A sledgehammer that won’t even crack the nut

Since they came to power in May 2010, we’ve seen this Tory-dominated Government attack the poorest people in our society again and again. Ostensibly to fix the problems largely caused by the bankers and financiers that make up the majority of Tory donors. They are taking populist concerns over issues like access to housing and benefit fraud and creating policies that may play well with readers of the Daily Mail, but do enormous harm to people who have – through no fault of their own – found themselves at the sharp end of the economic crisis.

We’re seeing this again with the Welfare Reform Bill. While some of the aims of the Bill are laudable, some of the outcomes will once again ask the very poorest in our society to shoulder the burden of the Tory obsession with deficit reduction at any cost.

Due to Government proposals in the Welfare Reform Bill on “under occupation”, 670,000 households in the social sector will be hit by an average £670 penalty every year because they are deemed to have a “spare” bedroom. No matter that there might not be any appropriate alternative housing to downsize to. No matter that the so called spare room might be where their child stays when they visit, where a family member stays at a time of crisis, or where their second teenage son escapes to do his homework.

People in these homes will have to make a horrendous decision. Do they try to stay in their home desperately scraping together the extra £13 or £14 – week in week out – they will be forced to find? In order to stay near their family and friends and the lives they have built, many will choose to get themselves into deep and potentially unsustainable debt.

Or do they move out of their home and away from the lives they have built for themselves and desperately try to find a cheaper place to live somewhere?

Of course, the sad truth is, with so few smaller homes available, they may not even have that choice.

The reality is that in some parts of the country there is a chronic shortage of available social housing, particularly smaller homes. Households have become smaller over the years. Some local authorities and housing associations inherited more large stock than others. So in some areas there isn’t the balance between different sized homes that would allow people to downsize. Managing these properties in such a way that ensures successful neighbourhoods is a complex process that takes so much more into account than how many bedrooms a property has.

A great deal of work has been done to prevent anti-social behaviour by making sure that huge cohorts of kids aren’t growing up living right on top of each other, but are part of strong mixed communities. This measure takes away the ability for local housing officers to use their stock in such a way that builds these kinds of communities. They can’t place people they think won’t be able to afford the rent in the stock they have and they won’t want to see families descend into the chaos of debt that trying to top up the rent could entail.

Of course more can and should be done to make sure that we use our social housing stock appropriately. A good start would be to build many, many more houses for genuinely affordable rents. But until that happens, we shouldn’t be punishing families who are living complicated lives just to assuage the headline writers of the Daily Mail.