SPEECH ON BEDROOM TAX, 27.2.13

The bedroom tax is a cruel and counterproductive measure from a Government that is intent on punishing the poor.

Cruel, because it’s likely to lead to greater evictions, homelessness, disruption and despair.

Cruel, because it takes no account of real people’s circumstances, with over two thirds of those affected likely to be people with disabilities

And counterproductive, because it’s highly unlikely to lead to the outcomes the Government claims it wants.  Not only are there insufficient smaller properties for families to move to, but the measure is more likely to cost money, than save it.

Evictions are not only hugely painful – they’re hugely costly too – estimated to be around £10,000 a time.  So is finding people temporary accommodation. 

And the truly cynical nature of the proposal is revealed by the Government’s own Impact Assessment, which makes clear that projected savings will only happen if tenants remain in their existing homes and make up the shortfall in benefit themselves. 

Yet the truth is that many people are struggling in such desperate circumstances that they simply can’t find the extra money to pay.

And the bottom line is that we have a housing crisis, with nowhere near enough affordable homes.

 The housing crisis exemplified by Brighton

In my constituency, for example, we have 15,684 households on Brighton and Hove’s waiting list with approximately 750 properties available each year.

And it’s successive Governments which have caused this housing crisis, not the poor who struggle because of it. 

It is not the fault of people who cannot get a job.

It is not the fault of people who are disabled.

It is not the fault of people who share the care of their children or those who are between foster placements.

The critical problem here is the epic failure of both the Tories and New Labour on council housing.  The Tories pushed the decimation of the stock with ‘right to buy’ ignoring the ‘right to rent’. 

And New Labour tweaked the enormous discounts but they just didn’t grasp the nettle and build council housing – for example in 2007-8 only 350 new council homes were built.

It is deeply unjust to penalise people struggling at the bottom of a housing market over which they have little or no control. 

Ministers give blasé answers to serious Parliamentary Questions about this nasty measure.  Get a job, get a lodger, move somewhere else. 

They ignore the fact that for many people, they simply cannot get a job as on average five people chase every vacancy and in many places this figure is far higher; the rooms in question are not spare or are so tiny they are too small to rent. 

Ministers also suggest that social landlords might want to redefine a property as having fewer rooms where the ‘spare’ room is extremely small. 

But we know that most social landlords can’t reduce their rents as they need that money for repairs and to service the debts they have for building more stock.

What about the person with severe mental health problems who has been settled for years, is deeply distressed by change and has a tiny box room?  They cannot take a lodger because of their unpredictable episodes.  They cannot afford the rent because of the box room.  There isn’t a smaller property locally.  What happens to them?

I haven’t yet heard a Minister deny the existence of our acute housing crisis but they conveniently attack the people who face the worst end of it.

And they overlook the cumulative impact of so many cuts.

In Brighton & Hove practically every household affected by the bedroom tax will also be impacted by the Government imposed cut to the Council Tax Benefit budget and a good proportion will also be hit by the changes to Disability Living Allowance.

Changes in the scope of what's covered under legal aid from April also mean that benefit issues will not be covered, so there is less opportunity for people to receive in-depth advice and to possibly challenge decisions in court.

This pernicious policy will not scratch the surface of our overcrowding crisis as it creates new housing emergencies for people who were previously just managing.

The Local Authority in Brighton estimate that the total cost of an eviction process, including temporary accommodation is around 10k per eviction. 

The Government say it won’t come to that but they are not in touch with reality.  Of the 1000 or so households affected in Brighton and Hove the majority are already struggling with rent arrears of around £2 a week. 

From where are they supposed to magic a further £16 a week in bedroom tax? 

A constituent desperately worried about the bedroom tax came to my surgery last week.  She has suffered domestic violence and she shares custody of her daughter and so the room she has for her daughter is seen as spare.

She simply does not have the money to pay the tax being levied on her daughter’s room – to open Minister’s eyes to her day to day reality I would like to read out the following testimony from her:

real people, homes and community

I quote at such length because I want Ministers to understand that we are talking about real people here.

Not the grossly inaccurate and insulting ‘shirker’ stereotypes, that are also grossly unfair. 

Ministers are recklessly and deliberately ignoring the harsh reality for the majority of those surviving on benefits. 

Deliberately pandering to the media stereotypes

How convenient to say it’s all the fault of the ‘workshy skivers’ swanning about with all this spare space... and so the mean and mistaken narrative goes.

Going back to reality, for a lot of people affected by this policy, their homes are not too big for their needs. 

Their homes meet their needs, from the padded box room that a single mother uses to help keep her autistic son safe when he is having an episode, to the extra room used by a disabled person to store their equipment, to the room used for half the week by the child whose parents are separated. 

There are very many reasons why what looks to the government to be ‘spare’ space is in fact not spare at all but essential.

It will always be possible to find a small number of examples of people who genuinely do have more space than they need.  However, that does not justify this crass blanket policy. 

Ministers may have noticed from the House of Commons Library note on this issue that the key message from landlords who have been active in this area is that cash incentives are largely irrelevant in most cases.  What is important, and leads to successful moves, is the provision of the right support and finding the right property.

So are the right properties there?

The Government don’t know and haven’t bothered to find out. 

And the reason for that is that they don’t really care. 

Disabled people and DHP:

Discretionary Housing Payments are the Government’s answer to everything.  But the pot is tiny compared to the cuts they are making and it is quite obvious that demand will outstrip supply.

In Brighton and Hove for example, the projected Housing Benefit shortfall has been modelled by the LA as over £12m (this includes shortfall from cuts to Local Housing Allowance, Bedroom Tax and the Benefit Cap).

The Govt have a given DHP pot of just over £1m to B&H – this is covers only 8% of the Housing Benefit cuts that people will face – the DHP is tiny and will be nowhere near adequate. 

(As others have rightly pointed out) research by respected Cambridge academics concludes that affected households will face “severe hardship”.

The Government try and justify these cuts on the grounds that they are "making work pay".  But when Ministers use this phrase it is really code for punishing people for being poor.  Of course work should pay – it should pay decent living wages not poverty pay. 

It is not the fault of people who cannot get a job or who are unable to work that employers don’t pay people properly.

There will be a potential push to move people from social housing to different size private sector accommodation, which does not have the same security of tenure, and which could actually cost more.  

What the Government should be doing is massively increasing the supply of affordable, sustainable, decent homes and legislating to allow for far greater security of tenure, which would probably go some way to holding rents down.

The bottom line is that the Government must stop relying on the profit motive to supply housing for people who are poor - it will take time but we must fund a real programme of sustainable mass council housing.

But this Government is going in the opposite direction.

This is a policy which will lead to bad debts and eviction, and which dramatically undermines financial stability of the social housing model.  Combine this with the government’s refusal to allow people the choice to pay their housing benefit direct to the landlord under Universal Credit, and we have a recipe for the end of social housing.

As landlords are faced with the lose-lose situation of either accumulating unsustainable bad debt as people simply cannot pay the tax, or the even higher cost of debt collection and eviction, the long term future of social housing looks bleak.

This is the death knell for social housing.

And shockingly I think Ministers must know this.

They prefer the market in all areas. Profit motive knows best. But this is not the way to house people who cannot manage in our grossly distorted housing market.

This is yet another ideological attack on the welfare system, designed, yet again, to shrink the state.

How deeply unjust this will seem in the history books: The banks get bailed out, the poor get chucked out.

So I call on the Government to abandon this cruel and counterproductive policy and to abandon it now.