On The Street

The government has a glorious vision that they will end rough sleeping, a praiseworthy aim that no-one can in good conscience take issue with. The Prime Minister, no less, states in the introduction to their new vision document that,

It is an affront to this country that last winter, one of the coldest on record, there were people still sleeping rough on our streets. While the temperature dropped below freezing, many were making do with doorways and cardboard boxes for beds. In a civilised society, this is totally unacceptable.

How right you are, Mr. Cameron! Moreover, he goes on to say that,

...tackling rough sleeping is not just about providing homes. It is about dealing with the wider causes of homelessness, from family breakdown and mental illness to drug addiction and alcoholism. This is a complex, multi-faceted problem.

Again, very true and reassuring to hear that at the highest level the government understand the complicated nature of the problem. If only this understanding was matched with some idea of the solutions. Set out in the vision document are six cross-departmental commitments to end homelessness. Before I get to them, here are seven actions the government is taking or has taken that are directly relevant to the number of people without homes. None of these are mentioned in the vision document:

1. Radically altering the nature of social housing tenure. Currently mean weekly rent in the social rented sector is £75, less than half the private sector level of £156. The government is introducing a new tenure called 'affordable rent', which by default will be set at 80% of private rent (although theoretically there will be flexibility to set it lower). New and moving tenants will be presented with this exciting new tenure, plus existing tenants may be encouraged to switch. 'Affordable rent' tenancies will also be fixed term by default; currently social renting offers a tenancy for life or until the tenant no longer wants it. All this amounts to making social renting much more expensive and less secure.
   
   
2. Cutting housing benefit in a number of ways (including capping, indexing to a measure of inflation that doesn't including housing costs, and calculating local housing allowance with reference to the cheapest 30% of properties rather than 50%), such that it won't be enough to cover either 'affordable rent' or private rent in many places. This is expected to reduce the government's spending on housing benefit by £1.8 billion. The Chartered Institute of Housing calculated that the changes could price private tenants on housing benefit out of, well, Britain.
   
   
3. Weakening the duty on Local Authorities to help the homeless. Currently if you are homeless and ask your Local Authority for help, they can offer you private rented accommodation but you do not have to accept it. Under the Localism Bill proposals, if you did not accept the private rented option, the Local Authority wouldn't have to help you any further. The devil is in the detail here; how suitable does the offer need to be? What if it is too far from your job, or your child's school? Private rental is also insecure, with assured shorthold tenancies rarely lasting beyond 6 months, prone to volatile rent, and of poorer quality than other tenures.
   
   
4. Cutting Local Authority funding, which impacts both on housing departments and on charities that rely on public sector grants, which form between them the front line of help for the homeless.
   
   
5. Reforming the planning system through the Localism Bill, to remove regional housing targets and introduce confusing new ways of involving neighbourhoods (whatever they turn out to me). The Chief Executive of Taylor Wimpey, one of the UK's biggest house builders, said this of the proposals:
   
   ...can I tell you my great fear? In three years’ time, it all stops. We are operating currently on existing consent and on land banks. We need a flow of consent coming through the process to maintain and grow business. I fear that we will reach a point, in about three years’ time, when what we have currently on the stocks runs out, where in fact we have not got that supply coming through. That is the big challenge. That is the sort of transition [...] which so badly needs to be addressed.
   
   House builders obviously have a bit of a vested interest here, but he also has a good point. There is a shortage of housing in the UK and uncertainty about the planning system will only delay the building of anything.
   
   
6. Cutting the National Affordable Homes Programme from £8.4 billion (2008-11) to £4.5 billion (2010-13, notice the overlap) and stating that it will only be spent on the new 'affordable rent' tenure. This housing will not meet the needs of the most vulnerable and impoverished people, by definition those who are most at risk of homelessness.
   
