Category: Blog Post

McDonalds write health policies; house builders set design standards

Post author By Red Brick Blog
Post date November 29, 2010

by Tony Clements

Former policy advisor to Rt Hon John Healey MP during his tenure as Minister of State for Housing and Planning. Executive Director of Place for Ealing Council.

When the government announced that it was inviting businesses to play a greater role in Britain’s health policy, it made the front page, because of the obvious clash of interests. Pepsi and McDonalds want to sell more of the products which cause obesity and poor health.

Last week the government did something similar in housing. It abolished the higher space and sustainability standards which were set to apply to new publicly funded homes. Instead, the Housing Minister is putting house builders ‘in charge of developing a new framework for local building standards.’

Now there is a fundamental clash of interest between house builders and people who want spacious, well designed and environmentally sustainable homes. These homes are more expensive for developers to build, no getting away from it. There is also a conflict within government; government (should) want good quality homes and all recent governments have wanted more homes. Higher standards hit your housing numbers.

The approach of the last government was to try to increase standards gradually, with public housing leading the way. That meant government shared in the increased cost of better homes and helped industry build capacity and expertise to build better homes elsewhere as cheaply as possible.

And to state the obvious, public cash is often on the line to mop-up the problems of poorly designed and built homes. Part of the problem of some of the ‘sink estates’ the Tories love to quote is that they were built poorly in the rush for numbers in the post-war period. Billions have gone into estate regeneration schemes in recent years, to demolish and rebuild the substandard and poorly built homes of the past,

So when the Housing Minister says: ‘There’s no good reason why homes built on public land should be built any differently to those of high quality on private land.’ The good reason is that private homes are often not very well built as the Royal Institute of British Architects and the soon to be abolished CABE point out.

This move is simply a leveling down, which will help the Housing Minister meet his numbers in the short term, but will build in longer term problems, for which the tax payer is likely to have to pick up the bill. The public sector has abdicated its role in trying to provide better and bigger homes for its citizens.

It’s worth saying that I’m not unsympathetic to the Housing Minister’s bind. There is a housing crisis and a desperate need for new homes. All those homeless families, overcrowded families, those on waiting lists, in temporary accommodation or sleeping on the sofas of friends and family, don’t they just need any serviceable home and quickly? And following the advice of architects has not always led to untrammelled success: tower blocks were once the cutting edge of design.

Rather than peddle nonsense about red tape however, the Housing Minister could say that after weighing up the balance he’d decided to go for homes now and lifting housing standards would have to wait for less straightened times. That would be an honest response.

Blog Post

Unequal impact

Post author By Steve Hilditch
Post date November 26, 2010

Steve Hilditch

Founder of Red Brick. Former Head of Policy for Shelter. Select Committee Advisor for Housing and Homelessness. Drafted the first London Mayor’s Housing Strategy under Ken Livingstone. Steve sits on the Editorial Panel of Red Brick.

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Since the Election the Government has substantially reduced the information it provides in announcements, consultation papers and the like concerning the impacts the proposals will have in equalities terms.

It was an important innovation by Labour to introduce a statutory requirement to publish impact assessments. Policy documents improved: ‘straight line thinking’ was challenged by the discipline of having to look at issues from the different standpoints of women, ethnic minorities, disabled people, and others. It didn’t solve the problem but equalities issues were much more likely to be properly considered as part of policy development, and policies were much more likely to be adapted to mitigate any adverse impacts identified. Impact assessments were fascinating to read because they tended to reveal downsides or unintended consequences of a policy that did not appear to have been addressed.

By any measure, this week’s consultation paper on social housing and homelessness is likely to have major implications for women, ethnic minorities and disabled people. Yet there is no impact assessment or equalities assessment published with the consultation paper. And none of the 30 consultation questions explicitly concerns equalities (although one asks if new tenants who are older people or have a long term illness or disability should be given ‘a social home for life’ – is there any answer other than ‘yes’?). The only reference to the duty is a note saying that impact assessments of the legislative changes will be published with the Localism Bill – we will see how thorough these are when they emerge – but the consultation paper has much wider consequences for practice in the sector than the contents of the Bill.

The Equality Commission is launching a formal inquiry as to whether the Treasury fulfilled its “legal duty to pay ‘due regard’ to equality and consider any disproportionate impact on protected groups when making decisions, including decisions about the budget”, pointing out that “Where decisions are found to have a disproportionate impact on a particular group protected by the legislation, public bodies must consider what actions can be taken to avoid, mitigate or justify that impact.” (see link below). The charge was made at the time of the spending review, notably by Yvette Cooper, that it would hit women much harder than men. Although officially denied, it emerged that Theresa May had written to George Osborne after the June budget to register concerns about non-compliance with the legislation.

