Prime Minister you will kill more women

Theresa May set up the VAWG department at the Home Office which says that two women each week die from domestic violence and abuse.

Theresa May also gets the job done, doesn’t beat around the bush and tells it straight we are told.

Good.

So its time social landlords and all other operators of all forms of supported housing stopped fawning, forelock tugging, and tell Theresa May straight that the LHA maxima cap will close every domestic violence and abuse refuge, every single homeless hostel, and almost every sheltered housing scheme.

Prime Minister in 2011 you created the Violence Against Women & Girls or VAWG department at the Home Office and you rightly care for the issue as should every human being, feminist or not, and so I will keep this to DV refuges to explain as simply as possible why the LHA maxima cap WILL kill more women.

The same personnel who came up with the LHA maxima cap – limiting housing benefit in all forms of supported housing to the local housing allowance cap  – have known that en masse closure would inevitably follow for years so the impacts of this latest LHA maxima cap is not new.

Five years ago Prime Minister, coincidentally just when you were setting up VAWG at the Home Office, the coalition proposed the LHA maxima cap limit and two better variants of LHA cap plus £20 per week and LHA cap plus £40 per week making three options in all … and then hastily buried these proposals as they were told these would kill off supported and sheltered housing and all DV refuges.

Command Paper 8152 of July 2011 received such heavy criticism and full detail of its inevitable closure impacts by response that the coalition government did not even release a consultation response; they hastily dropped it.

Amongst those who proposed the July 2011 consultation was Lord Freud – who will have seen those responses and who must accept that closure of all supported housing is inevitable – yet who is now STILL seeking a way of imposing this much worse and more unworkable policy than the original LHA only proposal of 5 years ago.

If you like straight talking Prime Minister then ask David Freud to be straight with you over the impacts of the dog with fleas policy that the LHA maxima cap is.

Conversely, Prime Minister, if you want the claimed current two women per week who die from domestic violence and abuse to increase dramatically, then go ahead with the LHA maxima cap policy which will leave them nowhere to flee domestic violence and abuse to.

You will fully appreciate the political impacts on yourself of being known as the Prime Minister who consciously kills more women and girls and legitimises increased violence against them.

Prime Minister, do you think that a single woman fleeing domestic violence and abuse should only be entitled to £45 per week in housing benefit to pay a £200+ refuge rent in Sunderland?

That is what your LHA maxima cap policy means and is why it will close all refuges.

The English average for a single woman under 35 – who make up around 30% – 35% of all women who flee domestic violence is £68 per week in housing benefit and the English average refuge rent is in excess of £250 per week.

The Sunderland example is the lowest LHA maxima yet still sees the same inevitable closure of all DV refuges across the country.  This is not hyperbole or over-egging the pudding Prime Minister, this is simple fact that can easily be verified.

In summary, Prime Minister, while our political viewpoints are miles apart, I warmly welcome that you want honesty and straight talking as perhaps this may see a marked change from the operators of all forms of supported housing who are notoriously apathetic and sycophantic when it comes to telling government of the INEVITABLE consequences of all its housing policies and which still remains so with the LHA maxima cap proposal which is the biggest dog with fleas ever proposed.

End.

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I have left it there reader as the Prime Minister has a lot on her plate.  So I did not mention above that the same LHA maxima cap policy will;

• be the first major policy that sees pensioners get hit by housing benefit cuts and
• will see all hostels close and
• mean rough sleeping will increase by twenty fold and
• that hospital beds will be full of those with mental health and learning disability issues as they too will have nowhere to live and
• literally scores of other inevitable consequences of this ideological unworkable bull shit of a policy.

Surely not Joe you say. If these are the consequences then they are political dynamite that would have been all over the front pages … But I do say and I am right and the figures are undeniable and unambiguous and I have been saying this for 5 years too as the original LHA maxima cap policy in the 2011 consultation is the reason I started blogging (so dear reader you know who to blame!)

One of the first blogs being that the more generous LHA maxima cap proposals of 2011 than those of today would see refuges that I advised lose 65% of their income which means this lesser LHA maxima cap policy now will mean they lose more than that and close as they would have done 5 years ago if the original LHA maxima cap has been implemented.