Jenny Jones AM, leader of the Green Party on the London Assembly, exposes the reality of Boris Johnson's claim to be a champion of those hit by Housing Benefit cuts.
By Jenny Jones AM, leader of the Green Party on the London Assembly
New evidence emerging from Westminster City Council and Eric Pickle’s office has further undermined the government’s case for its benefit caps and cuts.
Boris Johnson’s ambivalent posture is now untenable, and as Mayor of London he needs to intervene more forcefully on behalf of his low income constituents.
The likely impact of the reforms on Londoners described by this new evidence isn’t surprising. Academics and campaigners have been warning about hundreds of families having to take their children out of their schools, tens of thousands of households becoming homeless, and the bill to the Treasury rising ever since the reforms were announced.
What is surprising is where this new evidence comes from – champions of the reforms.
A report for an informal meeting of Westminster City Council’s cabinet apparently predicts the caps and cuts could force 4,000 school-age children out of the borough, including 500 primary school-age children from one ward alone. In all, 81 per cent of the 6,234 households in receipt of housing benefit renting in the private sector in the borough will be affected.
According to Nico Heslop, Private Secretary to Secretary of State Eric Pickles, the total benefit cap of £26,000 and the housing benefit caps could make 40,000 households homeless. The extra cost of handling these homelessness acceptances and arranging temporary accommodation for people, he wrote, will probably “generate a net cost”, wiping out any savings they might have made by picking the pockets of the poor.
Of course the Mayor of London should know all this already. His submission to the work and pensions committee concerning the housing benefit changes in isolation, written in September 2010, painted a similar picture.
His officers estimated more than 9,000 London households may have to move, with 14,000 children having to leave their local area. There would be some 5,000 more homelessness acceptances, with rises as high as 337% in Camden, 268% in Westminster, and 178% in Kensington and Chelsea. All of this would cost an estimated £78 million a year.
The revelations from Westminster council and Pickles’s office simply echo the Mayor’s own evidence; but in spite of this, all three remain firm supporters of the reforms.
Of course most people think the Mayor stood up to the government, warning of “Kosovo-style ethnic cleansing” and promising that would never happen on his watch. He has been fighting London’s corner on this, right? Wrong.
The story arose from an interview on BBC London radio in which the Mayor followed a guest who made the “Kosovo-style ethnic cleansing” allegation. As the Mayor’s subsequent statement makes clear, he fully supported the reforms and does not think they will lead to social cleansing.
The Mayor has pushed for some welcome concessions, but they are minor tweaks to slightly soften the blow, and there is no sign the government is going to adopt them. When I asked in June for an update on one very specific tweak, which would save vulnerable young people being forced into flat shares, he revealed his last meeting with a minister was in November last year and was only able to say “discussions” between his advisor and officers and the government “are ongoing”.
A genuine attempt to mitigate the impacts of these benefit cuts would involve the London mayor bringing together all of London’s councils to discuss a substantial transfer of funds and staff to match the flow of children, pensioners in need of care, problem families, and vulnerable adults who will be dislodged from inner London.
Instead of work being done to deal with this major disruption in the lives of poor people with difficult lives, the government and Mayor are ignoring their own advisers and downplaying or denying the scale of the problem they are creating.
The Mayor should also know that a better way to reduce the housing benefit bill is to provide homes that people on low incomes can actually afford. As I laid out last November in my “myth busting” briefing (pdf), for every pound we spent building new social housing in the past few years we spent five on housing benefit payments.
His housing advisor agreed with me that social housing would “clearly help reduce the housing benefit bill”, but the Mayor has made little noise about the government cutting off all future money for social housing.
Nor has he made a loud public call for reform of the private rented sector to slow the above-inflation rise in rents.
With such a weight of evidence pointing to a devastating rise in homelessness, thousands of households leaving their schools and communities, and a rising bill at the end of it all for the government, it is time that the Mayor came out forcefully against the benefit cuts. Never mind his small concessions, these caps and cuts are ill conceived and the government needs to go back to the drawing board.
46 Responses to “Boris fighting London’s corner on housing benefit cuts? Really?!”
Anon E Mouse
Leon – Poor people cannot expect to lead lifestyles enjoyed by people richer than themselves – that’s because they are poor.
There is also nothing that says areas should be mixed with people of differing social status. If there was then rich people would be living on council estates.
On the Hattersley estate in Manchester I was living (initially – my Grandad was a Labour councillor who “sorted” things for my family) I never remember a single wealthy individual residing there. (I was too young to know but I’m making a point).
So areas are not mixed dependant on wealth the other way round and it is only the social engineering of left wing governments that allow the nonsense that currently exists to continue.
Irrespective of how you spin things the facts speak for themselves. Minimum wage workers pay for the inflated rates charged by greedy landlords. That’s just how it is. My taxes go into the pockets of greedy landlords who do nothing to earn that money.
Finally “millions” will not be affected – a few thousand perhaps but certainly not millions and most certainly far less than the millions that WERE affected by Gordon Brown’s 10p tax fiasco or the £billions his stupid PFI projects are going to cost.
