Today’s benefit cuts and housing crises are taking us back to Victorian times. The government must listen to its critics, says Bill Randall
Like many other old housing hands I felt the clock had been turned back when Archbishop of Canterbury Justin Welby warned that proposed government benefit changes could drive children and families into poverty.
Society has a duty to support the ‘vulnerable and in need’, he said, backing an open letter to the Sunday Telegraph this week from 43 bishops criticising plans to limit rises in working-age benefits and some tax credits to 1 per cent for three years.
This principled stand by Church of England leaders - a welcome change from endless arguments about same-sex marriage and women bishops - took me back to November 1980 when another new Archbishop, Robert Runcie, led a battery of 28 bishops nailing up empty homes across England in support of a National Federation of Housing Associations campaign to reverse a government moratorium on housing spending.
Prime minister Margaret Thatcher and her cabinet were angered at ‘the Conservative Party at prayer’ publicly challenging their actions. However, much of the housing association budget was restored the following April, not least as a result of the spirited intervention by the bishops.
I fear the cluster-crunch of general benefit changes, housing benefit changes, the bedroom tax and the introduction of up to 80 per cent market rents will turn the clock even further back to Victorian times with only the deserving poor able to afford new housing association homes.
Going back in time
In 1868 the Peabody Trust was heavily criticised for failing the poorest of the poor by Mr Rigby, a member of the Board of Guardians of the London Union, the organisation responsible for the capital’s workhouses. In a letter to The Times he argued the rents charged by Peabody ‘entirely exclude the poor…it is the well-to-do manager of some city business or careful clerk who is encouraged in these homes’.
Mr Rigby had an axe to grind. Workhouses were in competition with the recently formed Peabody, and while his claim about clerks and managers was unjust, the very poorest were not housed in the trust’s new and, by the standards of the day, fabulous tenement blocks. In those pre-welfare state days only those who could afford to pay the rents, low by the standards of the time, could become Peabody tenants.
Stung by the criticism, Peabody published a list of its tenants’ occupations, which included blacksmiths, wheelwrights, labourers, dressmakers and others of the artisan poor. To make sure nobody lost sight of its good deeds it published the list in its annual reports until the 1970s.
Nothing’s changed
Nearly 150 years on housing associations are concerned about welfare reforms and the impact they will have on their rent collection, arrears and credit worthiness. Many of them have increased their risk provision to cover any welfare reform impacts. They are also looking again at their lettings policies. Southern Housing Group, for example, has told local authorities in the south east that, reluctantly, it intends to let affordable rented homes in new schemes only to working households and will ask for a month’s rent in advance, a month’s rent as deposit and additional fees. As a result, tenants moving into a one-bedroom flat in Brighton might have to pay as much as £1,400 in advance. It is also proposing fixed-term tenancies of up to five years.
All of this is outside Brighton and Hove’s allocation policy and the proposals were not discussed when the council supported SHG’s funding bids for the three schemes involved. My first response was one of intense anger. I worked on and off as a consultant for SHG for 20 years, at first in its original incarnation as the Samuel Lewis Housing Trust. I’ve lost count of the times I’ve repeated the mantra ‘housing those in greatest housing need’ on the group’s behalf and, indeed, for many other housing associations.
I fear that mantra will now be rendered redundant by the welfare reforms. SHG is not the only association grappling with the difficult issues presented by these reforms. Brighton & Hove is in discussion with them and other associations to look for ways round the situation, but it is going to be very difficult.
The situation will be worsened by the direct payment of housing benefit to tenants. Government ministers argue that doing this makes people more responsible for the way they spend their money. Many of them come from immensely privileged backgrounds and have absolutely no idea about the decisions faced by those on very low incomes: whether to eat or heat, for example, or pay the rent or buy a new pair of children’s shoes.
Downhill spiral
The new working tenants in the new schemes will be in housing need, for they too face problems of affordability. But letting new homes only to those in work will exclude jobless households, many in acute housing need, who can’t afford to buy and can’t afford private sector rents, even if private landlords will take them on. Homelessness will increase.
More people will end up in temporary accommodation in the private rented sector, provided by local authorities at great cost. Others will find over-crowded and sometimes illegal private sector solutions.
The government, which is the villain of the piece, must listen to Archbishop Welby and other voices of reason and look again at its welfare reforms. If it doesn’t, who will house the poor?
Bill Randall is mayor of Brighton & Hove. Follow him on Twitter
@BillRandallBHCC
Inside Housing
