Opinion: What are the likely unintended consequences of the government's disability cuts for the housing sector?

By Rob Gershon, council tenant, full-time carer and HQN associate

The brief spark of hope for any meaningful change of approach to issues affecting social housing tenants, and the sector professionals whose salaries they pay, after July 2024’s general election was swiftly snuffed out by the new government’s announcement of a £22 billion “black hole” in the UK’s finances.

Since then, the prime minister, the chancellor, and the secretaries of state for housing and the Department for Work and Pensions have refused to enact many of the promises they made before the election – to tax non-doms, make things fairer across the economy and address things like inequality, housing and energy costs, and child poverty. Instead, through its cuts, the Labour Party is slowly failing exactly the same people the Tories let down for the previous 14 years.

With hapless ministers like Torsten Bell and Darren Jones fouling up media appearances that make it clear they don’t understand the cuts they support, and the DWPs’ own impact assessment admitting that the changes to personal independence payments (PIPs) will push an additional 300,000 people into poverty, the similarities between this and the previous government feel stark and obvious.

Charities, think tanks and other organisations – not from the housing sector, of course – have mounted a spirited defence of the facts combined with a mix of chastisement and information-bombing of MPs, some of whom used to work in the organisations now explaining what the effect of the cuts will be but who have apparently lost their memories and their consciences in their transition to politician.

At present, it feels like social landlords and their various representative bodies are sitting quietly and hoping nobody notices that they are probably a big part of the reason for the ‘ballooning’ social security budget that MPs (who should know better) keep claiming is unsustainable.

The housing sector’s response to 14 years of cuts and diminutions under the coalition and then Conservative governments was to accommodate rather than challenge policies that had a direct bearing on tenants. The bedroom tax, the benefit cap, cuts to employment and support allowance, tax cuts for people who work on housing association executive teams and boards, and a hardening of conditionality for ‘welfare’ all had a negative effect on tenants.

Hardly an annual report or Tenant Satisfaction Measures announcement goes by without landlords making it clear that they are behind the rise in people claiming sickness or disability benefits. Framed as helping people to claim what they are entitled to – which is true – figures in the millions and tens of millions are proudly proclaimed to be helping tenants, when realistically it’s a way of ensuring the rent gets paid.

It is clear that making fewer people eligible for PIP – and other elements of universal credit for people who need support – will mean that many people who didn’t qualify for local authority funding for care costs previously will suddenly become eligible for many thousands of pounds if this paltry income is reduced or removed.

What might be less obvious is that many of these same people are already bridging the shortfall between their rents and the amount of housing support they get to pay for them. While PIP isn’t technically counted as income for calculating eligibility for a discretionary housing payment, many households who aren’t eligible for, or perhaps voluntarily not claiming, housing benefits will need to do so when their incomes are drastically cut.

The previous government shared the current government’s view that the bank accounts of the poorest should be spied upon to make sure that benefits intended for sickness and disability are being spent correctly, but no assessment has been done of what this means or on what scale disabled people, their families and carers are already making decisions about what qualifies in these abstract categories.

Does paying rent, or putting the heating on for people who aren’t as mobile, or covering any number of costs that can’t easily be categorised as disability aids and adaptations or support, count as things that rich MPs think people shouldn’t be entitled to? It looks like we’re about to find out. With the crucial support families need being withdrawn by these frankly spiteful cuts, many factors policymakers haven’t considered will come into play, with rent arrears, potential homelessness, the inability to pay or retain carers, and the subsequent economic effects of all that set to unleash the kind of ‘unintended consequences’ that even Slasher Osborne wouldn’t countenance.

In its desire to reward the unearned wealth of millionaires and billionaires, the government is coming again to take from those least able to afford it. The measures the housing sector previously put in place to mitigate cuts are about to be removed for many thousands of tenants, and the sector is running out of time to come up with a plan for how it will accommodate the wider, deeper poverty that many hundreds of thousands of tenants are about to be pushed into.

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J Sanders

1 year ago

When the Labour Party came in to being it was to support and promote the needs of the working classes. To become a MP and represent the Party in Parliament you had to renounce your title and all its rights – No sir this and dame that. It seems the Labour Party has indeed turned its back on those it was set up to protect.
Whilst I understand there is a deficit that needs to be reduced why go after those who need it most. There are claimants who are milking the system and stealing from the country so why not increase penalties for these people. Add more staff to the benefit fraud section, increase their powers to rake back what was stolen up to and including sending in bailiffs to sell off anything worthwhile to make back some of the lost money, reducing National health benefits to these people and holding them to a basic state pension but make them pay the full stamp. Increase training to assessment and fraud staff so they are aware of the signs of illicit claims. Stop paying asylum seekers and giving them full benefit rights until they have worked and paid at least a year’s tax and NI stamp. This is harsh I know but it may cut down on those trying to get into the country for the “milk and honey” lifestyle we apparently have without contributing anything towards it.
Finally reduce the gap between the haves and have nots by increasing taxes on luxuries like fancy cars and large houses (especially when there are two people in a 6 bed or more mansion), yes they have worked for their money and wealth but they also have a social responsibility to help others.
I believed that energy poverty, food kitchens, going hungry and having to choose between eating, or paying the rent was something from the pre or post war era (when rationing was the norm). By privatising out energy grid the Conservatives basically handed a economical weapon to other countries and abrogated Parliaments right to protect the people. Trump and Putin have proved that wars are not just fought with armies but also on economic fronts and ours are pitifully weak. This country cannot feed the population it has without imports, it cannot generate enough power without external input and its industrial base has been robbed and whittled away to almost nothing by foreign “investors” and banks. We are fast becoming a third world country and nothing is being done to stop it.

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Opinion: What are the likely unintended consequences of the government’s disability cuts for the housing sector?

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