David Cameron and George Osborne are fond of describing housing benefit as a payment for the unemployed. Recently challenged on his plan to abolish the benefit for the under-25s, Cameron said:
We should ask this question about housing benefit: if you’re a young person and you work hard at college, you get a job, you’re living at home with mum and dad, you can’t move out, you can’t access housing benefit [emphasis mine].
And yet, actually, if you choose not to work, you can get housing benefit, you can get a flat. And having got that, you’re unlikely then to want a job because you’re in danger of losing your housing benefit and your flat. We have to look at the signals we send and I think we should have a system where we say ‘you shouldn’t be better off out of work than in work’. The system doesn’t work today, so we need to reform it.
By portraying housing benefit as a payment for “the shirkers“, not “the strivers”, Cameron and Osborne aim to convince the public that their unprecedented welfare cuts are justified. But the truth is that the benefit is increasingly claimed by the working poor, the very group that Cameron purports to care so much about.
Today’s report from the National Housing Federation, Home Truths, shows that the number of working people forced to rely on housing benefit to pay their rent has increased by 417,830 (86 per cent) in the last three years, a figure that is rising at a rate of nearly 10,000 a month. Ninety three per cent of new claims last year were made by households containing at least one employed adult. By 2015, a total of 1.2 million working people people will only be able to stay in their homes through state subsidy.
As the figures suggest, it is excessive rents and substandard wages that are to blame for the inflated housing benefit budget (which will reach £23.2bn this year), not workshy “scroungers”. The cost of privately renting a home has increased by 37 per cent in the past five years, and is set to rise by a further 35 per cent over the next six years. With 390,000 new families formed in 2011, but only 111,250 new homes built, rents have inevitably soared as demand has outstripped supply.
Rather than making housing benefit ever more restrictive, Cameron should act to lower rents and increase wages (when did you last hear him speak of a “living wage”?). Punitive cuts to welfare might win the Tories favourable headlines in the right-wing press, but this approach will do nothing to help “the strivers”.
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