   
7. Rejecting the conclusions of the Rugg Review, which called for regulation of the private rented section to deal with abusive landlords and substandard accommodation. The review proposed a light-touch system of regulation designed to stabilise the sector and encourage investment. The sector was supportive, but the government labelled it red tape and that was that.

As a result of this combination of policies, affordable housing will become scarcer, private renting remain insecure, social and private rents will rise, and housing benefit will reduce, whilst the Local Authority safety net weakens. The implications are worrying, and the Department of Communities and Local Government is well aware of it. The six-month-old letter recently leaked baldly states that just the changes to benefits will generate more than £270 million of additional costs to Local Authorities and cause 40,000 households to become homeless.

Wait a moment, didn't the Prime Minister say he really wanted to end rough sleeping? Let's look at the government's six commitments to do so.

1. 'Helping people off the streets' by providing £20 million for a Homelessness Transition Fund. If that much money could end homelessness, surely there would be no-one sleeping rough at the moment. It will go to Homeless Link,a body representing organisations that work with the homeless and be spent on grants to pilot new ways of working.
   
   
2. 'Helping people access healthcare' by, well, I can't really tell. The verbs used are 'highlight', 'support', and 'work with'. I've used such phraseology before and know what they equate to - very little. The government is trying to devolve healthcare commissioning to the local level, so how can they ensure the health needs of the homeless are fully met in every locality?
   
   
3. 'Helping people into work' by using the Work Programme. However effective the new private-sector led approach might be, it will be impeded by the fact that there are currently 2.6 million more unskilled workers than jobs. If there aren't enough private sector jobs, what then?
   
   
4. 'Reducing bureaucratic burdens' by reducing guidance and local authority reporting requirements. I genuinely don't understand how this will this tackle homelessness. Ironically, it might make it harder to calculate the level of homelessness nationally. Notably, there's also no mention in the report of how CLG will even monitor whether their pledge is being met.
   
   
5. 'Increasing local control over investment in services' by analysing the costs of homelessness. That one just sounds like a non sequetur. Community-based budgets are also referenced, but it seems quite a heroic assumption that giving the community greater control over Local Authority money will automatically result in better services for the homeless. The government has also removed the ringfence on homelessness grant, leaving Local Authorities free to spend it on whatever their councillors might choose. Call me unduly cynical, but the homeless are not a big local election voting demographic. It's worthy of note that taking away the ringfence on the Supporting People budget (which also assists the vulnerable) has resulted in it being dramatically cut by many Local Authorities.
   
   
6. 'Devolving responsibility for tackling homelessness' by giving the Mayor of London unspecified new responsibilities and £34 million to try and cushion the seismic impact benefit changes will have in London.
   

That final so-called commitment is the real key to this. The government has made a grand statement about ending rough sleeping, something that no government has managed even in times of economic growth and increasing public spending, then dumped the responsibility for actually doing it onto Local Authorities. Whilst making unprecedented cuts to their budgets. Nice work, Mr. Shapps. Is it really credible to presume the measures that form this vision will more-than-counterbalance the huge negative effects of other policies?

The above might give you the idea that I am doubtful that rough sleeping will cease to exist over the next four years. Meanwhile, the Mayor of London has pledged to end rough sleeping in the capital by 2012. According to figures from the charity Crisis, 3975 people slept rough at some point in London during 2010/11, an increase of 8 per cent on the previous year's total of 3673 and of more than a thousand since 2005/06. The cuts to housing benefit have yet to be implemented. Five and a half months to go, Boris. Good luck.

Actually ending rough sleeping would be a strikingly impressive thing to do. However the government's policies are already increasing homelessness, and by their own admission will continue to do so. Far from articulating ways to solve the problem, they are making it dramatically worse. Their whole vision for ending rough sleeping is thus just an empty promise and a waste of words. I can only hope that the members of parliament who signed their names to this incredibly hypocritical document are eventually held to account for it.

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.