Although the Commission will not report until next summer, they could then serve a compliance notice and go to the Courts to force the Treasury to comply. Their intervention is to be welcomed and should also serve as a warning to Communities and Local Government Ministers.

http://www.equalityhumanrights.com/news/2010/november/commission-to-assess-the-spending-reviews-compliance-with-equality-law/

Tags Equalities, Impact assessment, Public consultation

Blog Post

Welwyn-Hatfield Syndrome

Post author By Steve Hilditch
Post date November 25, 2010

Steve Hilditch

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Always one for the grand gesture and photo-opportunity, Grant Shapps is on TV yesterday cutting some ‘real red tape’ and complaining that local authorities suffer from ‘Stockholm Syndrome’. Well, the point missed me for one and possibly most of the rest of the population as well. Wikipedia came to the rescue as usual, letting me know that in psychology Stockholm Syndrome describes the paradox where captives express positive feelings towards their captors.

I don’t know if Shapps is a student of psychology but evidentally in Spooks the syndrome was crucial to the storyline involving agent Lucas North. More likely that was the inspiration.

Shapps was describing the ‘bonfire of the regulations’ that are to free local government from the ‘apron strings of the nanny state’. But, just as this week’s social housing consultation talked of freeing landlords and not tenants, this announcement is about freeing government and councils and not residents. Both are about removing scrutiny of performance and achievement. At the core, they are about obscuring and hiding the real impact of the cuts.

One of the casualties is inspection by the Audit Commission of local authorities’ strategic housing function. Under the government’s plan to remove regional planning and targets and to place all key housebuilding decisions at local authority level, councils’ understanding of their local housing markets and housing supply and demand will be critical.

Over the last couple of years, the Audit Commission has completed over 30 inspections and re-inspections of councils’ strategic function. Not one was found to be excellent. Only 4 were found to be good, 18 fair and 11 poor. Picking one at random, West Somerset was described as follows: “The service lacks a clear understanding of community need and because strategic plans are weak, the Council has yet to effectively target the relatively poor private sector housing conditions. The delivery of new homes is not meeting needs and there has been little success in addressing empty homes. Strong outcomes for vulnerable people, such as those living in temporary accommodation, are limited.”

Some districts are very small, many now have no housing stock of their own, and many have little capacity to undertake the strategic work that is necessary. It is not surprising that they do not perform strategic housing tasks well and it would be even more surprising given budget reductions if they were to suddenly discover the talent to do so. This is one reason why so many local housing development decisions will be decided by the loudest voices rather than careful deliberation. It is also why the regional perspective was so important to housebuilding delivery.

So, we identify the new Welwyn-Hatfield Syndrome, unfortunately not yet in Wikipedia, but named in honour of Shapps’ constituency. This is where someone passes the buck down the line having made damn sure the recipient will fail to deliver, removing all scrutiny of the process, at the expense of everyone who needs a home to buy or to rent. Then you shout from the rooftops:

“Nothing to do with me guv, I’m only the Minister.”

Tags Audit Commission, Local government, Strategic housing

Blog Post

An unfair future for social housing

Post author By Steve Hilditch
Post date November 22, 2010

Steve Hilditch

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It’s too ambitious a task to analyse Grant Shapps’ social housing consultation paper in one post. I hope people will read it and make their comments forcefully to the government. But there are a few points I think are worth stressing.

1. Localism is a great dodge. It allows you to slide away from all difficult questions by saying you are just enabling the landlords and it will be down to councils and housing associations to decide for themselves how much the new powers are used. The paper has no predictions of how many of each type of new tenancy might be created in future and it avoids any substantive discussion of how ‘well off’ a tenant needs to become before they are evicted at the end of a short tenancy. So its a postcode lottery, what happens to you and your home depends entirely on an accident of geography and chance. Given that the stated justification for the policy is to give more opportunities to the 1.8m on waiting lists, it is astonishing that there is no estimate, however rough, of how many people might benefit from the policy over a period.

