Yesterday both Yvette Cooper and I were campaigning in South Shields. I was in Whitburn knocking on doors in Myrtle Avenue, Adolphus Street and Shearwater with Karen Allen, our locally born South Shields candidate. Yvette was in town for a flying visit and critical of the spare homes subsidy policy changes. She wants to call a taxpayer subsidy a tax - but seeing as she is married to Ed Balls I am not going to expect wise financial understanding from team Balls.
However, this is exactly the same policy change as was in the Labour party manifesto, [and as set out by James Purnell, the former Labour Work and Pensions Minister before 2010], which promised to reform housing benefit to ensure that people on benefits do not end up getting subsidies for rented accomodation that those who work could never afford to live in. Thus, all political parties accepted at the last election that this was an issue that had to be tackled. Like lots of our countries problems the reality is that this government is the one that has to take the hard decisions.
There are 12,000 people on the social housing waiting list in Northumberland, including several thousand in my constituency. We also have many homes occupied by social housing tenants where the present tenant is living in a home with more bedrooms than the present occupant needs.
Housing benefit costs the UK taxpayer £23 Billion. It used to be £11 Billion barely 12 years ago. All of this has to come out of working people's taxes.
Its cost has risen self evidently by over 100% in the last 10 years.
Our welfare bill in this country is also simply unsustainable.
The Coalition are trying to address this problem.
What to do?
Clearly we should tackle the need for social housing by building more 1 bed and 2 bed social housing bungalows and flats. This we are doing both locally and nationally. I can point to a large number of great projects locally - Trinity Court in Corbridge is but one that ISOS is opening soon.
But this will not be enough. We need to move people to homes that the state will continue to provide, but free up housing stock for people who need 2, 3 or 4 bed homes. I have local people who have been on waiting lists for well over 5 years.
There is a very large pot of money available to ensure that those who either cannot move or cannot afford to pay the difference can do so.
Yvette is thus criticising a policy she campaigned upon at the last election to introduce.
Yvette also fails to want to cut welfare in any way which is disappointing.
