Tagged with Housing Benefit

The case for fully devolving housing benefit to the Scottish government

house made of money – housing benefit

UNISON’s case for the full devolution of housing benefit has been supported by the respected think tank IPPR. Scotland needs all the policy levers to effectively address our housing crisis.

The command paper ‘Scotland in the United Kingdom: An enduring settlement‘, (love an optimistic title!) sets out the legislative provisions to enact the Smith Commission consensus for further devolution to Scotland. There has been some political froth over who holds power over those aspects of welfare that will be devolved. In fairness, consultation clauses are not unreasonable given the complexity of Universal Credit that will remain reserved to Westminster. Continue reading →

The illogical callousness of the bedroom tax is totted up in ruined family lives

The latest data from 107 local authorities shows that 86,000 households have now been forced out of their accommodation to look for 1-bedroom homes, but only 33,000 have become available in the past year. The pressure points vary regionally. In Rochford, Essex, for example, 100 social housing tenants were driven out by the benefit cuts, but only 5 one-bedroom properties had become vacant in the previous year.

Gloucester council said, by contrast, that 111 one-bedroom properties had been available in the past year, but nearly 500 households needed them because of the bedroom tax. Another example, Inverclyde in Scotland, said 1,100 households would need to move into 1-bedroom homes, but only 96 had been free to rent last year. This means that in these 3 areas alone 95%, 80% and 91% of those families driven out of their homes were unable, however hard they tried, to find locally the smaller accommodation they were required to move into. Continue reading →

Busting the myths of the bulging benefit bill

We hear so much of the “bulging benefit bill, so I’d like to deal with a couple of anomalies in the simplistic media analysis that surrounds this.

The housing benefit bill is certainly huge. The Government’s choice of dealing with this is through austerity, and they thus burden inner city councils with the fallout. Councils will have a statutory duty to find temporary accommodation for people who would no longer be eligible to receive housing benefit under Tory plans. So taxpayers will have to pick up this tab – yet again.

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Welfare reform: now Ed’s on side, keep the pressure on

In October 2013 the biggest change to the benefits system since 1945 will begin. The changes are profound. Over 1 million people will be affected in the first 6 months alone and by the time the new system is fully in place, in 2017, it will be relied on by as many as 6 million households – 19 million people.

The Government has announced that in order to promote fairness between those in work and those receiving benefits, from April 2013, benefit payments for individual households will be capped at around the average earned income after tax and National Insurance for working households.

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For the Tories, housing is just another market chip

A right to decent housing does not exist in the Tory lexicon. Three Tory measures in the last few weeks are now exposing the ruthlessness with which a rigged market is cutting swathes through the housing needs of all the most vulnerable groups within the population. First, housing benefit is being abolished for all persons under 25.

This will cause the eviction of more than a third of a million people, despite the fact that more than half of them have children and many are working, or are ill or disabled. The aim is to save £1.8bn by forcing them to return home to their parents, yet many are only on their own in the first place because they were driven out of the parental home by domestic violence or abuse.

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