Just when you thought that things can’t get worse, the screw is turned further.   According to the official National Housing Federation, the cuts in housing benefit which slasher Osborne announced in his Budget and which DWP are now about to launch will force over 750,000 people out of their homes, increasing 5-fold the 140,000 persons currently classified as homeless in Britain.   What is going to happen to soaring hundreds of thousands of additional rough sleepers when local authorities, facing 25-30% cuts like central Departments, only have a statutory duty to house people in ‘priority need’? The Tory rationale for the unprecedented £1.8bn cut in housing benefit is that it will force claimants to transfer to smaller homes and will help to bring down rents.   This is the most draconian Tory measure yet, picking on the literally homeless and poorest to pay for the reckless destructiveness of the economy by the bankers and the richest – a greater upending of justice one could ever find.

By deciding that housing benefit should be pegged to the bottom third of rents in any borough, the Tories almost by definition are making homelessness inveitable.   Moreover, by fixing a cap on housing benefit in London for a 4-bedroom property at £400 a week and £250 a week for a 2-bedroom house, Osborne will make it very difficult, if not impossible, to find homes that the poorest can afford.   To make matters worse, Osborne is also now uprating housing benefit each year in line with retail prices rather than by the average rental increases in the neighbourhood.   And the unemployed will be particularly targeted since JSA claimants will see their housing benefit fall by 10% if they’re out of work for more than a year.

All told, this is a monumental disaster when house-building is now this year at its lowest ebb since 1923.   The small increase in affordable housing budgeted for at the tail-end of the Labour Government has now been scrubbed out, and we are back to the derisory levels of Council housebuilding that shamed the latter part of the Blairite era – just 100-300 a year (when even Thatcher in her last year in 1989-90 produced 13,000).

And what makes this inexcusably short-sighted and brutal is that house-building offers the most beneficial triple whammy imaginable in a recession.   It provides houses or flats which people desperately need when there are nearly 2 millions on Council waiting lists.   It keeps building workers, and all the associated trades, at work paying taxes rather than out of work and dependent on benefits.   And it improves economic efficiency by increasing flexibility in the labour market.   Only the ideological rigidity of the politicians – in favour exclusively of the private sector and of home ownership rather than renting – stands in the way.

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