NextDoor is an advice line and casework service for households effected by reductions to thier housing benefit. Last week we were very pleased to be mentioned in a front page story of the Guardian. It highlighted the number of families in Westminster to be affected by the policy and schools that are now likely to close as children are forced from the area.
Dear all, The following two letters are published by The Guardian this morning. The first letter expresses my experience of OCCUPY exactly. The first text I quote is from the first five verses of the 5th chapter of St James’s epistle; not the first five verses of the epistle. My slip not The Guardian’s. With my very best wishes for Christmas and 2012; and thanks for everything in 2011. Paul
Please sign our e-petition on http://epetitions.direct.gov.uk/petitions/25438
Stop the housing benefit and universal credit caps.
St Paul’s and the right to protest • guardian.co.uk, Tuesday 20th December 2011
How I wish I could have been called as a witness for the defendants in the St Paul’s protest camp prosecution (Bid to evict St Paul’s protest camp begins at high court, 19 December). I am an 80-year-old lady from a quiet rural area, who visited the protest camp on a recent visit toLondon and was struck by the order, cleanliness and safety of the camp; and the courtesy, kindness and willingness of the protesters to explain to visitors their reasons for being there. As a result of various discussions with marvellously friendly young people, I was won over, with a far better understanding than I had from the media coverage of why they wanted to continue to demonstrate. I noticed several country vicars also there in quiet conversations with the protesters. And I felt safer there that night than in any other street in London. So for me, and others visiting, the impact of the camp has been positive, and not detrimental, and I would think completely in keeping with the guarantees for freedom of expression and association laid down in the Human Rights Act.
Margie Baron Owen Salisbury, Wiltshire
Events at St Paul’s echo events in Sheffield in the 1840s when the Chartists marched on the parish church demanding that the vicar preach on the first five verses of St James’s epistle which begin “Go to now ye rich men, weep and howl for your miseries shall come upon you … Your gold and silver is cankered; and the rust of them shall be a witness against you.” The clergy preferred Proverbs 24: “My son, fear thou the Lord and King, and meddle not with them that are given to change.” There were no seats for the poor of Sheffield because all the pews were rented, so they were thrown out promising to come back the following Sunday; then they were arrested by the police to appear before the magistrates, who were the vicar and church wardens.
Rev Paul Nicolson Chair, Zacchaeus 2000 Trust
The following statement will be sent to Peers considering the Welfare Reform Bill. Please sign it below no later than the 7th of January. Alternatively if you are an NGO and would like to add your name, inform us at benjenkins@z2k.org.
To Peers considering the Welfare Reform Bill.
A statement opposing benefit caps in London.
2012 and 2013 will be two of the unhappiest New Years ever experienced by many of the poorest citizens of the richest parts of London. Even under normal circumstances moving house can be traumatic. Nevertheless the government’s Welfare Reform Bill will force people to move house by making their accommodation unaffordable and putting them into rent arrears, which will in turn generate severe stress and mental health difficulties. It started with the housing benefit caps, which will be taking effect from the 1st of January 2012, and is repeated in the second wave of distress to be caused by the cap on the Universal Credit beginning in 2013.
It is our view that it is impossible to implement the UC cap in London without damaging the health and wellbeing of individuals, parents and their children, and should not therefore be implemented in London.
We ask Peers, and other comfortable tax payers, to consider where the unfairness lies, in their pockets or in the resulting ill health and misery of the victims of these policies. London Councils have estimated that 133,000 households in London will suffer an average loss of £105 a week if the planned cap on the Universal Credit goes ahead alongside the current housing benefit changes. The government has also estimated that 670,000 families will lose on average £676 a year if the planned reductions in benefit for under-occupying go ahead. But research from the National Housing Federation suggests a household under-occupying a three-bedroom home in London faces losing up to £1,385 a year. In the north west a family in a three-bed could lose up to £854 a year. It is unlikely there are enough one bedroom properties to take these tenants, this will also lead to evictions.
The Government Office for Science recognises the relationship between debt and mental illness. On top of that other researchers at the London School of Economics have found a clear link between anxiety and depression among parents and an increased chance of the children being ill and having a high temperature. The research helped in "understanding the biological impact of multiple sources of chronic stress in families on specific immune functions in a sample of generally healthy children", the team wrote in the Journal of Brain Behaviour and Immunity.
