Welfare Reform Bill

I would like to continue the argument with the Chief Whip, but we will move on. Perhaps we will have this discussion outside on the difference between consequential, and the mover of an amendment accepting an amendment to the amendment. That is where the confusion may arise. The noble Lord, Lord Best, certainly did do so. We discussed shared accommodation rent in Committee, and I have to say that one’s worries remain. At the moment, if you are under 25, you are eligible for Housing Benefit for a room in a shared house. If you are over 25, you are eligible for Housing Benefit for a one-bedroom flat. The Government are proposing that from next month, if you are aged up to 35 rather than 25, after 13 weeks you will get housing benefit only for a room in a shared house, a house in multiple occupation. Some 62,500 people will be affected, losing on average over £40 a week—in London, over £100 a week. The amendment is a modest one, a breathing-space amendment. It does not seek to maintain the status quo, though I wish that we could do so. Who is this breathing space for? Say that you are 33. You moved a couple of years ago to a large city and still do not know too many people. You are living in a one-bedroom flat and are in work as a secretary. You have not built up many savings but are not claiming HB. Because your small company closes, you lose your job, but the amendment would stop you from losing your home as well. Instead, you would receive housing benefit for your one-bedroom flat for a breathing space of 12 months while you look for another job. Without the amendment, the person I am describing would be forced—in London, for example—to lose her one-bedroom flat and go into a house of multiple occupation because of the cost of £100 a week that she could not cover herself, yet 50 per cent of people on JSA like her return to work within six months, 75 per cent within nine months and 90 per cent within the year. The amendment would allow her to keep her flat with housing benefit for that breathing space of one year. If after that she had not returned to work, she would fall down to the shared-room rent and have to find somewhere else to live. Why the argument for a breathing space? There are two reasons. The first is the upheaval factor. She would avoid a move out and then possibly, if she found work six months later, another move into a one-bedroom flat, each time spending perhaps thousands of pounds on curtains, carpets, a removal van, agency fees, deposits and the like. It is not just about cost, even though that will be wiped out of her savings—it is about stress. Having lost her job, she is desperate to get another one and should not have to worry about whether or not she is going to have a home. In any case, she needs to stay in the local area. As we know, very few jobs go through Jobcentre Plus; most go through knowing people who know of vacancies as they occur. If she loses her home, instead of focusing on searching for a job, she will be focusing on the search for a home. She has to; that comes first. Otherwise the choice is potentially a night hostel and, ultimately, a park bench. She will be stressed and pressured, and the strain for any of us in that situation without resources would be almost unbearable. She would be changing address, putting stuff in store, sorting out utilities, finding cash for a deposit and agency fees—all the clutter of an unwanted house move, at just the time when we want her to be focusing on the search for a job. Let her concentrate on getting the job; it is what she wants. If she gets one, she will soon be off housing benefit altogether and paying taxes on her salary, saving the state a long-term HB bill. It is in her and our interest to give her that breathing space of a year. I have calculated that within a year the amendment would save the Government more than they think they will gain from cuts to the group in her situation, because people like her will be off benefit and back to work sooner. So the first reason for a breathing space is for her to focus on a job search, which is what will actually cut the benefit bill. The second reason is the type of accommodation that she would have to move to. If she is lucky, she may have friends with whom she can share or sofa-surf, having put all her furniture in store. If not, she will have to move to an HMO. The ones that you can afford on benefit are at the bottom end of the market because landlords prefer students or people in work. That, combined with the effect of the 30th of a percentile on benefit payable, means cracked WCs, trailing wires, missing light bulbs, flimsy doors, stained carpets, indifferent landlords and dirty common parts in the kitchen and hall—and if she complains, she will be evicted. If she is fairly lucky, she will find that she can share with some other like-minded women, but few women are in HMOs because they are neither safe nor salubrious. She will instead have a room in a shared house with strangers, sharing the kitchen and bathroom, at night walking down the hall to the bathroom in her dressing gown, hoping that she will not be accosted or assaulted. She will hear every sound through partition walls, protected only by a flimsy plywood door to her bedroom. With whom will she be sharing? Most landlords can make HMOs work only with four tenants or more, usually unknown to each other. With luck, they may simply be younger men of student age, noisy, boisterous, boozy, chaotic, undomesticated, helping themselves to whatever is in the fridge and holding late-night parties with loud music. However, students in that situation would be able to afford something better, so instead she faces the much higher likelihood of sharing with other strangers—older men who have nowhere else to live. It is mainly older men who live in HMOs. Why is that? I speak as someone who, as local authority leader and housing chair, tried to regulate them. Those men are in HMOs because they have been thrown out of the family home for violence; because they are ex-offenders, addicts or alcoholics; because they have been evicted from their previous flat for antisocial behaviour; because they have mental health problems; because they have substantial learning difficulties; because they have come off the streets from sleeping rough; or because they are dealing, and their so-called friends crowd into the kitchen to buy and consume. They knock on her door by mistake, perhaps shout at her through it, and she is terrified. Most men in that position could defend themselves; she cannot. I fear that HMOs at the bottom of the housing market are warehouses for the marginal, the deviant and the drifter. We are requiring this woman, having lost her job through no fault of her own, to join them. The journey back to work will take far longer and be far harder for her as a result of what we have done. No woman in this House would want to be in this situation and no man would want it for his daughter, and if it is not good enough for us it is not good enough for her. If I can show the Minister, as I am happy to, that the amendment would be at least cost-neutral and would probably give additional savings—I have worked the permutations on different possibilities—will he please take it away and think about it again? I am happy to share my financial figures with him now, later or in my wind-up. If I can show him that he will not make any losses on the amendment but it will either be cost-neutral or even make some surplus, will he offer to take it away and think about it?