Written evidence submitted by Defend Council
Housing
Punitive cuts in Housing Benefit (HB) announced in
the June Budget will hit all tenants, with pensioners and the
low paid bearing the brunt. The poorest tenants are being forced
to pay for the housing crisis. High rents and the lack of secure
affordable homes caused this problem—not tenants.
The first cuts are aimed a tenants in the private
sector. But savage cuts will also hit council and RSL tenants
of working age who are unemployed, or have a spare bedroom.
They will force tenants into debt, poverty, evictions
and homelessness.
Government propose to reduce housing benefit by 10%
for job seekers who have been out of work for more than 12 months.
Unemployed people will have to make up the shortfall from the
£65 they get on Job Seekers Allowance. The National Housing
Federation has warned thousands will face eviction and homelessness
could rise by over 200,000 as a result.
Local Housing Allowance (LHA) is currently claimed
by one million private tenants. Almost half those on LHA are already
£100 a month short of what they need to pay the rent. Two
major cuts proposed could tip many families over the edge.
From next April LHA will be capped at lower levels.
London Councils say tenants with two or more bedrooms in seven
London boroughs would be unable to afford their rent when new
caps are introduced.
The cap would limit Local Housing Allowance (LHA)
payments at lower than current local housing allowance rates for
homes of two or more bedrooms in inner London. Private landlords
in high-demand areas will not reduce rents: the low paid, pensioners,
the ill and unemployed will be driven out.
And from October 2011 LHA for private tenants be
set at 30% of average rent in an area, instead of the present
50%.
It will in future lag behind rents so that, by about
2020, there could be no rents cheap enough to be paid for by the
benefit, according to the Chartered Insitute of Housing. HB will
increase at less than the Retail Price Index (RPI) which includes
a measure of housing costs, in line with CPI is almost always
lower than RPI and is currently about 1.7% behind it.
And in a further attack on council and RSL tenants,
landlords will be given powers to cut housing benefit to tenants
of working age who are judged to be in a home larger than they
need. Work and Pensions secretary Iain Duncan Smith has referred
to "tons of elderly people" who should be encouraged
to move out of their homes.
The majority of those claiming housing benefit are
pensioners and the low paid; around 12% were unemployed. Successive
Governments' decisions to shift funding away from "bricks
and mortar" council house building, and instead use HB to
subsidise high rents in "the free market", has created
this crisis. Controls over high rents, and a mass programme of
first class council house building would create the secure affordable
homes for rent needed by millions on waiting lists and paying
exhorbitant rents.
Tenants are outraged at these proposals to attack
housing benefit. We are organising with trade unions, councillors
and MPs, and will demand the proposals are suspended, with tenants
and councillors involved in a genuine review of rents and benefits;
and that councillors join with tenants to resist these attacks.
If a fraction of the cost of housing benefit was
invested into building new council housing it would create a new
generation of first class, secure and affordable housing and start
meeting the desperate and growing housing need exploited by high
rents.
6 September 2010
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