New Clause 16
Welfare Reform Bill
4:00 pm
Danny Alexander (Shadow Minister and Disability Spokesperson, Work & Pensions; Inverness, Nairn, Badenoch and Strathspey, Liberal Democrat)
It is a pleasure to be back here this afternoon under your chairmanship, Mr. Hood. I shall pick up where I left off in moving new clause 16. Ministers have previously suggested that they have no plans to make local housing allowance available to existing housing benefit claimants, but that position will be reviewed after a two-year period. I have expressed several concerns, not least the risk that landlords will seek to evict their existing tenants to let to new tenants at a higher rate, if local housing allowance happens to be at a higher rate. Local citizens advice bureaux have reported many cases of landlords increasing their rent to local housing allowance level.
It seems not impossible, although I am not a fortune teller, that landlords will respond similarly in the national roll-out and will not necessarily distinguish, in their rent-setting behaviour, between tenants whose housing benefit is assessed under the existing rules and those whose housing benefit is assessed under the local housing allowance rules. That could leave some tenants at a disadvantage. One can envisage a situation in which some landlords would be pushing rents up towards the local housing allowance level, causing shortfalls, potentially, among the tenants who were in receipt of existing housing benefits.
The new clause, as I said earlier when probing the Government’s intentions, would address the problems by allowing existing claimants to choose whether to transfer on to local housing allowance, or, at any rate, by giving the Secretary of State powers to make regulations to allow that to happen. Such an approach would be consistent with another of the Government’s priorities for the local housing allowance, which was, after all, to promote choice, in terms of shopping around with benefits and local housing allowance. In addition, such an approach could perhaps ease acceptance among claimants of some of the changes, because it would allow them greater choice.