La Belle France

The unrelentingly grim tone of political and economic announcements recently led me to read about the French Revolution to cheer myself up. I've always had a fascination with the upheavals of 1789-94. In just five years (the usual gap between elections now) the whole country was turned upside down, torn apart, and built back up by war, terror, and astoundingly prescient ideas. Paris must have been a simultaneously horrifying and astonishing place to be during those years of upheaval.

The tenuous link that this has to UK housing policy is found in the demographic layout of Paris, focal point of the revolution centuries ago. Unlike London, which has pockets of social deprivation in close proximity to the richest areas of the central business district, Paris has a donut of deprived suburbs around a wealthy centre. With housing benefit cuts and changes to social housing, this structure will be rapidly replicated in London. Although given the scale of benefit cuts, those reliant on them in central London may need to move much further afield than the still-costly outskirts, and/or resort to deliberate overcrowding.

Minister of Decentralisation (surely one of the most oxymoronic titles ever) Greg Clark mentioned this in his recent speech to launch the government's White Paper on 'local growth'. He said:

'...even in the wealthiest areas, there remain significant pockets of unemployment and deprivation. Whatever the differences in economic performance between broadly defined parts of the country, the differences between different towns and neighbourhoods are also often great. Tower Hamlets, in the shadow of Canary Wharf, has three quarters of children growing up in low-income families.'

Mr Clark has successfully identified the problem of inequality, which has many complex economic & social causes, and without sustained and significant intervention perpetuates itself. However, he then veers into a character-assassination of Regional Development Agencies followed by a massive plug for their successors, the Local Enterprise Partnerships. Both RDAs and emerging LEPs focus on economic development, and I very much doubt that reducing poverty within areas the size of Tower Hamlets falls within their remit. Which is not to say that the government is doing nothing to tackle poverty in the shadow of Canary Wharf. The changes to benefits and social housing will move this poverty outside central London so that those working in the City won't have to look at it anymore.

You might wonder why London shouldn't become more like Paris. Unfortunately, confining poverty to the outskirts of the city hasn't always worked out well. The 2005 riots were centred on the poor suburbs of Paris, expressing frustration at high levels of unemployment, entrenched poverty, and racial tensions. That unrest had been simmering for decades before violence erupted. In London there will be huge internal migration of those in poverty over the next three years; the low-paid, unemployed, elderly, disabled and carers forced to uproot and resettle elsewhere. This will inevitably cause some tension, although historical comparison suggests that we have a much more sanguine approach to displeasure with the government on this side of the channel.

More seriously, the reason that housing benefit cuts will bite hardest in London is that it's disproportionately economically successful and lacking in housing supply, resulting in extremely high housing costs. The government's rhetoric is entirely focused on reducing the deficit, brushing aside the ideological questions at stake. Should the public sector subsidise people so that they can live in London, or let the market lock all except the highly paid out? What are the social benefits to communities with mixed levels of wealth; economic dynamism due to ease of recruiting for lower paid jobs, less wasted time and energy commuting, improved social cohesion as different groups mix? What are the disadvantages of London as it is; dissatisfaction stemming from the proximity of poverty and wealth, perceived unfairness of housing benefit, potential driving up of rents? Although replicating Paris' donut model would reduce housing benefit costs, would it increase public expenditure in other ways by moving people away from jobs, requiring greater spending on Job Seeker's Allowance and transport?

Have the government silently dropped their responsibility to try and alleviate poverty, or at least not make it worse? It really concerns me that they don't seem to be acknowledging any of these questions, let alone trying to answer them.

Strangely enough, given the choice I'd prefer to live in Paris than London. Not for any rational, statistically-supported reason - I just like it more.

The End is Nigh

This was not a cheerful way to start the working day:



On my desk I found the latest Inside Housing magazine announcing the death of social housing. The coalition's so-called reforms effectively end social renting as a tenure. Requiring new social tenants to pay 80% of market rents will result in one of two things:

Housing Benefit will have to increase to cover the much more expensive rents, increasing how much is spent on benefits in order to subsidise the provision of new social housing;

Or

Housing Benefit won't increase and will no longer be sufficient to cover social rents, ending the safety net for the vulnerable that social housing was meant to be.

