If we’re not against this, what are we for?

By Grace Fletcher-Hackwood / @msgracefh

By the time you read this, if I’ve got my arse in gear and managed to pack up all my council papers and vegan cookbooks, I will have moved house: from just-very-slightly-outside my ward, into my ward.

Thinking about the three years I’ve spent in this flat has reminded me how I came to move in. Before here, I lived in Manchester’s Northern Quarter. It was a brilliant location, a large flat – almost a house, really – and for the first month or two I revelled in it, enjoying having a kitchen to myself, putting friends up in the two empty bedrooms. But then my landlord found people to rent the rooms – a man from Italy who cooked an octopus in one of my saucepans, deliberately let my kitten outside in the hope that she would run away, and wanted to grow cannabis in the airing cupboard; and then a lad from Bolton who kept me awake at night by loudly explaining to a friend, over the ‘phone, how he was going to avoid taking responsibility for having got his girlfriend pregnant. They were both stoned all the time – literally every waking moment that they were in the flat.

After a couple of months I was being driven mad by the constant smell of weed (and occasionally boiled octopus). My then long-distance boyfriend of a few months was moving to Manchester to do a Masters, and I begged him to share a flat with me. (Don’t try this at home, kids.) We moved in to this flat together, broke up, and carried on living together until the end of term, when he promptly got a job in Wales and left to do it, and I moved another friend in. I had decided, post-octopus, that from then on I was only going to live with friends I already knew. Flat-sharing with strangers is not for everyone.

It turns out that the government disagrees.

I’ve blogged about the shared accommodation rate (SAR) of housing benefit before, over at The F-Word, but if you’re not familiar with it: the SAR, currently £53.45, is the maximum amount of housing benefit you can claim – regardless of how much your rent actually is – if you rent a single, self-contained room, rather than having access to a whole property. But the SAR is also the maximum amount of housing benefit you can claim, regardless of your actual living situation, if you are a single person, without children, under 25.

It’s a ridiculous policy. There isn’t enough shared accommodation to go around, for one thing. An excellent report for Crisis by researchers from the University of York found that shared accommodation accounts for between 1% and 5% of the private rented sector (depending on your definition of shared accommodation) – and housing benefit claimants start off at a disadvantage because of the number of landlords who don’t want to let to them. (Do those housing ads saying ‘no DSS’ remind anyone else of anything? How about the ones that say ‘no DSS or pets’?)

What’s more, shared accommodation just isn’t suitable for everyone just because they happen to be single and under 25. The high tenant turnover in some properties means it’s often near impossible to know who you’re living with at any given time – or who has a key. For someone fleeing a domestic violence situation, this is a nightmare.

The lack of control over who shares the property with you can lead to ex-offenders living with criminal activity while they’re trying to avoid re-offending; recovering addicts living with drug users; vulnerable people living with aggressive behaviour. (The researchers for the study mentioned above spoke to female claimants who, following past problems such as sharing accommodation with male tenants who displayed aggressive behaviour, were only prepared to share with other women – again restricting their housing options – or were instead making substantial top-ups to housing benefit to live in self-contained accommodation rather than to share, with a subsequent impact on their income.)

And what about non-resident parents? Noise levels, cleanliness of communal areas, and doubts about the backgrounds of other residents can make the environment of shared housing potentially risky for children. My sisters and I spent every other weekend with our dad when he was around: if he’d lived in a shared property with no real idea of who else had a key to the house, I suspect my mom would, understandably, have refused to let us stay there for an access weekend. And she might not have been the only one: some shared accommodation landlords prohibit overnight visitors, which makes it still more difficult for claimants to be closely involved in child care.

Labour failed to reverse this policy when we were in government: I was disappointed, if not particularly surprised. I certainly didn’t expect the coalition to reverse it – but nor did I expect, until it was announced last year, that they would raise the age threshold of claimants entitled to SAR only – to 35. That’s right: under government plans, if you claim housing benefit before your 35th birthday, you will get little more than fifty quid a week, because the government expects you to be flat-sharing – or moving back in with your parents.

Crisis estimate that this will directly impact on 62500 current housing benefit claimants. That’s 62500 people who could wake up to find that they can no longer afford their rent; another 62500 people to start chasing the tiny percentage of the country’s houses that are shared accommodation. Many of these people will not be able to find cheaper accommodation; they will stay where they are now and try to make up the rent shortfall from their other income; they will fail and they will be evicted. This policy will, categorically will, make thousands of people homeless, and force thousands more into insecure or unsuitable housing. It is wrong, wrong, wrong.

Characteristically, the government genuinely don’t seem to realise how wrong they are. In a commons debate on this issue in February, Steve Webb, the Lib Dem MP and minister for pensions, said ‘Many 28-year-olds and 31-year-olds are back with mum and dad or family. Perhaps they are saving for a house, and they have made the decision to stay with family because it is cheaper and they can put money by. Should we ask the taxpayer to pay for some 29-year-olds and 31-year-olds to have a flat of their own, rent fully paid, when others have to live with mum and dad and save the money?’ As with so many issues, government ministers are wrong because they aren’t thinking about the people their policies should be designed to help. They’re thinking of their own kids or their friends’ kids, unemployed after university, living at home or sharing a flat with fellow graduates – they’re not thinking of people who are homeless, or leaving care, or estranged from their families. Steve Webb went on to acknowledge in the debate that many young people do not have the option of living at home – so why was he speaking in support of a policy based on the idea that they all do? The government is wrong because they are simply thinking in the wrong universe.

Meanwhile – what are we thinking? Jon Cruddas and others ably denounced this policy in the house, but what is Labour saying to get headlines on welfare reform? While the government blithely budgets to make tens of thousands of people homeless and condemns tens of thousands more to yet another source of daily financial struggle, we are fighting back with…James Purnell, who wonders if we could make the welfare state more popular by cutting the money we pay to pensioners to stay warm in the winter. And Tom Harris, who used this site to openly – and disgracefully – take the piss out of a Labour activist who disagreed with Purnell. Words fail me.

It seems to me that those in our party who have always been engaged in a diagonal race to the bottom right on welfare reform have lost sight of why they started doing it. When the government is engaged in under-reported ‘reforms’ that are so palpably, demonstrably unfair – and the housing benefit changes outlined in this article are just one example – while Labour is discussing policies that would be both unfair and unpopular, we are not just wrong – we are making ourselves look bloody silly. Rather than pontificating on new and interesting ways to be exactly the same as the Tories (and yellow Tories), we need to be shining a light on what they are doing and then taking it to bits. This government’s programme of welfare reform is an outrage. If we’re not actively, powerfully against that, then I don’t even know what we’re for.

Read more about the Crisis campaign on the shared accommodation rate here.