Schools in Westminster and Kensington have successfully spent tax payers money on services to parents and children who have been excluded from society and education by the cruel misfortune of being born poor. These families have made real progress and their children have begun to accept the education so vital to their lifelong wellbeing. They are about to be forcibly uprooted from friends, family and therapeutic services, and forced into the trauma of entry into a new, possibly unwelcoming, community and school.
The madness of this policy is illustrated in Waltham Forest where the council is coping with the influx of families from Westminster and Kensington, who were advised to get moving before the axe falls. Landlords are increasing their rents because of the increased demand, some times higher than the caps. The council’s own deprived families are being shunted out of London altogether to Luton, where the council has made a deal with private landlords.
Comfortable taxpayers should not be taken in by talk of transitional arrangements; the temporary discretionary housing payments do not mend broken lives. Nor should they countenance the government’s naïve suggestion that landlords will lower their rents to meet the caps where there is a healthy demand for rented accommodation. They are in fact increasing their rents where they are lower than the caps thus increasing the cost of housing benefit to the tax payer. Caps will only act as rent controls where landlords have no alternative, non-housing benefit market within which increase them. This is simply not true of most Inner and many Outer London boroughs where accommodation is in such high demand that working individuals will pay extortionate prices, even if this limits the amount of money they have to spend on other items such as a healthy diet.
The Welfare Reform Bill is being discussed by Peers in January. We call on you to prevent the mass changing of locks by bailiffs as tenants are evicted to an uncertain future; to abolish the cap on the Universal Credit; to call for a reform of the Housing Benefit Regulations; and to insist on the creation of a policy for affordable housing in all tenures which will improve the wellbeing and security of every one of London’s citizens.
Tariq Abu Rahma,
please help us from this resolution useless humanity
xxxxxxxx,
I am totally opposed benefit cuts and agree with the petition.We need representation in parliament to put our case.
Yesterday we held an event in conjunction with 4in10 (a Save the Children initiative which campaigns to reduce London poverty) exploring the effects of reductions to Housing Benefits on London. Speaking at the event were Camila Batmanghelidjh, of Kids Company, Karen Buck MP, Jenny Jones AM, the Green Party’s mayoral candidate, Nigel Minto, of London Councils, and our own Joanna Kennedy.
(Camila Batmanghelidjh, Karen Buck MP, Romin Sutherland [Z2K's Housing Benefit Expert], Jenny Jones AM, Joanna Kennedy)
(Jenny Jones AM, Rev. Paul Nicolson [our Chairman], Camila Batmanghelidjh)
As announced in today’s Guardian, Z2K are launching a dedicated advice line and casework service, NextDoor, that will help people forced to migrate to and settle in more affordable areas.
The event was extremely well attended by a number of people from Local Government and the Third Sector. While the atmosphere was glum, given the likely negative effects these policies will have on vulnerable people in London, in the discussion groups a number of positive potential policies were formulated.
UPDATE
Dave Hill has written about the event on his blog. On it he transcribed a section of Camilla’s speech:
There are many young people who have had to flee their family home from a very young age, and they are prematurely living independently – on their own, without family support. What is very, very important is to understand the implication of this cap in relation to some of those young people.
The truth is that a six-foot boy without a job, without prospects of employment is going to find it very hard to rent a room in a house. Very few people are going to rent their space to such a young person – male or female. They will be worried about whether the person can sustain the bills, what kind of entourage of friends the person is likely to have and bring into the house. And those are legitimate anxieties in the context of some of the challenges that our young people are enduring at street level.
I suspect that we are going to be at the edge of an enormously risky situation, as more and more vulnerable young people aren’t going to be able to rent places to live, or find accommodation. I think it is imperative for government to wake up to the special needs of lone young people. I think the riots of the summer, whatever narrative you put on it, whether you blame the police or anyone else, were profoundly about revenge – about young people’s revenge about society, because they felt so powerless and so not thought about.