I wonder which will happen? Here's a clue: the government is totally obsessed with reducing the housing benefit bill.

The National Housing Federation are saying that the level of new social rents will be so high that in places like Camden, Hackney and Haringey households would need to earn £54,000 to pay their social rent without housing benefit. David Cameron's defense of this is, '[Are] our constituents working hard to give benefits so people can live in homes they could not even dream of? I don't think that's fair.'

This welfare-scroungers rhetoric, seemingly taken straight from the Daily Mail, makes me incredibly angry. Cameron is ignoring the fact that the housing market is a disaster in this country, supply is inadequate, owned and rented housing is getting less and less affordable, and there is a particularly acute shortage of housing for the most vulnerable. That's why spending on housing benefit has increased. In London and the economically thriving parts of the South, private renting (let alone buying a house) is unaffordable for people on an average wage. It is a barefaced lie that only unemployed 'scroungers' need housing benefit and social housing. It is also a barefaced lie that social housing is in any way mansion-like.

Here are some facts from the government's own housing statistics.

• The percentage of households who own their home outright and have no
  members of the household working (57%) is comparable to that for social
  renters. This is because both contain a high proportion of the retired.
  
  
• 31% of social tenants are retired; only 21% are under 35. Younger people are far more likely to be in private rented accommodation.
  
  
• Social housing is more likely to be overcrowded than private rented or owner-occupied. (6.7% of social renters, 5.4% of private renters and 1.6% of owner-occupiers are overcrowded.) A third of all overcrowded households live in London.
  
  
• More than a quarter of all children in the social rented sector (25.7%) are living in overcrowded conditions, compared to 5.8% in the owner-occupied sector and 15% in the private rented sector.
  
  
• More than a third of social renters work: 24% are in full time work, 10% in part time work. Only 8.4% are unemployed.
  
  Let me reiterate that: eight per cent of social tenants are unemployed. Would you like to see the table I got that number from? Here it is. David Cameron, your claims about unemployed scroungers are simply not true.
  
  
• 24.5% of social tenants are economically inactive, meaning that they can't work and are not getting Job Seeker's Allowance. These would be the disabled, ill, and full-time carers.
  
  
• Not all social renters receive housing benefit at the moment - 59% to be exact.
  
  
• Households buying a house with a mortgage had an average income more than three times that of social renters (£47,500 and £14,800 per annum respectively). 65% social renters have incomes of less than £15,000 per year.

Does it seem like social renters are getting an unfairly good deal here? I think not.

Social housing is allocated to those that most need it - the elderly, disabled, young people who've run away from abusive families, homeless families with children. I'll tell you what's not fair, Cameron: dumping these people on the streets, shunting them between bed & breakfasts, or forcing them into overcrowded accommodation. You don't need me to tell you that this will trap people in poverty.

How can this government have the gall to use the word 'fair' as their mantra whilst callously kicking away the welfare safety net? They have decided that if you can't afford shelter you're just not trying hard enough, whether you're a child, disabled, ill, elderly, or just another victim of the recession. William Beveridge must be spinning in his grave.

Just Keep Moving

On Friday Iain Duncan Smith advised the unemployed to 'get on a bus' to find work. As well as being incredibly patronising, this talk of the 'flexible labour market' ignores both economic theory and observable reality.

For a start, there is no economic rule that there will ever be enough jobs for everyone. At the moment, jobseekers outnumber vacancies to an almost farcical degree in economically weaker areas of the country. In the area of Wales Iain was discussing in his speech, for instance, there are approximately nine unemployed people for every vacancy. Presumably Mr. Duncan Smith would suggest that all those unable to get a job either commute further or move out of Wales.

