Councils and housing associations should define affordability together
If you work for a local authority or housing association, does it know whether its rents are affordable to those on low incomes, and if so how has it worked this out? Does it do its own assessment, or just rely on government guidelines? How will this change in future and what are the implications […]
Five ways low wage-earners are being banished from central London
London is getting less and less like the rest of the country. Elsewhere houses prices have struggled to reach 2007 levels, but in the capital they’ve already grown by more than a fifth. The price of a one-bedroom home in London would secure a three- or even four-bedroom house almost anywhere else. Because of its […]
What would a serious attempt to tackle under-occupation look like?
One of the government’s preferred names for the bedroom tax is the ‘under-occupancy penalty’. Yet the penalty only applies to under-occupation in social housing, while we know that the country needs to make much better use of its limited housing stock overall. Since the bedroom tax was introduced, it’s been clear that it is causing […]
Government plans will draw more people into welfare system
John Perry and Steve Wilcox A little-noticed effect of the government’s universal credit scheme is that it draws more people into the benefit system.
Against the Bedroom Tax
From 1 April something like 660,000 people who have spare bedrooms are going to be taxed if they don’t take in a lodger or move to a smaller house. This might sound like a selflessly even-handed if drastic move on the part of the welfare minister Lord Freud, given that his own house has eight bedrooms, […]
Cameron’s benefit blunder
The PM wants to put age restrictions on housing benefit. But if young people are penalised for moving out of their parents’ home, and the only jobs available are low-paid ones in high-rent areas, what can they do?
Ignoring the facts
Last week John Humphrys was seconded from the Today programme to present The Future State of Welfare on BBC2. He wrote a piece for the Daily Mail to promote the programme: ‘Our Shameless Society – How our welfare system has created an age of entitlement.’ Returning to his birthplace – Splott, in Cardiff – Humphrys […]
John Perry lives in Masaya, Nicaragua where he works on