From the Revd Paul Nicolson
Sir, - Those of us who are highly critical of the Coalition's
welfare policies are fully aware of the seriousness of the disaster
that hit the UK in 2008. It is Iain Duncan Smith's moral arguments,
supported by Canon Angela Tilby (Comment, 22 March), that
have to be challenged.
The Zacchaeus 2000 Trust warned the Labour Government in 2005
that the increasing commitment, from 23 per cent to 72 per cent of
GDP since 1980, to house-purchase loans seemed unsustainable;
furthermore, the increasing flow of demand-side subsidies were
working to enrich landlords and land vendors, not to stimulate more
housing output. More money went into housing, and fewer houses came
out, for 30 years.
Mr Duncan Smith argues that is is unfair on homeless people for
impoverished tenants to have a spare bedroom; and that it is unfair
on taxpayers if high housing benefit is paid to poor tenants in
arrears where housing is expensive.
We argue that that is the wrong ethical polarity. The deep
unfairness is that landlords profited from rising rents, in a
housing market in short supply, and therefore from rising housing
benefit to £22 billion from the 1980s to the collapse in 2008. But
it is the poorest tenants who are paying a disproportionate price,
and private landlords nothing.
This is particularly true in London, where bankers with their
bonuses and overseas investors are buying second and third homes
and leaving them empty, while tenants' housing benefit is cut
because they have one or two empty bedrooms, or because they were
housed at those rents by the State while the housing market went
berserk around them.
Without any sign of a coherent affordable-housing policy for all
tenures, ownership and rented, it is likely to go berserk
again.
Most of the clergy do not pay rent or council tax. They should
be honest about how severe and unfair the welfare cuts are, which
use up those parts of the benefit system needed for food, fuel,
clothes, transport, and other necessities. They were never
generous, and were always kept very low, to discourage the moral
hazard of dependency. Housing-benefit caps are particularly
responsible.
It will get worse in April when the bedroom tax and the £500
overall benefit cap start to hit, and whatever income is left over
is expected to pay 8.5 per cent to 30 per cent of the council tax.
Food banks provide food for only three days, three times with
intervals.
PAUL NICOLSON
Taxpayers Against Poverty
93 Campbell Road
London N17 0BF