Inequalities in the UK by David Fee Anémone Kober-Smith

Author:David Fee,Anémone Kober-Smith
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781787149427
Publisher: Emerald Publishing
Published: 2017-11-06T16:00:00+00:00

Table 4. Dwellings by Tenure, England (Percentages).

Table 5. Housing Benefit Expenditure Great Britain £ 000s.

LIMITING SOCIAL AND AFFORDABLE HOUSING

The Emergency Budget of 2010 reduced funding for social housing and changes to local authority housing subsidy (March 2012) increased the difficulties faced by local authorities that wanted to build, acquire or improve housing. The new arrangement redistributed outstanding council housing debt between the 171 local authorities in England with retained stock, and added a further payment to government in respect of future surpluses. Councils with retained housing stock were still subject to the Right to Buy (RTB) and had to balance their housing accounts, meeting future repair and renewal needs, without central government subsidy. These arrangements severely limited councils’ scope to undertake new house building: although some councils developed local housing companies to continue house building the overall scale of activity remained very low.

Alongside policies that limited investment the approach to social rented housing involved changing tenancy arrangements, housing benefit and tenants’ rights. There was a distancing from previous approaches: ‘Margaret Thatcher introduced statutory lifetime tenure for social housing in 1981. Times have changed, and it is no longer right that the Government should require every social tenancy to be for life ….’ (DCLG, 2010, p. 5).

The rights of social rented tenants were increasingly aligned with private tenants. New and existing tenants experienced different changes to rents and support with rental payments. New housing association tenants could be offered affordable rent tenancies with less security and higher rents (up to 80% of market levels or Local Housing Allowance (LHA) level). Affordable rents would be eligible for housing benefit but the aim was to recognise that many tenants could pay more than generally charged in social renting. In some circumstances, new lettings of social rented properties could be for a fixed term while affordable tenancies would be for at least 2 years with the maximum set locally: some new tenants would have less security than existing tenants.

Important changes in housing benefits that particularly affected tenants below pension age were designed to reduce expenditure but also justified by four views: that security of tenure, combined with benefits that could meet 100% of rent, encouraged a dependency culture; that incomes from benefits should not exceed the average earnings of ‘hard working households’; that there should be ‘fairness’ between households in private and other tenancies; and that benefits should not meet costs associated with ‘spare rooms’ or high value properties. The key elements in benefit changes included:

In 2010 the LHA cap on Housing Benefit was reduced from the median to the 30th percentile rent in a given area and was capped at four bedrooms – with the greatest impact on households living in larger properties and in higher rent areas. LHA levels do not map against actual market rent and, although rents continued to increase, LHA levels were not updated. Consequently their effect was extremely restrictive in some areas where very few properties were accessible to households depending on LHA alone to pay their rent.

The

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