Here’s a topical rant for you! As some may be aware, the government scrapped the fair rent system for housing benefit and replaced it with Local Housing Allowance. The idea being that everyone could see how much housing benefit would be paid for private rented accommodation(as a maximum) depending on the area you lived and the number of bedrooms you needed. A simple, reasonably straightforward idea. . . . . And like all of these ideas, now messed around with!
NOW, at the moment, most single people under 25 years old are paid the ‘shared room’ allowance of around £50 per week in this area. This was to encourage young people to share houses and thus free up private rented accommodation for us older people! A bit of an odd idea but when you consider under 25′s can’t actually afford to maintain a tenancy on their basic benefit rate, you can kind of see some joined up thinking. However, as this can’t have been saving enough money, in January, this ‘shared room’ rate will apply to most UNDER 35′s. There are exceptions for disabled people, high risk offenders and people who have been in hostel accommodation or supported housing for 3 months. But, the impact is likely to be huge.
I am absolutely positive that the government has some reasoning for this other than ‘we need to save money’ but I’ve yet to find anything convincing! The actual effects are likely to be:-
- A number of people being made homeless as private landlords cannot afford to lose that much money.
- Local Authority homelessness departments being inundated at massive cost.
- Deprived areas becoming more deprived as overcrowding, crime and poverty become even more concentrated in particular areas.
- The demand on social housing becoming even more unmanageable.
All this in a climate where support services are being cut completely or severely underfunded. How this fits into the ‘Big Society’, I would love to know.
Bleak, sad and downright crazy (in my humble opinion)!!!
