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Housing Benefit (Amendment) Regulations 2011

My Lords, I, too, am grateful to my noble friend Lord Kirkwood for tabling the take note Motion. On the face of it, the proposal to extend the age range for single people who receive local housing allowance from 25 to 34 seems entirely reasonable. I, myself, lived in shared flats or houses at that age, as I could not possibly afford a flat or house in London on my salary from the Liberal Party. However, although my fellow housemates and I tried to be careful when interviewing potential new sharers, we did not expect them to belong to particularly vulnerable groups or be on housing benefit. The only tension came when boys wanted to get girlfriends in, or vice versa. The Government, to their credit, have, as we have heard, made two exemptions. I shall mention the exemption for homeless people who have spent more than two months in a hostel, which is particularly welcome because of the difficulty of moving those in hostel accommodation on. Here I declare an interest as patron of the Winchester Churches Nightshelter, which has an especially impressive record of moving clients on to suitable accommodation. However, even with those two exemptions, there is a great deal of concern among all the stakeholders whom we have consulted about the policy. In fact, we see from the consultation outcome that none of the respondents supported the proposed changes and the majority questioned the rationale for them. The $64,000 question is whether the proposals will save the taxpayer money or cause even more to be spent by local authorities having to find extra emergency accommodation. The SSAC report answers that in clear terms. Thank goodness, I have a different sentence to cite from that quoted by the noble Baroness, Lady Lister. The report states: "““The evidence we have seen points to this being a high risk approach to cutting costs that does not take account of potentially negative impacts on other areas of public policy and potential increases in other areas of public expenditure””." The Government’s solution is to increase discretionary housing payments to local authorities to support those in the most vulnerable situations who do not fit the exempted categories, but the discretionary housing payments will be spread extremely thinly across a lot of housing hotspots because of the changes to the 30th percentile. Such payments can be regarded only as a temporary sticking plaster. An awful lot is being asked of this particular pot of money, which will not go very far when spread across the poorer boroughs of London, not to mention those of all the other large conurbations. In Winchester, homelessness is increasing dramatically, with evidence from letting agents suggesting that fewer than 10 per cent of properties are affordable. As I have said before, Winchester is a very expensive place in which to be poor. As my noble friend said, are there really enough houses and flats available for multi-occupation in areas where there are likely to be jobs, particularly low-paid jobs? In a buoyant market, will landlords really be willing to reduce their rents to let properties to what could be a potentially unstable cohort of people, when landlords will have no difficulty finding tenants who will pay the market rent? In my view, this is a worrying experiment. The Social Security Advisory Committee report states that, "““the Department knows very little about either the shared accommodation market””," or those who live in that sector. As we have heard, that committee recommends that the Government should gather evidence as a matter of urgency with the proposals introduced gradually and evaluated. That sounds like a very good idea to me.