Research casts doubt on ministers' ideas
Ministerial assumptions behind the forthcoming housing Green Paper have been blown apart by the government's own research into housing benefit.

An official study into the restrictions already in place on housing benefit for private tenants shows that the limits failed to achieve policy aims, and instead are forcing tenants to beg, borrow and use other benefits to make up rent shortfalls.

The study for Department of Environment, Transport and the Regions and the Department of Social Security examines the impact of both single room rents for people under 25 and local reference rents.

Both restrictions were designed to encourage tenants to shop around for cheaper accommodation and negotiate lower rents with landlords - ideas that ministers are keen to put forward for social tenants in the housing green paper (Housing Today, issue 125).

But a detailed analysis of six councils found none of the landlords interviewed had been approached by tenants to negotiate a lower rent after their benefit had been assessed. Only a fifth of the 776 tenants interviewed had even considered moving to cheaper homes.

What it did find was increasing hardship caused by rents shortfall. One tenant said he went without food to meet the gap in benefit. Four out of five were paying the shortfall out of other benefits, and one in five were borrowing from friends and relatives - many for sums of more than £1000. One tenants was forced to beg on the streets before being evicted by his landlord.

The report notes that "paying the shortfall from Job Seekers Allowance or Income Support implies that these tenants are foregoing some other essential expenditure."

Shelter policy officer Matthew Waters said: "It's a damning report - the underlying assumptions made by the government were wrong."

He said it showed that the government needed to think "very seriously" before introducing flat rates to housing benefit. "The lesson to draw is that flat rates don't work. Landlords don't drop the rent and tenants don't shop around, it just leaves people in more and more hardship."

National Association of Citizens Advice Bureaux social policy officer Liz Phelps said: "Trying to impose a shopping incentive model onto the basic level of income support is a recipe for enormous hardship. It is increasingly the landlords that are doing the shopping not the tenants."

National Housing Federation chief executive Jim Coulter said he hoped that "policy would now follow fact."

Source

Housing Today