The bedroom tax has made huge problems even worse

When I met the Holden family back in January, they were worried – scared, even – about the looming arrival of the bedroom tax. They live in Hartlepool. Stuart, 36, and his wife Lorna, 33, have four kids: Faith, Noah, Elijah, and four-year-old Sam, who's autistic. In the five-bedroom home they rent from a local housing association, one room is given over to Sam, so he can use it as a sensory space: somewhere to calm down and readjust, which is therefore an essential part of his everyday life. Unfortunately, as they half-expected, this crucial detail has so far been steamrollered by Whitehall diktat, and the Holdens have been judged to be "under-occupying" by two bedrooms. As a result, their £114-a-week housing benefit has been suddenly cut by £28.

The Holdens are currently behind on their rent, but have come to an arrangement with their housing association. They have appealed to their local council and cited Sam's needs, but so far heard nothing back. Meanwhile, though Stuart has a job in nearby Darlington, life has become even more difficult, and their £80-a-week food budget has taken yet another hit. "I buy a lot of reduced-to-clear stuff now," says Lorna. "And rather than doing one big weekly shop, I'm having to look for bargains." Their street, they say, now seems be noticeably less populated. "Lots of people have moved out since this benefit came into effect," she says.

Of late, coverage of what the government is up to has tended to concentrate on the kind of things that get Westminster in a lather: David Cameron's travails over the EU, the Tories' increasingly semi-detached relationship with the Liberal Democrats. However, in large swaths of the real world, the big story is still the government's crazed drive on so-called welfare reform, and the chaos that is being sown as a result.

As was proved by the outrage that erupted just before its imposition, the bedroom tax is probably the single most glaring example. But the media tends to go a bundle on a story and then decide it has had enough – and in this case, the result has been a torrent of coverage in advance of the measure, and not nearly enough stuff about what is now actually happening.

The answer is straightforward enough: everything that was predicted, and more. Remember: the avowed aim of the policy – whereby housing benefit is docked by 14% a week for one "spare" room, and 25% for two or more – was to somehow push people out of "under-occupied" social housing, let in people from more cramped homes and thus pull off some miraculous national readjustment. But as anger mounted, even the Department for Work and Pensions seemed to accept that this was a vain hope. "Most people will not move," said a less-than-explanatory statement from the DWP that arrived in my inbox.

And so it has proved, because the obstacles are as immovable as scores of people said. One- and two-bed flats in particular are impossible to come by and, in any case, people are understandably reluctant to leave behind the networks of family and friends. So, they are staying put, and suffering – as proved by a slow trickle of human stories, which have already included one suicide.

Councils and housing associations forecast huge increases in rent arrears, and the financial problems that would create, which is exactly what has come to pass. In Leeds, the city council has announced that it will reclassify rooms in 837 houses and attempt to avoid the worst – but 7,000 households have been hit, and 2,800 of them are now behind on their payments, so the council is already facing total arrears of £138,000. By the end of the financial year, those losses look set to easily top £1m, which will have profound consequences for the money that can be spent on maintenance and repairs – and, over time, the building of any new homes.

In Moss Side in Manchester, the Mosscare Housing Association reckons that 41% of its affected tenants are in arrears; in East Ayrshire, the council puts the figure at 75%. Moreover, the effects of the bedroom tax on some places are almost comically perverse. As the Holden family's experience suggests, in some neighbourhoods, houses and streets are emptying out: the result is not a reduction in "under-occupancy", but no occupancy at all.

Evidence recently released by the community network Locality and the Joseph Rowntree foundation certainly says as much. It quotes a woman from the Norris Green area of Liverpool, who says: "The social landlords would lease the houses to individual people on the basis that it was better to have the houses occupied than to have them empty … I walked just from my house to the bus stop and counted 11 houses tinned up because the social landlords can't lease them, because of the under-occupancy."

"Tinning up" is Liverpudlian slang for putting up metal screens on houses that have become empty. The woman goes on: "It's madness. How can you say you're saving money when you're destroying a community?"

For housing associations in particular, all this sits in the middle of a mounting nightmare. Grants for the building of social housing have been slashed. Worse still, October sees the arrival of the grandest folly of all by the work and pensions secretary, Iain Duncan Smith: universal credit. Under the scheme, most working-age benefits will be folded into a single payment, and the portion that covers housing benefit will be paid directly to tenants, as opposed to councils and housing associations. As the government's own pilot schemes have suggested, arrears are predicted to skyrocket once again.Down the coast from Holdens' home in Hartlepool, the Coast and Country housing association sees to around 10,000 homes, spread across South Teesside. Its chief executive, Iain Sim, says he has been given £130,000 of the government money intended to assist people hit by the bedroom tax, and half of it has gone already. The policy's effects, he says, will "get worse – it's going to be cumulative". He is already seeing tenants reduced to having £20 a week to spend on food, clothes and fuel bills. Given the local shortage of one-bedroom homes, he says it would take 37 years to rehouse the association's "under-occupying" tenants into the one-bedroom flats that the government seems to assume exist. If they all simultaneously rented private flats, he reckons it would cost £500,000 a year in housing benefit – far, far more than what keeping them in places with supposed spare rooms entails. "None of this makes sense," he says.

So, the government's benefits policy is in a mess. Its housing policy is a fiasco, and it is making huge problems even worse. And one big question sits under this. In the event that 2015 sees a change of government, will this be at least one of the cuts that Labour might repeal?

On Friday, I spoke to someone high up in the party who I was told would know the answer. "The government should drop the bedroom tax now," he told me. "But as with everything else, we're not making spending commitments before 2015." On one level, that's a matter of inevitable realpolitik. But in Hartlepool, Redcar, Leeds, Manchester and beyond, it will doubtless look like yet another example of the coldness of modern politics – all despair, and no hope.

Original Article
Source: guardian.co.uk
Author: John Harris