Helpfully, the government will be making both options much more expensive in coming months and years. The costs of road, rail and bus travel will all rise. Petrol prices are creeping up again, VAT hits 20% in January, and the fuel escalator kicks back in next year. Road pricing is back on the cards. Bus subsidies are being cut by 20%. Rail fares will rise by 3% plus the Retail Price Index (currently 4.6%) each of the next three years. In fact, it looks like the best option will indeed be to get on your bike, as Norman Tebbit so famously suggested. Unfortunately, cycling from Wales to London on a daily basis is scarcely practical.

Moving house to get a job, though, would be even harder. Housing benefit is being substantially cut, the affordable housing budget has been hung, drawn and quartered (post on this to follow), and those in social housing have a newly created massive disincentive to move. New social tenancies will be on a novel and deceptively named 'affordable rent' basis, constituting 80% of market rent. That might sound reasonable, but in London would result in rents tripling. In Cambridge, I gather social rent would double under the new terms. Existing tenancies will remain on the same terms as they were created. If moving house would inevitably result in a vast increase in your rent, it would take a very attractive job to get you packing.

As with all the policy currently being made, Iain Duncan Smith's approach is entirely predicated on reducing spending, in this case on welfare. The Department of Work and Pensions isn't trying to strengthen the economy, reduce regional inequality, tackle long-term unemployment, or improve business confidence. It is assumed that swiftly reducing the deficit will cause these things to magically occur all by themselves. A number of nobel prize winning economists are sceptical of this.

Crudely cutting benefits, especially housing benefit, isn't going to make the labour market more flexible or create jobs. Indeed, jobs will be rapidly lost as the cuts bite. Encouraging people to move, or indeed forcing them to, is useless when there aren't jobs available. In the UK, housing costs strongly correlate with job availability, as house building has failed to keep up with demand in successful areas. Cuts to housing benefit and the affordable housing budget will move the unemployed away from jobs. Further away than they can commute, even if travel costs weren't rising steeply.

There's another significant problem here, and it concerns the Big Society. If communities are to unite in order to provide their own public services, as the coalition expects, they will need to be stable and cohesive. Housing benefit cuts will force hundreds of thousands of people to move, causing huge social upheaval. What hope have unsettled and precarious communities of successfully running libraries, community centres, and schools?

High levels of spending on welfare are a symptom of a geographically unbalanced economy and hugely dysfunctional housing market. Coalition policy is ignoring these causes in favour of the idea that anyone without a job just isn't trying hard enough. Again, it's hard to reconcile this insistence on believing the worst of people with a sudden flowering of voluntary work and community enterprise. All I can conclude is the government doesn't understand that things are connected, things like jobs and housing and transport. I wouldn't have thought that was too complex an idea to grasp, but unfortunately the Diary of a Civil Servant confirms that it is.

Regression

Recently the Institute for Fiscal Studies has confirmed the intuitively obvious: the 2010 budget will be regressive. In other words, it will have a stronger negative impact on the poorer inhabitants of the UK.

As the IFS analysis points out, the government's budget impact assessments completely missed out £4.1 billion of the £11 billion cuts to welfare budgets, including the significant changes to Housing Benefit. Claims of a 'progressive' budget have been based on ignoring a large proportion of the policies within it. The coalition's defense of this claim continues to be based on the idea that cutting the deficit is progressive in and of itself, even if the effect of those cuts falls disproportionately on the poorest. I for one would query whether this is what 'progressive' actually means.

What particularly struck me in the IFS report is the contrast between pre-announced and budget policies. According to the IFS analysis, the coalition policies announced before the budget were geuinely progressive, taking most from the richest. These polices were basically tax-based; raising the income tax threshold, changes to national insurance, etc.



Compare that to the policies announced within the budget, including significant cuts to welfare budgets and an increase in the biggest regressive tax: VAT.



Look at that reversal. The implication is depressing but not surprising - all the nice policies were touted during the election and when the coalition was formed. Once the government was entrenched, they laid into the poor.

