Mark Isherwood
Shadow Housing Minister Mark Isherwood AM has criticised the Welsh Government and some local authorities for ignoring UK Government guidance relating to groups exempt from the removal of the Spare Room Subsidy.
Speaking in this week’s Assembly Short Debate on ‘Managing Welfare Reform – How local councils are using discretionary housing payments to mitigate the impact of changes to housing benefit’, Mr Isherwood said delayed action by the Welsh Labour Government and some local authorities throughout Wales has led to many vulnerable people being “clobbered”.
He said: “When Labour introduced what they now call the bedroom tax in the private sector in April 2008, the then UK Government said:
‘The new system comprises a flat-rate benefit according to household size and location and a presumption of direct payment of the benefit to the claimant.’
“The UK Government has standardised that across the sector under Universal Credit. Guidance was first issued in March 2011 and then in July 2012 to every local authority and, of course, to Welsh Government as well. However, it appears that they ignored that guidance, which said, among other things, that disabled people in adapted accommodation or who were reliant on a local support network should be prioritised for Discretionary Housing Payments, starting two years before the changes came into effect. Local authorities knew that.
“Some housing associations had face-to-face meetings with up to 95% of their tenants before that, but many local authorities did not even write to their tenants until the December or January beforehand. Of course, the most vulnerable did not understand what the letters were about and ended up being clobbered.
“Therefore, all of those exempt groups—the elderly, foster carers, carers, disabled people, severely disabled children, the armed forces and bereaved families—were, in some cases, clobbered, and too many disabled people were clobbered because local authorities did not exercise the discretionary powers handed to them by central Government to assess eligibility, according to the priority groups identified in the guidance.”
The UK Government significantly increased the amount of money available to local authorities for Discretionary Housing Payments, to be applied locally in mitigating the removal of the spare-room subsidy. These funds are demand led and are clawed back if they are not spent at the end of the financial year. Despite many stories of severe hardship from tenants, however, a Monitoring Report issued by the Welsh Government for the period from April 2013 to September 2013 showed that, halfway through the financial year, only three out of 22 local authorities had spent more than half of their annual discretionary housing payment budget.
