Welfare Reform Bill

Like many hon. Members on both sides of the House, many of my constituents and many organisations have contacted me about their concerns about the Bill. Given that many other hon. Members want to speak, I shall highlight only a few of those. The changes in housing benefit will in due course feed into the housing element of the universal credit. Without going into all the details, there is no doubt that many people in my constituency will be seriously disadvantaged by those proposals. People will be driven into poverty, and in some cases, driven out of their current housing. The fact is that for all the press stories we read—they are sometimes repeated by Government Members—about people living in luxury housing benefit accommodation, any such cases are few and far between, if the ones we read about are genuine, which is doubtful. We should not allow the debate to be distorted by a few extreme examples that, if genuine, need to be tackled. Hon. Members will recall that in his Budget statement last year, the Chancellor of the Exchequer referred to"““families receiving £104,000 a year in housing benefit.””—[Official Report, 22 June 2010; Vol. 512, c. 174.]" I pursued that with a number of written questions. I have still not had the exact figure from the DWP, which I suspect is because only a handful of families are in that situation. If we are to have a serious debate, we should talk about the realities on the ground, not fake figures that are designed to scare people and distort the real debate that we need to have. There are precious few areas in which forcing down housing benefit costs will affect market rent. In most cases, the market rent will become further diverged from housing benefit. As I said, as a result, people will be driven out of their housing, and perhaps forced to leave their communities or forced to go to areas where they do not get support from family and friends either in or out of work. It may be the case, as the hon. Member for Bromsgrove (Sajid Javid) said, that the Government's changes will affect the market in cases where housing benefit tenants form a large proportion of the rented market. However, in constituencies such as mine, there are lots of student properties, holiday lets and those whom one might describe as young professionals. They are a major element in the rented housing sector, and they are certainly not going to go away, meaning that those on housing benefit will no longer be able to afford their existing housing. That is certainly a concern that has been expressed to me by housing associations in my constituency.