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Housing Benefit

I certainly confirm that. I am happy to commend the Government on their decision to withdraw the proposal to reduce housing benefit by 10% for people who have been on jobseeker's allowance for more than a year. I also accept entirely that there has been a phasing in of the cap on housing benefit, which particularly affects central London. As the Minister knows, that was more than compensated in cash terms by bringing forward the reduction to the 30th percentile for housing benefit for local housing allowance claims, which affects the rest of the country for new claims. We have heard a range of contributions this afternoon. My hon. Friend the Member for Hampstead and Kilburn (Glenda Jackson) was highly critical of the proposals, and she raised concerns about their impact particularly on families with children. She made it clear that one of the areas that has not been properly addressed by the Government and many commentators on this agenda is the variance between London housing costs and those in the rest of the country. The hon. Member for Cardiff Central (Jenny Willott) raised a number of thoughtful and important points about the structure of the broad market rental areas and the complex lives of real individuals who will be affected by the move to the single-room accommodation rate. She made an important point, which I accept entirely, when she said that one reason why we have a dilemma about how to pay for low-income households and housing is due to a 30-year-long reduction in the availability of social housing. I do not want to divert too far from the central topic—I know you will not allow me to, Mr Sheridan—but in 1997 the Labour Government inherited social housing stock in such a poor condition that huge investment had to go into improving the physical conditions of council housing through the decent homes initiative. I have gone on the record extensively over the years to say that I, too, regret that we did not build more social housing. We would still, however, have had a significant number of low-income households in the private rented sector, and we would still be facing some of the same problems. My hon. Friend the Member for Stockton North (Alex Cunningham) drew attention to the risks of homelessness and eviction in another part of the country. This debate has so often focused on London, and it is good and right for us to recognise that it is not only a London problem. The hon. Member for Brighton, Pavilion (Caroline Lucas) spoke powerfully about the experience of a city with a large private rental market, where the changes will have a profound impact in terms of squeezing out low-income households on local housing allowance across the city. Since the cuts were introduced by the Government, the debate has concentrated largely on London and a few individual cases. It was good to hear many speakers emphasise that such cases involve a tiny minority of larger households living almost in very high-value properties, something none of us would defend. As the Select Committee report reflected, depending on which figures one uses, the few thousand cases that are at the significantly higher end of the cost market are an issue that the Government could have tackled, if they had wanted to. They could have confined themselves to that, but instead we have almost 1 million—936,000—households that will lose by an average of £12 a week over the course of a full year, once housing benefit changes to the local housing allowance are introduced. It is important that the public understand the sheer scale and spread of the changes, and there will be a nasty shock starting in April with the new cases calculated on the 30th percentile and the other changes phased in later.