The many reasons why the housing changes are wrong

By Emma Burnell / @scarletstand

The extremely heated discussion over changes to housing have – so far – tended to focus solely on the housing benefit cap. Hence the utter glee when these words were rooted out of the Labour manifesto:

“Housing Benefit will be reformed to ensure that we do not subsidise people to live in the private sector on rents that other ordinary working families could not afford.”

The cries of hypocrisy over the weekend – even louder than the sound and fury over Harriet’s stupid remarks (yes they were stupid, no, in the scheme of things they aren’t important and shouldn’t detract from the agenda of addressing what the ConDems are proposing) – were as deafening as they are tone deaf. The point isn’t that Labour think the current system if perfect and requires no reform, but that the way these reforms – all of them in one go – have been devised and are being implemented are wrong and cruel.

So even were Labour to have come up with the idea of a cap (which is not a reform specifically mentioned in the manifest), I don’t believe that at the same time as introducing such a cap, we would have also shifted the Local Housing Allowance from the 50th percentile to the 30th percentile, ensuring that anyone in need of housing benefit must live in below average housing.

The image we are being sold endlessly by the government and their supportive press is that of benefit scroungers living in palatial mansions, but of course this isn’t true. Only 1 in 8 people in receipt of housing benefit is unemployed. The vast majority are poorly paid, carers, disabled or pensioners who have found that the rents in the neighbourhood they have lived their whole lives have changed enormously as the neighbourhood became gentrified around them.

Then of course, there is the most pernicious change of all, the removal of 10% of housing benefit from those who have been in receipt of JSA for 12 months. Punishing people for not finding a job in a recession where unemployment is high and rising and the new policies of the government – even by their own figures – will put more people out of work. It’s cruel and hard and probably in the end completely untenable. I’ve heard a great deal of speculation in fact that this policy is so stupid and unworkable, that it is a smokescreen, a thing the Tories will give up to any rebelling Lib Dems in order to secure their support for other parts of this nasty swath of policy. If this is so, we mustn’t let ourselves be appeased that the truly worst has been avoided, but remain focused on all the damage done by all these policies.

The final area of damage, and the one that makes the least headlines but could be the most insidious is the double whammy combination of the grant freeze for social housing with the rule forcing a charge of 80% market rent for social housing, thus pricing huge swathes of those in need out of the sector. This is the death of social housing as we know it, and will not only lead to there being far less housing available for those in need, but also to this housing being significantly less secure (as tenancies are also threatened). This will not affect current tenants, and so the change will be creeping and insidious. Unlike the other changes around us the effect will not be immediate so will be harder to campaign against. But make no mistake – this changes the welfare settlement in this country irrevocably.

Emma Burnell also blogs here.