2. The proposed change to the homelessness duty guts the legislation as we have known it for 33 years. Local authorities will be able to discharge their duty to a homeless household by finding a private letting for the applicant, who can no longer refuse it, even though landlords will still have to offer ‘reasonable preference’ to vulnerable homeless households under their allocation policy. The paper complains that “those owed the duty can effectively insist on being provided with temporary accommodation until offered social housing” as if being in TA is some luxurious option. In fact, TA makes it almost impossible for people to work, frequent moves mean families do not settle and children are seriously disadvantaged. The average stay in TA is one year outside London and 3 years in London. No-one would suffer that if the private rented option was a reasonable one for them. People suffer it because social housing offers the only hope of a decent and secure home at an affordable rent to enable families to rebuild their lives in a settled home.

3. Some extraordinary claims are made – for example that the reforms will help overcrowded families. How exactly? There are no proposals to tackle underoccupation amongst existing tenants and zero existing large homes will be released to help the 260,000 overcrowded social tenants. Even more astonishing is the claim that the proposals will promote ‘strong and cohesive communities’ when the opposite is the almost certain outcome of a more rapid turnover of tenants with new tenants not being able to put down roots and become net contributors to their neighbourhoods.

4. The new ‘affordable rent’ tenure, or ‘flexible tenure’ as they now seem to prefer, is aimed to provide homes for the same people who might be offered social rent now. But it is open to the landlord to decide the rent, the length of tenancy and, within a broad framework, the terms. The paper at least is honest when it says this is “a significant first step towards those greater freedoms for social landlords.” How will people on waiting lists, homeless people or any other prospective tenant know what kind of tenancy they will receive, for how long and at what rent? Chaos awaits.

5. The paper has one traditional charlatan’s trick – if you can’t change the reality, change the way it is counted. One reason for the growth in waiting lists since 2002 was labour’s decision that they should be open to anyone to apply. As a result, waiting lists have become a more accurate count of not only the need for social rented housing but also the demand – and it is huge. Social housing is a popular option with many people and they want more of it. But in future councils will be able to dictate who qualifies to join the waiting lists, leaving it open to local political manipulation as was the case prior to 2002. And no doubt the government will claim that waiting lists have been slashed since they came into power.

6. And my 2 favourite hobby horses. First the claim that social housing is subsidised when everyone at CLG knows that council housing is running a surplus, including the cost of debt, which is likely to grow over the next few years. Even calling houisng association homes subsidised because they have capital grant is questionable – they make a large surplus in the long term. And secondly, the use of the term ‘lifetime tenancy’ as if it was a legal or technical term, is extremely irritating. This phrase was invented by those opposed to security of tenure to try to make it sound ridiculous. Security of tenure simply means that the tenancy is not time limited and the landlord has to have grounds for possession and to get a court order to repossess. Simple consumer protection.

‘Local decisions: a fairer future for social housing’ can be found at http://www.communities.gov.uk/documents/housing/pdf/1775577.pdf

Tags Coalition policies, Department for Communities and Local Government, Homelessness, Social housing

Blog Post

Social housing ‘reform’: less Localism and more Localis

Post author By Steve Hilditch
Post date November 22, 2010

Steve Hilditch

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There is a lot in common between the policies on social housing announced today by Grant Shapps. None of the policies appeared in the Lib Dem Manifesto. Apart from better mobility, none appeared in the Conservative Manifesto, which promised to “respect the tenures and rents of social housing tenants”. Apart from the HRA reform and empty homes, none made it into the coalition agreement. The common thread is that they have all been thoroughly undemocratically arrived at and the British people were not told any of it at the Election.

The truth is that these policies have all been developed in the back channels of the Conservative Party. One document recommended virtually all the policies now adopted by the coalition. A Localis pamphlet written by the Leader of Hammersmith and Fulham Council, Stephen Greenhalgh, and John Moss, in 2009, called ‘Principles for Social Housing Reform’, proposed ending security of tenure, raising rents to market levels, and removing rights from homeless people. There is only one serious departure – Greenhalgh and Moss accepted that there would have to be a commensurate increase in housing benefit payments to enable rents to rise so high – and the government hasn’t taken that one on board.

Dave Hill in his London blog traces the contact between Greenhalgh and the Tory front bench. The more they met, and the more the front bench distanced themselves in public from the more extreme policies, the more committed they seem to have become to implementing them if they won.

There is little doubt that social housing has suffered from a great deception.

