Councils’ problems in finding accommodation for their homeless are as nothing compared with the difficulties of the tenants

Sir, That Newham Council is trying to export homeless tenants to a housing association in Stoke-on-Trent because of the coalition’s benefit caps and cuts is nothing compared with the problems faced by the tenants themselves (report, thetimes.co.uk).

The cases we are helping in Westminster include a family whose 10-year-old son has a terminal brain tumour, a 10-month-old boy who is receiving 24-hour support from social services because neither parent is able to care for him, and a mother, diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia, who has two young children, both with learning difficulties. Only one of these cases received the much heralded discretionary housing payments, which run out leaving powerless and vulnerable tenants in unmanageable debt.

Other families are deliberately overcrowding rooms to fit the rent to the cap. The stress involved increases the demands on the health and education services, the costs of which are never taken into account by the Treasury.

The Rev Paul Nicolson
Chair, Zacchaeus 2000 Trust

Z2K has pledged support to a manifesto for a family friendly London along with a coalition of charities. To campaign for this an event has been organised for families to share thier concerns with members of the mayoral teams.

You’ll have your say, then hear about how candidates plan to improve access to childcare, housing, advice services, and flexible jobs – to help make up your mind before election day. Professionals who work with families also welcome.
Refreshments and childcare provided, just let us know when you register to attend.

It will be held from 5pm to 6pm on the 1st May at the Cardinal Hume Centre (Family Services entrance), Medway Street, London. SW1P 2BG.

Register online at www.familyfriendlylondon.org.uk

The following letter was published in the Guardian last week:

The Riots Communities and Victims Panel calls poverty a key factor that can lead to a person’s involvement in crime. The panel recommends that efforts are made to improve young people’s resistance to the peer pressure that leads them astray. That does not get to the bottom of the problem. Nowhere in the report is there any mention of the actual level of weekly income at which young people live in poverty.

A single unemployed parent has to live on a shrinking jobseeker’s allowance of £67.50 a week, or £53.45 for those aged 18-25, or on the national minimum wage, a poverty wage in London that is also shrinking. The word “debt”, and its debilitating effects on parents and children in poverty, never appears in the report. It damages nutrition, an essential ingredient of healthy babies and a good education, which is likewise ignored. Blaming the schools misses the target. Parliament needs to wake up to the fact that the current system of social security is not fit for purpose.

There will continue to be impoverished young people who, because survival and inequality are massive issues in this very expensive economy, will turn to crime.
Rev Paul Nicolson

The Pro-Housing Alliance have started publishing weekly articles housing policy as part of thier campaign for increased housing supply. Read the latest contribution, from our chairman Paul, here.

We would be very grateful if you will join our Chairman, Rev Paul Nicolson, at the vigil outside the House of Lords from 1 – 3pm tomorrow Monday 23^rd , Wednesday 25^th and Tuesday 31^st January, the days the Welfare Reform Bill is being debated in the House of Lords. Read about previous actions here. 

On Monday the 23^rd January, we ask you to take serious consideration of two amendments to the Welfare Reform Bill which are vital to the mental wellbeing of the poorest citizens of the UK because they provide safeguards against the damage done to mental health when debts are enforced against poverty incomes.   The Royal College of Psychiatrists, Mind, the major Christian Churches, CAB and Liberty are among the 20 NGOs supporting;

1. Lord Ramsbotham’s Amendment 62A, which will ensure that Jobcentre and local authority officials do not punish welfare claimants with sanctions and penalties,  nor enforce overpayments made in error by officials, when they know there is good reason not to, by requiring officials to examine the facts and circumstances of each case,

1. Baroness Hollins’s Amendment 62ZC, which will retain the current legal prohibition on enforcing overpayments of welfare against claimants which are made in error by officials.

The Department of Work and Pensions has been advised by the Royal College of Psychiatrists that poverty is trigger factor for poor mental health, a factor in maintaining poor health and part of the experience of many with poor mental health. We know from our experience of serving welfare claimants in debt to the State how seriously depressed they are: and it hurts their families too.

Welfare incomes are already set at poverty levels to act as an incentive to look for work; but the Welfare Reform Bill,  coupled with cuts and caps on one hand and rising prices of food and fuel on the other, is creating debts without the necessary safeguards for welfare claimants or poor people in work. The Centre for Mental Health has shown that mental health problems already cost the economy in England £105 billion in 2010/11; the debts this Bill will create will increase that cost.

This comes at a time when the Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Bill will remove access to legal aid for those on low incomes. When access to basic justice through the courts is being removed it is all the more vital that mistakes are not made by officials to begin with.

It is the landlords who profited from the £billions paid in housing benefit every year; now we learn that £100 billion of UK property has been placed in offshore accounts beyond the reach of the taxman.

It is not fair on welfare claimants that they are bearing the heat and the burden of deficit reduction and welfare reform with cuts and caps, forcing them into unmanageable debt, while the landlords get off Scott free.

Fairness to tax payers matters but there is no balancing mantra from government or opposition regularly repeating the unfairness to welfare claimants.

Landlords have exploited both the market and the tax payer by increasing their rents in a housing market in short supply and receiving more and more housing benefit.

The mantra pouring out of the Department of Work and Pensions repeats it is unfair to taxpayers if welfare claimants are placed in expensive properties by local authorities with housing benefit paying the rent, which hard working tax payers could not dream about living in.

That is nothing compared to the unfairness to the tax payer and welfare claimants of tax the free palaces of the landlords that none of us can dream of living in.

The Bishops are right to oppose the cap on the Universal Credit in the Welfare Reform Bill.

Please sign our e-petition on

http://epetitions.direct.gov.uk/petitions/25438

Stop the housing benefit and universal credit caps.