The Labour Party rewards the rich and punishes the poor and continues to advocate policies that perpetuate that position.
Poor people are poor – that’s just how it is and trying to raise the lifestyles of those people would be OK if other poor people’s money wasn’t being used but it is and that’s just unfair however you spin it…
Ed's Talking Balls
Anon E Mouse has provided a pretty comprehensive rebuttal, so I have little to add. Once again, I agree with him.
It may surprise you, however, to discover that I would support more drastic reform in housing. I would build more, to increase supply and threby drive down prices; I would legislate to prevent (or at least make significantly less attractive) the hoarding of property by buy-to-let barons, whome I regard as an absolute scourge; and I would legislate to redress the imbalance between landlords and tenants (perhaps via reintroduction of the Rent Acts, and/or in numerous other ways).
But as Anon E Mouse says, I don’t see how you can spin this one to make the status quo seem fair. You won’t succeed with me and I’m very confident you won’t succeed with those others who profoundly disagree, and in many cases are downright angry, with housing benefit as it stands.
Leon Wolfson
Great, so you think these measures, which will hurt massive amounts of people are fine. I get it.
Let’s address your outright lie there, though. Household size limits will hit half a million claimants. 30th Percentile rent., three quarters of a million. The excess withdrawal (which I do, in fact, agree with) 400k. CPI linkage will affect every single claimant, 4.5 million (1.5 immediately). Non-dependant deductions will hit another 300k.
While there is some overlap, it’s not 100%…and the vast majority of claimants are households, with much more than one person affected. There is also a significant knock-on effect to other people who will try and pick up the slack, in many cases, from their own “disposable” income. Millions is a *perfectly* correct figure for those who will be negatively affected by this.
(The hard caps certainly only actually affect 50k – almost all in London – yes, but that is never the only issue I’ve been concerned about: although it IS an issue which is going to break up families. Gogo Tory family policy!)
It doesn’t “have to be” the way that poorer people pay inflated prices for rent. I’ve suggested a perfectly viable alternative (rent boards), which is practised widely even in socialist-hating America! This is purely a CHOICE, one which you are backing, a nasty piece of social engineering.
Ed – I’m not saying the status quo is fair. I’m saying the changes are dramatically more UNFAIR. When there are alternate ways, ones used very successfully in other countries, to solve this.
The changes won’t make anyone less angry with housing benefit – it’s a small change, financially, which will cost more elsewhere in the system – since it keeps the same principles, and simply sticks many people into poorer quality housing, away from the areas with jobs.
It’s the Tories who are just tinkering with the status quo. (And I see mouse still hasn’t been able to work out that I am not an avatar of the labour party yet, and don’t necessarily agree with them! My opinions ARE MY OWN!)
Look – I’m not at all shocked that you don’t like the status quo. We’re even in broad agreement. But. These changes will, for example, allow couples people claiming to live only in 10% of the apartments in Manchester as soon as 2016, and 5% in 2018 – and Manchester is NOT a very high rent area. (Also, typically, the lowest 5% is considered unfit habitation!)
Worse, the government is slashing the already relatively small amount of money they spend on monitoring the housing situation, so they will NOT be able to properly track the effects of their changes!
Are you really saying that this isn’t a valid view? That doing the wrong thing can be dramatically worse than letting something slide until you can do the right thing, even if they have to stop these changes, and take six months to do things right? (When that would only act as a minor delay in any case, given the timescales?)
Ed's Talking Balls
Excluding all but the most extreme and/or illogical views, I would never deny the validity of others’ views. Of course, I reserve the right to disagree with others at times (or, to put it another way, they are perfectly entitled to disagree with me, as often as they like!)
I apologise for having misunderstood you the first time round. I was under the impression that you were defending what I regard as indefensible, i.e. that those who work and still live hand to mouth should pay for those who don’t work to live in houses in which they themselves could not dream of living. I have seen people defend this position elsewhere and have treated comments in defence of the status quo with the contempt which they deserve.
I have been encouraged by the headline, if you will, that the government realises that there is something grossly unfair in taxing people to pay for others to enjoy a better lifestyle. While you have shown in your posts that you don’t hold the Conservatives in high regard (understatement, I know!), I wouldn’t trust most Labour MPs as far as I could throw them. I believe they didn’t see anything wrong in the position I’ve described above (which I consider perverse, given that Labour should instinctively, traditionally, support the low-paid, hard-working).
But, as the saying goes, the devil is in the detail. It’s plain that this government, like the one before it, doesn’t excel in this area (although I feel in terms of the bigger picture, it’s performing better: no doubt this is something we disagree on).
Leon Wolfson
Except, no offence, I don’t see any acknowledgement from the government’s actions that they are doing anything of the sort. They are continuing to back a system which has delivered above-inflation rents since proper controls were abolished.
They’re tinkering around the edges with rates in some especially damaging ways (30th percentile and CPI linking, especially), but not addressing the core issue in anything but some good-old fashioned benefit-scrounger bashing, when it’s an important in-work benefit.
And no, I don’t view painting them painting into a economic corner as “better” when they inherited a recovering economy, you’re quite right there…