We will have more about the new policies on Red Brick shortly, but the government’s consultation paper can be found here: http://www.communities.gov.uk/documents/housing/pdf/1775577.pdf

The Tory back channel policies can be found here: http://www.localis.org.uk/images/articles/Localis%20Principles%20for%20Social%20Housing%20Reform%20WEB.pdf

And Dave Hill’s history can be found here: http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/davehillblog/2009/oct/05/stephen-greenhalgh-housing-policy-timeline

Those that like to follow the personalities in housing as well as the policies will be interested to know that Greenhalgh and Moss specially acknowledge the help of “two extremely influential couples” – Julie Cowans, co-author of Visions for Social Housing, and David Cowans, Chief Executive of Places for People; and Nick Johnson, Chief Executive of H&F Homes and Kate Davies, Chief Executive of Notting Hill Housing Trust.

As Stan Laurel once said, “Here’s another nice mess I got you into.”

Tags Coalition policies, Department for Communities and Local Government, Social housing

Blog Post

LHA on a Shoestring (Eddie, that is)

Post author By Steve Hilditch
Post date November 17, 2010

Steve Hilditch

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The excellent blogger Jules Birch, of Inside Housing magazine, demonstrates the value of a good journalistic nose and a bit of statistical persistence.

Last week, Ministers made much of the comparison between private sector rents, which they claimed the Office for National Statistics showed were down by 5% in a year, and rents where local housing allowance was being paid, up 3%. This proved, they declared in the House and on the airwaves, that LHA was distorting the market, driving high rents and fuelling profiteering by landlords.

Birch, aka Inspector Clouseau, smelled a rat. And in particular that the ONS produces no such statistics. A few calls later, and Inspector Morse forced the admission from the department that the statistics in fact came from a private property website. And Inspector Frost then discovered that using the website’s stats as an index was dodgy in the extreme, not to be relied on as an indicator of rents in the sector as a whole let alone the LHA market, and that their analyst was in fact predicting rent rises. And finally Inspector Taggart demonstrated that all the available evidence shows that LHA does not distort the market after all. No case to answer.

So, was Ian Duncan Smith misleading the House – sorry, in Parliamentary language, was he ‘inadvertently’ misleading the House? If this had been Labour Ministers it would have been all over the front pages and Paxman and Humphreys would demanding an apology, but so far our forensic investigator, Britain’s answer to the Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, has only managed the pages of Inside Housing and not the Daily Mail.

I’m sure that erstwhile Jane Tennisons and Juliet Bravos on Labour’s front bench will pursue further enquiries in Parliament.

http://www.insidehousing.co.uk/community/blog/mind-the-gap/6512515.blog

(illustration: an inspector’s insignia)

Tags Housing Benefit, Iain Duncan Smith, Local Housing Allowance, Statistics

Blog Post

A nice little earner – or not?

Post author By Steve Hilditch
Post date November 15, 2010

Steve Hilditch

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The New Homes Bonus

As a country we have failed to build enough new homes for more than 30 years. The coalition’s scrapping of Labour’s system of regional housebuilding targets, which was only starting to have effect, has caused great concern. Now a little flesh has been put on the bones of their proposed alternative – the New Homes Bonus – in a consultation paper published on 12 November.

The core proposal is that each council will make its own decisions on the scale and nature of housing development, but they will be incentivised to encourage building through a grant that will match the council tax raised on new homes for the first six years after development. The benefit to councils (on current figures) over 6 years would be over £8,000 for a Band D property (using the national average) and over £10,000 for a band E property. An additional flat rate of £350 a year would be paid if a property falls within the definition of ‘affordable’ in PPG3.

Communities and Local Government department estimates that the cost will rise to over £1 billion a year in year 6 even on current housebuilding numbers, but it is likely to be significantly more if the scheme has the desired effect and housebuilding increases. A contribution to the cost will come through scrapping the current Housing and Planning Delivery Grant – about £250m a year for the first 4 years – but all other costs – ie £1 billion or more by year 6 – will come out of local authority Formula Grant, so there will obvious gainers and less obvious losers. Very little is said in the paper about the losers (ie those that will lose more in Formula Grant than they will gain in NHB) and how much impact the overall reduction in Formula Grant will have.

Despite the wealth of methodology in the paper, the government has no real idea how many extra homes NHB will generate and how much impact an incentive of say £8k a home over 6 years will have. Is that enough to overcome nimbyism and genuine local concerns? An estimate is made that by 2016-17 there might be an uplift of 8-13% from the base, but this is not convincing.

There is no guarantee that the grant will be used to help communities affected adversely by development or to support infrastructure. It can be spent in any way the beneficiary council chooses – and the document identifies only non-housing uses like council tax discounts, rubbish collection, and providing local facilities like swimming pools. Most likely in the current climate, it will be used to offset the general cut in Formula Grant that is taking place anyway as part of the CSR.

