Rt Hon Iain Duncan Smith
Secretary of State for Work and Pensions
Caxton House
Tothill Street
LONDON
SW1 9NA

 9 November 2010


Dear Iain,

Proposed changes to housing benefit

I am writing to you to ensure that you hear my concerns on your proposed changes to housing benefits. Despite sitting in the chamber for five hours yesterday, I was not given the opportunity to contribute to the debate.

I have therefore attached to this letter the points I would have made, had I been called to speak.

As you will see, I am deeply opposed to the cuts to housing benefit. They will have a devastating impact on many families, in particular those living in my constituency of Brighton Pavilion.

The private rented sector here makes up 21% of the housing market, and someone would have to earn more than £50,000 a year to buy an average-priced house.

It is little wonder then that nearly 10,000 households are on the waiting list for affordable housing in the Brighton and Hove area. At current rates, that list will take more than eight years to clear.

I should be grateful for your response to the points made in the attached document, particularly those pertaining to Brighton.

I am sending a similar letter to the Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government.

Yours sincerely,

Caroline Lucas, MP, Brighton Pavilion

CC: Rt Hon Eric Pickles - Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government

DEBATE ON HOUSING BENEFIT - Tuesday 9 November

So called "reforms" to housing benefit show that the 'nasty party' is alive and kicking, and kicking the poor especially.

With the assistance of the right wing press, the Coalition tries to justify the housing cuts by presenting Housing benefit as an area of waste, manufacturing the scenario of hardworking families supporting the housing costs of the "work-shy" who are simply wasting taxpayers money. But this is both inaccurate and irresponsible.

As other members pointed out only one in eight of all housing benefit claimants is formally classified as unemployed - the rest include people on low incomes, pensioners, carers and disabled people unable to work.

Many people who depend on Housing Benefit to get by in Brighton and Hove are actually in work. To be exact, 31% of people who receive Local Housing Allowance are in employment.

They rely on Housing Benefit, but fear they will be forced to move away from the higher rent areas where they work, such as my constituency of Brighton Pavilion.
For many, the cuts to LHA will force them to move and so make it very difficult to retain their jobs because it will be impractical, or too costly, to commute from the cheaper areas they will be forced to go to.

Once the cap on rail fare increases is raised to 3% above inflation from 2012, and the arrears caused by the shortfalls in housing benefit have really started to pile up, the Government's housing benefit cuts mean that many will find themselves in a new benefits trap, removed from their communities and newly unemployed.

When working parents in receipt of LHA are forced to give up their home and move to a cheaper area, they will struggle to afford the astronomical childcare costs so they can work, when they no longer live near friends or family members who can help with child care.

Later this month statutory instruments will be laid to allow for Local Housing Allowance to be capped, and for it to be set at the 30th percentile of market rents - down from the 50th percentile or median rate.

This will have a hugely negative impact on my constituency of Brighton Pavilion, where the private rented sector makes up about 21% of the housing sector, much higher than average.

My surgeries are already full of people who are already struggling to pay rent, and to find alternatives to cramped, overcrowded and overpriced accommodation, and the Government's plans can only make that worse.

The increase in housing benefit bills over recent years is not, as the Government would have us believe, the result of some epidemic of scroungers, but, as others have said, of the considerable growth in the number of people who are being forced into the private rented sector.

In Brighton, Pavilion, for example, someone would have to earn more than £50,000 a year to buy an average-priced house. No wonder that nearly 10,000 households are on the waiting list for affordable housing in the Brighton and Hove area. At current rates, that list will take more than eight years to clear.

To garner public acceptance for these swingeing housing cuts which will push many people into dire circumstances, the Government is guilty of distorting examples from the tiny number of families on housing benefit who have a large number of dependants and who live in expensive inner-city areas.

The reality is that most people do not enjoy life on benefits in the UK, which - as a percentage of GDP - are lower than elsewhere in Western Europe. The Government should stop and reflect that the exceptional cases they present are a poor basis for a change to the law.

And as if the cuts I have mentioned so far weren't cruel enough, in a radical change to benefit principles, anyone out of work for more than a year will lose another 10% from their housing benefit.

This is a frightening departure into the realms of a United States time-limited welfare model - caricaturing people as deserving or undeserving poor with no care for fairness, the realities of job market or people's health and wellbeing. We are moving from a model of conditionality to one of punishment.

Members will be aware that in the US, after 99 weeks, people lose their unemployment benefit. Such people are labelled 99ers because of the hardship they face.

This is where the Coalition are taking us. Regardless of how hard you try to find work; regardless of the unemployment rate or the vacancy rate, if you don't succeed in getting a job, after one year, you will be disciplined by the state.

Yet in Brighton the local press are reporting cases like that of a local man who is desperate to work; has applied for 465 jobs over the past ten months but after 7 interviews remains out of work. How can the Government possibly defend punishing him by cutting his housing benefit?

If we allow in this principle of kicking people when they are down, no matter the circumstances or how hard they are trying, then we will have lost something of our society. The Coalition's housing benefit 'punishment proposal' undermines the very basis of our welfare state.

People do not want a brutal and humiliating system that says "If you can't get a job, you may be able to eat in a soup kitchen - possibly staffed by your neighbour as part of the ‘Big Society".

If we are to reduce the housing benefit bill in the long term, we should be building more affordable housing, which should, of course, be green, decent and fuel-efficient housing.

The Government are trying to present themselves as the builders of affordable homes. But the reality is that they are slashing the money available for house building.

[As others have said] housing charities calculate that the £4.4b package of capital funding in the CSR to build up to 150,000 new affordable homes over the next four years represents a 60% cut to the affordable housing subsidy.

And they are making this massive 60% cut from the shockingly low housing investment base that Labour are responsible for. Members may recall that in the Spring Budget in April 2009, only £100 million was provided by the then Labour Government for council housing - enough to secure about three council houses per constituency at a time when more than 1.5 million households were on council waiting lists.

The Coalition's June cuts are already kicking in. This month people who lost their job have had their help with mortgage interest payments cut in half - no doubt this will lead to more arrears and repossessions. My constituents in Brighton are already getting in touch about this, and they're understandably extremely worried.

People with disabilities will be particularly severely affected by this cut - by crudely slashing help with mortgage interest payments in half, the Government is potentially forcing thousands of disabled homeowners into arrears or homelessness. The National Housing Federation point out that some 64,000 people with disabilities get monthly help through the Support for Mortgage Interest (SMI) system.

Many of those in receipt of SMI are on higher rates precisely because they are poorer - those with poor credit histories will often have the worst loan rates.

Instead of these attacks on housing benefit and the Support for Mortgage Interest scheme, we need a major investment in new affordable housing, and measures to bring empty properties back into use.

We need a reduction in VAT on repairs to encourage people to put older properties to better use, and we need to support people in bringing empty properties into use. We also need to support housing co-ops and other forms of affordable housing - not measures that drive up social housing rents to 80% of market rent.

These cuts are not only socially devastating; they also make no economic sense either.

If you put fairness to one side and look solely at the money - it is clear that the short-term budget savings from the Housing benefit cuts are highly likely to be eclipsed by a mounting bill to the taxpayer as the knock on consequences of homelessness, job losses and overcrowding impact on people's health and employment prospects.

What the Coalition seem to want us to ignore is the fact that we do not all start out with equal life chances and opportunities, and a fair society redistributes wealth from the rich to the poor - not the other way around.

The coalition's plans are punitive, destructive, and costly - the people of this country deserve better.