Moving forward, I think these caps run the risk of leaving out yet again the special needs of vulnerable young people…they present [themselves for help] with great bravado, and they survive by appearing tough, but fundamentally they are some of the most sensitive individuals in our community, enduring a period of flux both economic and emotional, often on their own, and who do deserve out support.
Our Chairman, Paul Nicolson, had the following letter published in the times this morning. It has long been argued that the Billions paid in housing benefit each year would have been better spent increasing the supply of housing and keeping it affordable for all.
Sir, It is unfair, says Anushka Asthana, (“Clegg is on the wrong side of the fairness divide”, Opinion Dec 2) that the rent of a council house is £440 a week and the rent charged by a private landlord is £750 a week for a similar house next door. It certainly is but the private tenants’ indignation should be aimed at landlords, who have been the beneficiaries of billions of pound of their taxes in housing benefit every year since lending was deregulated in the 1980s, rising to £21 billion last year. It is not the welfare system which is to blame but the governments who allowed that flood of lending to push up prices and rents, and housing benefit, in a housing market in short supply. There has been, and there remains, no coherent housing policy to keep rents and prices under control to provide all tenures with affordable housing.
Mrs Ali was introduced to us by an Outreach Worker from one of Westminster’s Children’s Centres. An Egyptian refugee with 5 children, Mrs Ali’s husband abandoned the family in May before returning in August, becoming violent and subsequently being prevented from harassing the family by court order. Unknown to Mrs Ali, when she informed the Housing Benefit Department that her husband was no longer at the property she had to make a new claim, for which the new housing benefit caps applied (£400 a week maximum). Having signed a tenancy with her husband in February (before the caps), Mrs Ali suddenly found herself with a shortfall of £395 a week and no other option but to present her and her family as homeless. Continue reading
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Zacchaeus 2000 Trust (Z2K) is a small charity based in Westminster that assists vulnerable debtors and victims of mistakes and/or oppressive enforcement by the welfare and justice systems. We work to support those in extreme poverty and help them negotiate the court system and government bureaucracies. We pursue test cases through the courts and we lobby Parliament and other statutory bodies when the law and government practice is unfair or oppressive. Continue reading
We at Z2K have joined many others in repeatedly condemning the coalition’s moves to uprate benefits by the less generous Consumer Price Index as opposed to the Retail Price Index. As the CPI includes housing costs, such as mortgage payments and council tax, which do not rise as fast the things included in the RPI, such as food, clothes and fuel. Further the rents, which are included in the RPI, will rise faster than CPI but Local Housing Allowance is set to be uprated by CPI. All this paints a bleak picture for those in and out of work in receipt of benefits.
The Retail Price Index is by no means perfect as it included non-essential items which inflate in price slowly, but the switch to CPI exacerbates the problem. This has been shown again today by the Institute of Fiscal Studies who have predicted that the switch will more than offset any benefits that could be provided by the Universal Credit. They also found that the forecast for child poverty in 2020 is 23% when the statutory target is 10%.
Last year a volunteer of ours received just over £200 in Housing Benefit overpayments over the space of a few weeks. As is quite understandable he assumed the Local Authority would have gotten their calculations correct, having supplied all the correct information to them and did not realise there had been any overpayment. He used this money to meet housing costs, and so when the error was noticed could not immediately repay the money.
A tribunal recently ruled in this case that the burden to identify such mistakes falls with the claimant – not the Authority or landlord. Z2K is concerned that Housing Benefit rules seem to expect even seriously ill, debilitated or otherwise vulnerable claimants to understand benefit calculations which Local Authorities, who should be the experts, do get wrong. Indeed the council fully admitted they had made an error in this case.
Judges themselves have previously identified housing benefit cases as problematic. In a Housing Benefit case, Gargett v Lambeth London Borough Council [2008] which went to the Court of Appeal, Lord Justice Wall considered:
In my view it remains an apparently non-eradicable blemish on our operation of the rule of law that the poorest and most disadvantaged in our society remain subject to regulations which are complex, obscure and, to many, simply incomprehensible.
Z2K will be appealing this decision.
If you have been affected by Housing Benefit Overpayments get in touch to see if we can help:
admin@z2K.org, 0207 259 0801