Will the scheme encourage affordable homes? The £350 enhancement for affordable homes appears plucked out of thin air. Who knows if this is a real incentive or not? Using the PPG3 definition of ‘affordable’ means that everything that is sub-market will be included, and there is no specific incentive to encourage homes for those most in need.

The scheme does not distinguish between different areas in terms of the need to build. The benefit will come to those with the greatest capacity to build on easy sites. Councils with little developable land or no need to build will be concerned about the overall impact this might have on the finances.

An interesting oddity is the intention that acquisitions that increase the availability of affordable homes would receive the £350 enhancement but not the core NHB. It is also suggested that the scheme might cover the bringing back into use of empty homes.

I would strongly urge everyone to read the consultation paper and to get comments in. We’d be delighted to report your views here on Red Brick.

Click to access 1767788.pdf

Tags Affordable housing, Formula Grant, New Homes Bonus

Blog Post

Simply complex

Post author By Steve Hilditch
Post date November 12, 2010

Steve Hilditch

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Hands up if you understand the welfare reforms unveiled yesterday by Iain Duncan Smith. How can a simplified system be so complex to understand?

Fortunately the public seem to have a grip and polls show a healthy majority agree with the government’s position. IDS seems to have pulled off a magic trick. He will simplify the system into a single Universal Credit by 2013, he has promised to improve substantially the marginal rate (how much people keep from extra earnings taking account of benefit withdrawal), he has promised there will be no cash losers, and he has got the public onside.

I have little doubt that the golden scenario will begin to unravel with a little more analysis. Labour’s shadow work and pensions secretary, Douglas Alexander, pointed out that the ‘no cash loss’ promise did not appear to apply to new claimants, and of course turnover is high. The Child Poverty Action Group were most concerned about the removal of hardship payments drawing attention to the main difficulty in withdrawing benefits from people who refuse to take jobs – making children suffer for the sins of their parents (Mr Duncan Smith likes to use the word sin).

The simplicity aim has wide support amongst advisers, including the CAB. The government claims that Universal Credit “will support people both in and out of work, replacing Working Tax Credit, Child Tax Credit, Housing Benefit, Income Support, income-based Jobseeker’s Allowance and income-related Employment and Support Allowance”. As always, the devil will be in the detail. UC will be a basic allowance with “additional elements for children, disability, housing and caring”. Experience tells me that none of the add-ons will be simple to understand or to calculate. The devil will also be in implementation. A welfare system that is widely regarded in the media as soft and open to abuse is simultaneously experienced by users as inflexible, harsh and punitive.

With 5 jobseekers chasing each job, how DWP implements the system will be hugely important. There will be much stronger ‘conditionality’ – the new word for punishment – but “conditionality will be responsive to an individual’s circumstances.” As the housing benefit system has been bedevilled by the complexity of handling changes in circumstance, how can the new system become more responsive? The answer unfortunately relies on IT. UC “will be calculated and delivered electronically, automatically adjusting credit payments according to monthly income reported through an upgraded version of the ….. tax system”. I believe this is the same system that has delivered millions of incorrect tax calculations and hundreds of thousands of incorrect tax credits. The test will be how DWP responds to many thousands of calls challenging their calculations and the many real errors that will be made.

The proposal has ambitions that many will agree with – simplicity, the integration of out-of-work and in-work support – but also many dangers and risks for the poorest people in society. And I have a particular fear about administrative chaos. We may not be able to start evaluating those risks properly until the Welfare Reform Bill is published in January.

Quotations from the White Paper, which can be found here:

http://www.dwp.gov.uk/policy/welfare-reform/legislation-and-key-documents/universal-credit/

Tags Universal Credit, Welfare Reform

Blog Post Uncategorized

Indecently decent

Post author By Steve Hilditch
Post date November 12, 2010

A guest post from Maureen C
Like Red Brick I’m pleased to see so much news coverage of housing and benefit issues as this new government appears to announce new, ill thought out policies, most of which they have no mandate from the electorate for, on a daily basis. Even when the press get things wrong, as they have on some aspects of the HB reforms, it is nevertheless good to get the issues out there.
Grant Snapps made some statements yesterday on proposals to alter funding arrangements for Decent Homes which do not seem to have attracted attention yet. These represent more bad news for the many tenants who still live in homes that do not meet the decent homes standard. Interestingly the background papers on this state ‘46% of council owned non-decent homes will lie in London at end March 2011.’