But is the effect regressive when all of the policies are taken into account - do they balance out?



In a manner of speaking they do. However, if you aren't a pensioner and don't have children, yes, the total effect of coalition tax and benefit policies is regressive. The largest proportional impact will fall on the poorest of this group. For families with children, the greatest impacts are shared between the richest and poorest. Pensioners at all income levels are effected relatively equally, as most of the changes pass them by.

Take a look at more detail of the impacts by household type.



The greatest negative impacts will fall on households reliant on benefits. This is consistent with the government's fuzzily-articulated aim to get people off benefits and into work. However the simplistic 'take away benefits and they'll work' approach is based on any number of fallacies, for instance that work is available, that claimants have the suitable skills for work that is available, and that it's appropriate for everyone to work. Why should a single parent work full-time? They'll just have to employ someone to care for their child(ren), which seems like a waste of money and time. Plus of course there are many with disabilities or illnesses that prevent them working.

You will note that the greatest loss of proportional income falls on households with no earners and children. I'd emphasise the word proportional; such households aren't going to have much of an income to start with. Losing 7% of it will be significant, not least in its effect on the children. It's ironic that a government claiming to be pro-family are in fact penalising people for breeding through the tax and welfare systems.

No-one gains from this budget, but to lose out least you'll need to be in a childless household of working age in the upper half of the income distribution. Which I am lucky enough to be, for the moment. (In case you're wondering where in the income distribution you are, try this tool.)

The IFS analysis is very useful, but what's more alarming is that it only models tax and benefit policies. This is reasonable, as modelling the effects of wider cuts to departmental budgets is nigh-impossible. It's important not to forget, though, that departmental budget cuts will also have a disproportionate impact on poorer households. Many don't have the option to 'go private' when public services reduce or disappear.

The 25% cuts apply to much that we take completely for granted: the police, fire service, environmental health, justice system, scientific research, flood defense, road maintenance, and public parks & nature reserves, for example. These are the kind of things people assume will be there when needed. That won't necessarily be the case.

No Comment

This afternoon I've had the interesting experience of emailing a friend to say 'You know that a press release has gone out saying your agency is being abolished, right?' As it turns out, it looks more to be reorganisation, with the term 'abolish' used merely for spin. Still, something of a sign of the times. I have friends working all over the public sector; in teaching, health, central government departments, government agencies and the army. I wonder how many of us will still be thus employed in two years time?

Two interesting links have surfaced today. Firstly, someone has worked out the effects of the housing benefit cuts, area by area. In Cambridge, the changes will result in a reduction of £25.32 per week. That's £113.94 less every month, an unmanageable sum for a pensioner, family on a low income or unemployed person to find elsewhere.

The Guardian continues to cover the story of housing benefits cuts, and the government's response continues to be scandalously offhand. The Department of Work and Pensions stated,

'What these reforms mean is that people receiving housing benefit may not be able to live in expensive city centres, but the same applies to most working families who do not receive benefit'.

That's a vast understatement. Currently most people are priced out of city centres; these reforms will price people receiving housing benefit out of the entire South-East of the country.

The other link is a somewhat surreal interview with Eric Pickles, minister for Communities and Local Government.

For your convenience, I have extracted Mr. Pickles' choice quotes below:

'This building was the Balkans until I arrived.'

'...if we let the system take over before we stop in any way, then the cigar-chomping Commies take over again. The cigar-chomping Commies are not going to take over on my watch.'

'Basically, I'm not mad keen on reports longer than two pages because after that most things are just word processing.'

'You cannot see things in shades of grey. Labour is wrong, the Lib Dems are wrong, we are right.'

'I see myself as a diamond geezer.'

This man is in control of a multibillion pound departmental budget, and the future of local government is in his hands. Words actually fail me.

Why does this government have a Housing Minister?

