Welfare Reform Bill

I shall speak also to Amendment 46. These amendments are on shared accommodation. Thanks to the alertness of the noble Lord, Lord Kirkwood, we had a debate last Wednesday on the affirmative regulations. As a result of that, I wondered whether we needed to run this amendment today. I thought it would be useful to do so in Grand Committee, so it is in this format, and we can perhaps revisit some of the arguments that were helpfully elicited by the noble Lord, Lord Kirkwood, in the response by the Minister. At the moment—forgive me if I repeat some of the arguments that the noble Lord, Lord Kirkwood, ran on the affirmative regulations, but not everyone was present—young people under 25 get housing benefit that covers the cost of a room in a shared house, student-style, in which there are four of them in a three-bedroom house, one of them occupying the front room, with a common bathroom and kitchen, although, of course, students are not eligible for HB. However, some 80,000 other young people receive HB for such shared rooms: 53,000 under-25s and 36,000 aged between 25 and 35. The Government propose to raise the age range for the shared room rate to 35, so I gather that a further 62,500 who would have received housing benefit for a one-bedroom flat will receive HB for only the single room rent. To make things worse, the HB for shared room rent will, like that of other property, now reflect only the 30th percentile of room rent rather than the 50th percentile. Demand for very limited stock will double at just the time that the HB to pay for it will be cut to the 30th percentile. Some 20 per cent of existing claimants in one-bedroom benefit-funded property will now get HB only for shared room rent. The average difference in HB in the private-rented sector between those two figures is over £40 a week, but in London it is likely to be over £100 a week. You get £88 if you are on HB for single room rent and £188, on average, if you are in a one-bedroom flat. That is far too high for anyone to make good the shortfall out of their other benefits, even if they sought to do so. In some cases, it would wipe out their entire benefit allocation. Let me talk about the supply. There are fairly few HMOs around. They form perhaps less than 1 per cent of the country’s stock, apart from in Greater London, where they formed 2.3 per cent in 2001. Finding shared accommodation for HB tenants is already difficult as landlords avoid them, preferring students with a university behind them or people in full-time work. With the percentile cuts to HB, even fewer landlords will risk taking them. Certainly in my city, what little shared accommodation of an HMO sort there is is mopped up by students and the rest is of poor quality. With good reason, housing associations and local authorities that are not yet affected by these changes, and I hope never will be, and who have, as we had, bedsitters or HMOs as part of their stock have over the past few years been converting, as I have been doing, two of them into one-bedroom flats for young people precisely because shared rooms provide poor accommodation in terms of space, storage, personal safety and sound insulation for the young, single and often fragile who end up there. In the past, such property in my housing association has been the source of endless neighbour complaints about noise and anti-social behaviour. Young tenants, especially women, also had a strong aversion to moving into house-sharing with strangers. As a housing association, we have few if any left. You could argue that, until now, those young people under the age of 25 were treated more like students in terms of the accommodation that they were expected to occupy, unsatisfactory though it was. Even then, most housing associations were changing their stock. We have had plenty of evidence over the years that most of them preferred to top-slice their benefit by £10-£20 per week and frankly underpay on their diets to afford something more salubrious than the shared-room rented accommodation on offer. Now the Government are raising the age threshold so that anyone under 35 will receive only the single room rent. For 62,500 people, that will mean a cut on average of £41 a week and a reduced HB on 30 per cent of a shrinking market. We shall press them into the poorest and least salubrious properties in the market. Although the PRS is growing, as the Social Security Advisory Committee told us on page 19, the amount of shared accommodation has fallen in absolute terms. The price will go up while the quality declines and less and less is available to this group: hence these two amendments. Amendment 46, with which I start, does not say ““no change””. It would exempt for one year the situation of someone of, say, 35, who is in work as a secretary, renting a small, one-bedroom flat with no HB. The small firm she works for closes and she loses her job. Under the Government’s proposals, when she applied for HB she would be covered for 13 weeks but after that would get only enough to cover a shared room. To stay put, she would have to cover the shortfall herself from JSA. She would soon be in arrears. Having lost her job, she would lose her home. Instead of looking for a new job, I fear that much of her energy would be deflected to looking for a clean, safe room in an HMO. She would feel stressed and possibly fragile. Were she to share with women friends—people of her choice—she would probably be okay if her HB stretches far enough. As the Minister said in response to the noble Lord, Lord Kirkwood, maybe she could move to a two-bedroom flat to share with a female friend—if there are such friends floating around currently non-housed—in the hope that their combined housing