The decent homes standard is fairly basic – it includes having modern kitchens, bathrooms and electrical systems. But the previous government’s arrangements have quietly transformed standards in social housing all over the country. Millions of council properties in particular have been brought up to a decent standard after decades of under investment.
Some councils have done this by transferring their stock to housing associations. But where council tenants, understandably in many cases, voted against wholesale transfers , councils could get access to funding (largely loans) if the arms length management companies (ALMOs) they formed to run the housing got 2 stars in an Audit Commission inspection. The rationale was to incentivise councils to provide better quality, VFM services for their residents and ensure services were built around residents’ needs and preferences. As anyone who lives and works in this area knows -better housing, opportunities and stronger communities need much more than bricks and mortar. But decades of tenants’ pressure to improve services and design fell on deaf ears. No teeth and no real market to power better services.
Inspections assessed this independently and were widely credited with driving up services and standards. The reality is that housing organisations had to up their game and provide better, more customer orientated, VFM services to get 2 stars. These efforts produced good results for tenants that sadly previous decades of tenant and political pressure had failed to deliver. Over 20 ALMOs got top scores of 3 stars for excellent service and 40 have 2 stars – making them the best performing in the sector.
Now Grant Snapps has slashed the funding for future programmes to meet decency standards – down from £680 million to £260 million in 2011/12.
And the pressure is off landlords to improve their services as they no longer need to get 2 stars to access what little funding remains. Under the banner of reducing the ‘hoops to go through’ funding will be decided upon by the regulator (what’s left of the regulator anyway). The proposals, published by HCA, state ‘We will work with the regulator to achieve appropriate assurance on value for money in the use of funding.’
So much for transparency and accountability.
They had a system that produced better services for tenants and decent homes. It wasn’t perfect but it did produce some of the best outcomes for tenants in social housing we’ve seen for decades. Now we can have no assurance that the reduced funding will fuel better services and choices for tenants who deserve much better than this. Will this get picked up by the national media?

Tags Audit Commission, Decent Homes, Decent Homes Standard

Blog Post

HB: more heat than light

Post author By Steve Hilditch
Post date November 10, 2010

Steve Hilditch

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Yesterday’s marathon Commons debate on the proposed housing benefit changes produced more heat than light. There were a lot of apparently conflicting statistics, especially about the number of people affected and the number of people likely to have to move home as a result.

The main government theme – sorry, but I can no longer distinguish between Tory and Liberal members of the government, I had thought the Minister, Steve Webb, was a Liberal Democrat until I heard his speech – was to attack Labour’s ‘scaremongering’. But as the government has yet to publish any meaningful analysis of the proposals, or to demonstrate how the savings are calculated, the opposition has to rely on its own analysis and that of the housing organisations like the National Housing Federation and Shelter, and all have predicted dire outcomes.

There was an interesting debate about the impact the Local Housing Allowance has had on rent levels in the private rented sector. In short, Labour argued that rent levels, especially in higher rent areas, have been dragged up by buoyant and growing demand from non-HB tenants, especially the growing group of people who would have become owner occupiers in previous times who now can’t or won’t take a risk on buying. Therefore LHA, being linked to the median rent, follows the market rather than leads it. Labour in office had decided to remove the highest rents from the calculation of the median to reduce the impact the top of the market was having on the measure that determined the going LHA rate.
The government benches took two slightly different views; on the backbenches several claimed that the LHA level was determining the rent levels, driving the market up, but the Minister relied on the more limited construction that, as the LHA supported 40% of rent payers in the sector, it must therefore have some effect on the price.

This seems to me to be a proper debate about a fundamental issue. How does state intervention impact on a market, especially one with inelastic supply, which caters for the very rich and the very poor and lots in between and has little consumer protection? We will be more and more dependant on private renting in the future, and this is a question worthy of proper study and analysis. One factor may be the differences between the market in high rent areas and those in areas where the gap between social and market rents is really quite small and where there are fewer richer people entering the market.

Another noteworthy feature of the debate was the number of speakers from places well away from London. The government has been keen to keep the debate focused on the more extreme cases where the national cap will now apply, but there were speeches about Glasgow and Sheffield and Sunderland and elsewhere identifying the likely losers and the impact the losses might have on families.

The only real sign of dissent on the government side concerned the proposal to cut HB by 10% for anyone on job seekers allowance for more than a year, irrespective of how hard they had looked for a job, and LibDem Simon Hughes said he would oppose this – although the remainer of his interventions gave me the impression that he might end up supporting the rest of the package, making it much more likely that it will go through.

Tags Housing Benefit, Local Housing Allowance, Private rented sector