A new study by the International Journal of Housing Policy has found that lowering the levels of Local Housing Allowance “resulted in a statistically significant increase in overcrowding”.

The study adds: “The changes to uprating, which meant that LHA rates no longer tracked with changes in rents, further exacerbated this effect.”

The 5% increase amounts to around 75,000 households in England.

The paper frames the issue around health and wellbeing, saying that the policy will have significant impact on the health of those now in overcrowded accommodation.

And adding Covid-19 into the mix, the findings suggest it is likely to be “linked with higher levels of infection.”

These changes to the LHA also had the effect of reducing the number of LHA claimants, so this analysis “likely underestimates the impact of the policy changes and misses a number of people living in poor housing without additional HB support,” the paper says.

The study also argues that the “effects of these policy changes will not have been felt equally.”

They will have “disproportionately affected single-parent families, households with dependent children, households that include a disabled person or people, women-headed households, racially marginalised households”.

In conclusion, the paper summarises: “In the English context, these findings support calls to increase the LHA back to the 50^th percentile⁴, and to uprate in line with rents. While this is in conflict with the apparent desire among policy makers to reduce government spending, three considerations should be acknowledged.

“Firstly, it should be recognised that the increase in HB spend over time reflects decisions by policy makers, such as the shrinking of the social rented sector, that have led to the increase in people living in the PRS and increasing rents, rather than the excessive spending of HB recipients (Powell, 2015).

“Secondly, many interventions made on the basis of ‘improving’ access to owner occupation have, at great cost, inflated housing prices and made accessing ownership more difficult for renters (e.g., Shelter, 2015) benefitting large housebuilders (Jolly, 2019) and those already in owner-occupation (Birch, 2021; Chapman, 2021).

“Given these impacts, perhaps policy makers should look beyond support for renters to interventions in the owner-occupied market for housing spending reductions.

“Finally, reducing spending on HB will likely have led to increases in spending elsewhere, particularly health, because of the negative consequences including overcrowding.

“Making housing more affordable through LHA will have benefits in the short-term, enabling recipients to access more appropriate housing and reducing the health and social consequences associated with overcrowding, while moving towards a more sustainable housing policy should be a longer-term goal.

“In the broader context, these findings add to the extensive evidence of the centrality of housing and housing policy to people’s well-being and should also serve as a warning to governments looking to cut spending by reducing housing support.”

You can read the full paper here.