benefits for SARs will meet the rent. Perhaps they will, but two-bedroom accommodation is in the shortest supply across the whole of the housing field. Landlords already make it clear that they will not let to people on HB except as a last resort. Rents are soaring and HB will cover less and less of it. In practice, three-quarters of those in one-bed accommodation affected will be men. So what is available and on offer? If the young woman could do what the Minister suggested—the odds on her being able to do so are extremely unlikely, at least for a while—her other option would be to move into an HMO: that is, a house in multiple occupation. Those are usually now occupied by people who have arrived there from some sort of crisis—a relationship breakdown, a row with parents or because they are emerging from institutional life. Few landlords can make an HMO pay without at least three or four tenants, often unknown to each other. The larger the HMO and the greater the profit to the landlord, the greater the problems for all the tenants. A shared tenancy with strangers—they may all be men and she is a woman—will be at best, noisy and intrusive, with late-night parties because they are young and unemployed, loud music and banging doors. The other tenants may perhaps be overfriendly, with chaotic lifestyles, casual about helping themselves to anything that she puts in the fridge, and careless about keeping the shared kitchen or bathroom clean. That is at best. I know that, at worst, often the older men in HMOs are ex-offenders with a history of violence, people with poor mental health, aggressive men with anger management problems who never hold down a tenancy for more than a few months, or current drug users whose various associates move in and out of the property—with numerous, multiple keys in circulation. There will be dirty common parts, stained lavatories, never-cleaned baths, an open front door and only a thin, plywood door to her room to keep her safe. She has had to find somewhere clean and decorate if she can, move her things, get rid of most of her furniture for lack of space, sort out utilities, notify her change of address—all the clutter that impedes her job search, which should be her priority—as well as find desperately needed cash for agency fees, a month’s deposit a month in advance, compulsory contents insurance, and fees for a credit search at £125 a time. The cost may be £500, or £1,000, and she has just lost her job. Having found a room, somewhere away from where she lived and worked, she is no longer meeting friends at lunchtime to gossip about job vacancies and the like, even though we know that 80 per cent of all job vacancies go not through Jobcentre Plus but through networks. In practice, we have sharply increased her likelihood of not finding a job and of staying unemployed. Yet we know that 90 per cent of all people on JSA who have lost their job get back to work within nine months or so, and almost never because of Jobcentre Plus. They do not need to be chivvied; they are desperate to find another job, and they will do so. In that case, the young woman will come off HB and hopefully all will be well, and again she will move—not back to her old flat, because that has gone, but to yet another flat, with all the associated costs and disruptions: the search again for affordable furniture such as curtains and kitchen equipment, a month’s deposit a month in advance, and another agency fee. All that could be another £1,000. She has had to pay for two moves in the space of nine months, which has wiped out her savings, strained her health and made it much harder for her to find a job. She has been put through the ringer for no point at all. We have made it harder for her and delayed her re-entry into work, instead of supporting her. Stats and the Social Security Advisory Committee show that two-thirds of all HB claims for one-bedroom flats last for one year or less, because the claimants get back into work. We are impeding this young woman in making that sensible move. This amendment, very simply, gives the young woman a breathing space of a year, during which she receives HB for a one-bedroom flat. Hopefully within the year she will be back in work and will need no HB at all, and we will have avoided rather a lot of distress and misery, avoided wiping out her savings in forced moves as we compound her problems for no point at all. If however, after a year—I am mindful of the expenditure implications—she is still dependent on HB, she can consider her options and will have had time to find the safer, more attractive option which the noble Lord outlined in response to the noble Lord, Lord Kirkwood, of sharing a two-bedroom flat with someone she has got to know, rather than resorting to unsafe and insalubrious HMOs amid strangers. The Government will get their benefit savings over time from long-term stayers on HB, but they do not need to send this fragile woman, who has lost her job, to the rock bottom of the housing ladder as well. Amendment 45 deals with exemptions. The previous amendment was to give someone who was previously in work and has lost their job a breathing space so that they can concentrate on seeking work rather than go through the revolving doors of changing homes and moving to an HMO. This amendment seeks equally to prevent people who are already on benefit and who for one reason or another are especially fragile from going into HMOs. Some of these groups of people are so obvious that they hardly need to be spelt out, and perhaps the Minister will be able to reassure us on this: disabled people; care leavers; those who might be a danger to others, including, I fear, in some cases, substance abusers or those with a fairly severe mental