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Welfare cuts: taking Mr Duncan Smith and Canon Tilby to task

by
28 March 2013

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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

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