The Labour Party manifesto will abandon the bedroom tax and will restore housing benefit for those under 22 (page 54) and will abandon the LHA Maxima Cap policy (page 64) which seriously threatens the closure of existing supported housing and all new homeless hostels, refuges, disabled housing projects and sheltered housing.
If you are a social landlord or social tenant then there is no doubt that voting Labour is in your best financial interests in terms of Housing Benefit.
Additionally the increase in the national minimum wage will see a significant Housing Benefit cut to the 1.1 million HB recipients who are in-work and thus reducing the massive £5.8 billion per year subsidy that HB is for low paying UK employers and noting it was £2.8 billion in May 2010 and had 0.65 million recipients.
This means those who are able to work will benefit as I pointed out here as you will have more net income and the government will also be paying out less in welfare and get more in the tax and NI take.
The abolition of the work capability assessment and the restoring of the £30 per week ESA cut will also help those tenants who are unable to work too and by extension help social and private landlords as tenants will have more money to pay the rent.
There are around 4.3 million social tenant households containing circa 6 million eligible voters and all of them are better off financially if they vote Labour.
Labour also promise to ensure that all rented properties are fit for human habitation as the manifesto states on page 62:
Renters are spending 9.6 billion a year on homes that the government classes
as ‘non-decent’. Around a quarter of this is paid by housing benefit. A Labour government would introduce new legal minimum standards to ensure properties are fit for human habitation’ and empower tenants to take action if their rented homes are sub-standard.
That is beneficial to private rented sector tenants as well as social tenants, working or not, and it is a f*cking outrage that the last Conservative government voted down by talking out a Bill to ensure all homes are fit for human habitation.
It is natural for those who vote to say what is in it for me, all voters, and there is no doubt that all renters would be better off voting for Labour … and that is 36% of the entire population!
It begs the question why the Labour Party itself makes so little to date of the clear advantages for all renters that the Labour manifesto gives for existing renters.
SPeye Joe (Welfarewrites) 
Does this mean anything for people who are in supposed social housing and who are charged something called ‘Local Reference Rent’ Meaning – My son moves out and I get paid benefit for say a 2 bed home – Even though there are no 2 bed homes like mine even in this area… So I end up paying goodness knows what just because of that? Thank You
Please…?
his it true you going tax the gardens
Scurrilous myth in one of todays papers
The invented methodology was absurd, I don’t understand how that could be printed. But LVT is a fantastic idea, it should definitely be piloted and refined so that it can eventually replace council tax, business rates, and maybe stamp duty too! Would incentivise much better use of land, and tax largely unearned wealth.
A friend of my daughter is going to be made homeless soon, as her benefits were stopped, because she was fighting for her life in hospital on the day she was due for a face-to-face assessment to change her over from her indefinite DLA, to the notorious PIP.
Despite consultant’s letters, etc, the DWP are sticking to their decision and she is presently living on the £20 a week she gets for her 3 year old son. She is allowed 3 days of food for herself and her son from the food bank, but is only allowed to claim this 3 times in any one year.
It took her all day to travel by bus to the food bank, claim the food, and get back home – all the while coping with terrible ill health, and dragging her child with her, as there was nobody available to look after him for her. She has no money now, so can’t afford to pay the local nursery’s fees, so they wouldn’t take him for her.
Because she now has no money while she fights against this decision, she is about to lose her privately rented home, as she has been having to find £120 a month extra from her benefits, to pay towards the rent, as our local council won’t pay beyond around £90 a week for the 2-bed bungalow that she needs as a disabled person, and a mother.
I just hope, for her, and her son’s, sake, as well as the rest of us affected by the awful austerity measures meted out to us by the tories, that Labour gets in on June 8th.
She has very little to look forward to if they don’t 😦
Everyone believes there are safety-nets in place to prevent cases such as this – unless it happens to them or someone they know. That’s how government have managed to dismantle the welfare system under our very noses. I hope she manages to stay put while the DWP sort it out – it takes quite a while for a landlord to regain possession through the courts. But the whole business does take over your entire life and causes immense emotional/mental/physical damage. Appalling that we have been reduced to this as a nation by such wicked government policies. Labour must get in to power for all our sakes.