The June Budget announced a number of changes to Housing Benefit, aiming to save £1.8 billion from the £21 billion a year spent on it. Yes, that's twenty-one billion pounds every year, between 4.7 million claimants. Why so high, you might wonder. That would be because it rose with housing costs, which have vastly inflated in recent decades as supply fell further and further behind demand. To reduce this burden on the public purse, say the coalition, we will make these changes:

1. Capping Housing Benefit payments to £250 a week for a one-bedroom flat, £290 for a two bed, £340 for a three bed and £400 a week for a four-bedroom property. This is a maximum, not the amount that most people will get. For much of the UK, the caps are reasonable (at the moment anyway), but in almost all of London rents are far higher than that.
   
   
2. Changing the way that payments are calculated, using the lowest 30% of rents rather than 50% as is currently the case. This amounts to an absolute cut in Housing Benefit.
   
   
3. Adjusting Housing Benefit to inflation using the Consumer Price Index rather than the Retail Price Index. The difference - the former doesn't include housing costs, which have caused the Retail Price Index to be consistently higher. Levels of Housing Benefit will no longer have any connection to rises in actual rents.
   
   
4. Cutting Housing Benefit by 10% for people on Job Seekers Allowance for more than 12 months. Presumably to 'encourage' them to find employment.

The more that I think about these changes, the more outrageously regressive I find them. The reason that the government pays Housing Benefit is that in the UK we supposedly believe that shelter is a human right. The proposed reforms will cause Housing Benefit to trail further and further behind housing costs. It will no longer be a safety net. Homelessness is going to rise, and fast.

If people can't get into social housing, and Housing Benefit isn't sufficient for them to afford private rental, what are they supposed to do? Where are they supposed to go? In effect, those entitled to Housing Benefit (working on a low income, unemployed, retired, or unable to work) will be priced entirely out of the South-East of the United Kingdom.

I am not exaggerating. The Chartered Institute of Housing calculates that these reforms will price Housing Benefit claimants out of all private housing within a decade. They are so concerned that they've started a campaign against the changes.

The National Housing Federation calculates that just the proposal to cut Housing Benefit by 10% for people on Job Seeker's Allowance for more than a year will cause 202,000 people to face almost inevitable homelessness.

And what is the response to this from our Housing Minister, Grant Shapps?

I refer you to the excellent theyworkforyou.com, which keeps track of what our representatives in parliament are talking to each other about.

The Labour MP for Westminster asked Mr Shapps What discussions he has had with the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions on the effect on housing and levels of homelessness of the proposed reduction in housing benefit levels?

His response is that he has set up a cross-ministerial working group and has increased the existing discretionary fund to tackle homelessness.

That is a shockingly brief, offhand, weak, and ineffectual answer. It is clear that the Housing Minister has no conception of the disasterous effects that Housing Benefit reforms will have. Those on low incomes will be excluded from London and much of the South-East, effectively forced to migrate North-West, where lower employment and economic stagnation have kept house prices low. Keyworkers like nurses, carers and firefighters will be priced out of half the country.

Has there been any consultation on these changes? No.

Has the government conducted an assessment of the impacts? No. I can't find it, and I've got a lot of experience locating things on government websites. In any case, the month between election and budget was insufficient to properly examine the impacts of huge changes like this.

Undoubtedly the Housing Benefit system inherited by the coalition was in need of reform, to reduce costs and make it fairer. These reforms, however, will penalise the most vulnerable people in society, worsen poverty, and further entrench regional wealth disparities. They mark a return to Victorian notions of the undeserving poor, who are merely lazy rather than trapped by economic circumstances. The changes will increase the number of homeless people and drive others to crime in order to pay their rent.

4.7 million people are going to struggle to keep a roof over their heads. I am enraged that a Housing Minister who claims to be a long-term campaigner for the homeless is so unconcerned about this that he thinks setting up a working group is an adequate response.

Why does this government have a housing minister? I honestly don't know. At the moment the post looks like a complete waste of public money.