Welfare Reform Bill (Programme) (No. 2)

I will be very interested to see the evidence for the hon. Lady's assertion. Although I know that our two parties have differed in the past on their interpretation of ““rough sleeping””—on street homelessness—and that there is a genuine debate to be had about how that is measured, I was not aware, and I stand to be corrected, that there has been a shift in the data set for the measurement of the number of people approaching local authorities as homeless and being accepted as such. Nothing on the DCLG website indicates that, so I dispute her definition and it seems to me that we are facing a genuine problem. Even more worryingly, rent arrears and mortgage default were to blame for a growing share of the number of people who were approaching local authorities as homeless; although not the main cause, that is a growing cause of those applications. It gives me no satisfaction to see that; I do not want people to be made homeless. As we discussed in Committee, homelessness is one of the greatest traumas that any household can possibly face. The hon. Member for Truro and Falmouth (Sarah Newton) and other Government Members must face up to the fact that the statistics show a growing trend just as the cuts in housing benefit begin to be flagged up and as people react to the changes in the incoming benefits. The second set of data to come out in the past week of which we need to be cognisant was a survey released on Friday by the National Landlords Association. It found that 58% of all private residential landlords plan to reduce the number of properties they let to tenants on local housing allowance. Some 80% of landlords expressed concern about the reduction in local housing allowance rates from the average market rents of the bottom 30% and the same number were worried, as I shall discuss in the context of the relevant amendment, about the future local housing allowance increases being linked to the consumer prices index rather than true market rents. The survey also found that 90% of landlords stated they cannot afford to reduce their rents to absorb changes to the local housing allowance as the large majority are faced with mortgage repayments and rising running costs. The worrying picture is that our discussions are put in context by the cuts in housing benefit that have already been through the House and were opposed by the Opposition, which are feeding through into the concerns of landlords. One point of concern is that when the Government assert that 30% of properties will remain available to tenants on local housing allowance, they ignore the fact that not all the properties in that threshold will be available to tenants because it will not necessarily be the landlords within that cohort who are prepared to let in the first place. We will have to wait and see, but it is entirely reasonable for alarm bells to ring on the impact on homelessness when we look at those two sets of statistics. If we find either that households are in an affordability crisis or that landlords simply pull out of the housing benefit sector, particularly in those areas where the demand for private rented accommodation is greatest—that is, London, the south-east and some of our cities—we will have a severe problem and many the assumptions being made by the Government about savings are unlikely to be realised. Homelessness is an expensive process and places considerable pressure on local government.