health problem; and people with learning difficulties, who may be financially exploited by other tenants. Some of the most heart-wrenching stories from housing associations that I have come across are about people with learning difficulties being exploited in an HMO. We might, for example, hope that a young ex-offender will go straight or a recovering addict will stay clean, or be talking about a young person with a dysfunctional family background who is coming out of care and trying to be independent. The last thing they need is to go to an HMO, where they might be surrounded by the chaotic, the insecure, the petty criminal, or those who sometimes have abusive lifestyles from which their problems emerged in the first place. One young man coming off drugs had two options of an HMO available—one with five ex-users, or one with two who had just started again. He was asked which he preferred. Such HMOs increase the risk of recidivism. Landlords certainly do not want such tenants, and often only the worst landlords with the poorest accommodation will take them. I hope that others of your Lordships will speak to their knowledge of particular client groups and the unstable, chaotic housing biographies that will result from the Government’s proposals. I shall now spend a moment on two groups in particular: women at risk of domestic violence, and non-resident parents. I should declare an interest as I set up a refuge back in the 1970s for what we then called battered wives. Let us say that he and she share a one-bedroom flat; they are both around 30 and on HB. He knocks her around but tells her that if she gets him excluded from the flat she will lose it and be forced into an HMO. At the HMO she could expect to be with strangers and men with alcohol or substance abuse issues or with anger management issues, and men who have been excluded from the marital home also because of domestic violence. Already frightened, she will be terrified. She will have little or no protection if he has stalked and followed her there, as some more predatory partners do. The other group involves non-resident parents—usually men. This is perhaps a less obvious group. We know that the best predictor of a girl child in a lone-parent family making a good life, who stays on at school, passes her exams and does not become pregnant is if her mother works and raises her aspirations. UC will really help in this and I hope that it will transform her life. We also know that what matters to a boy child—so that he does not truant or get into trouble with the law, he stays on at school and does not lock horns with a stepfather—if he is excluded from the home and in time finds a job is if he is in regular contact with his natural father. A stepfather is six times more likely to harm a child than a natural father, so such contact is a crucial form of safety, especially for the boy child. It is only possible if the non-resident parent—nearly always a man—has a safe home for that child to stay for the weekend. Even if the HMO is salubrious, safe, clean and comfortable, which is, frankly, unlikely, a father could not decently have his 12 year-old daughter sleeping in the same single room as he does. If the HMO is less than safe and salubrious, his son will not want to stay over either. Indeed, the father may not want to bring any children into an HMO that is dirty and where there is drug use and petty criminality. A mother would not let either of them visit and stay, and in those circumstances the child will probably not want to. York University did a study with Crisis and reported that, "““men with children who go into bedsits will lose contact with their children … most of our clients have been abandoned by one parent, so the cycle will continue””." We know that after two years half of all men have lost contact with their children, partly because of accommodation reasons. Two things flow from that. If he is paying maintenance he may well say, ““If I don’t have contact I am not paying””. We are then into the desperate roundabout of CMEC pressures and prosecution. The children, especially boy children, who I am most worried about, lose the opportunity of having their natural father in their life. We know that half of all fathers lose contact within two years. This measure will increase their number and the lack of contact. The father must have a one-bedroom flat so it is safe for the child to stay. When I was chair of housing in Norwich, I used to offer two-bedroom flats if possible, but if not always a one-bedroom flat, to men in such circumstances when they broke up with their partner. It meant that parents did not then war over who should have the tenancy of the marital home and the children moved freely and happily between the two. There was shared parenting and shared residency. Civilised relationships between the couples were more likely to be maintained when they were not fighting over access to the children as a way of getting access to a home. A one-bedroom flat would suffice but a room in a shared house not at all. I hope, therefore, that the noble Lord will help with these amendments. The amendments ask, first, for an exemption for one year for those who have lost their job and coming on to HB for the first time; and, secondly, to take into account the particular circumstances of those who are vulnerable and will continue to be so in HMOs. The groups on which I have focused are women coming out of domestic violence and men who are non-resident parents, when we are desperately anxious in every other part of the DWP to maintain contact. That is how maintenance flows. If we undermine contact through our housing legislation, we will undermine payment, which the CMEC is trying to achieve. I beg to move.