The £1,560,000,000 Question

I'd like to draw your attention to a couple of headlines that the mainstream press haven't really covered.

Labour politicians attempt to block Localism Bill. I hope they succeed in getting a longer consultation period, at least. This bill is actively centralist, has nowhere near enough safeguards, and will make the planning system impossible to navigate. I find it hilarious that the government's method of cutting the undoubted surfeit of red tape in planning is to remove the strategic and predictable layer of regional plans, and replace it with an atomised, unwieldy, and capricious neighbourhood layer. Much more work is needed on the Localism Bill, otherwise it'll prove in parts destructive but mostly just chaotic. Since it is meant to have such a huge impact on local communities, shouldn't they get the chance to have a say in what it contains?

'Affordable rent' could add £1 billion to benefit bill. I am so glad that someone has pointed this out to the Department of Work and Pensions. Surely it cannot have been hard to infer that if you increase social rents, housing benefit would have to rise, as the people living in social housing are the poorest and most vulnerable. Incidentally, the headline is slightly misleading - the rise could actually amount to £1.56 billion per annum. If the government intends to chop billions off the benefits bill, this is clearly not the way to go about it. Tellingly, no government impact assessment of the new 'affordable rent' (up to 80% of market rent) system has been published. Perhaps not even undertaken, if an independent research organsisation has to point out this glaring discrepancy.

I'm disappointed that this hasn't been more widely reported. There are two potential implications. Either:

The government has miscalculated the future benefits bill by one and a half billion pounds by not taking into account a shift in social housing policy. That would be an extraordinary failure of communication, planning, accounting, and indeed common sense. It is not a small mistake. With numbers like that, the responsible ministers should be getting serious questions from parliament, at the very least.

Or,

The government didn't factor the additional rent into the benefit bill because they don't intend housing benefit to cover it. That would result in that same one and a half billion a year apparently being paid by social tenants - the poorest, most vulnerable people. The elderly, disabled, carers, low-paid parents, and the like. It does not seem remotely realistic to expect them to be able to afford such rent increases. The average income of a social renting household is £14,800 per annum; 65% have incomes of less than £15,000.

The result would be vulnerable people in their thousands being priced out of housing, all housing. The purpose of social homes is to give those who cannot afford private rent or ownership a roof over their head. If this policy isn't reconsidered, the housing benefit bill will have to rise by billions or endemic homelessness will be the inevitable result. What a choice.

The epithet 'affordable rent' is doubly ironic; either the tenants can't afford it or the treasury can't. The higher rents are supposed to pay for investment in more social housing, to make up for the cuts to the Department of Communities and Local Government's budget. There's a certain cunning about channelling money from the Department of Work and Pensions into affordable housing, I'll admit. Unfortunately, the policy's success relies on DWP not noticing an annual one and a half billion pound overspend.

By the way, just in case you might somehow have temporarily forgotten, we are all in this together.