Analysis: Does ‘cleansing’ fit the bill?
Labour’s ‘cleansing’ rhetoric may be controversial, but it is certainly powerful. Does it really stack up?
The problem with benefits is that they are so very complicated.
This can be politically useful – George Osborne’s outline of planned cuts in the comprehensive spending review left MPs blank-faced as he reeled through a list of technical shifts only the most brainy council worker could understand.
Sometimes it can be utterly frustrating, as the government’s failure to explain the impact of the new intermediate rent for new social housing tenants shows. Housing charities say they are baffled by the lack of clarity from ministers on how this will work for housing associations and local authorities, as politics.co.uk showed on Friday.
Mostly, though, it just requires a bit of clearing up. Researchers from the University of Cambridge have been asked by Shelter to examine potential affordability changes for those claiming housing benefit. Labour politicians have controversially claimed the capital’s central boroughs will suffer a ‘cleansing’ process as the poor are driven out into London’s outlying areas. Work and pensions secretary Iain Duncan Smith has dismissed the claims as “scaremongering”. Who’s right?
Initial findings show Labour warnings are far from fantasy. The neighbourhoods where, following the changes implemented in the spending review, a big majority of claimants will find their housing benefit no longer covers their rent are dotted all across London, not just in the centre. Further shifts being introduced by 2016 make the situation even worse.
When you look at the areas which were already unaffordable, however, the extent to which the poor will be excluded from the city centre becomes strikingly clear. Only the green areas of the map will remain within a realistic price range for housing benefit claimants. Most of Greater London, it is clear, will be out of bounds. Hence Shelter’s chief executive Campbell Robb is justified in stating: “Whilst we do not have the full research yet, early indications show these cuts will change the make-up of London, with central boroughs becoming no-go areas for those on local housing allowance.”
Yet this only means tens of thousands of households could be forced from the centre. There are no guarantees this will take place. If this is a ‘cleansing’, to use that deeply unpleasant term, it is an indirect rather than a direct one.
Just because housing benefit will no longer cover rents in a majority of places does not mean claimants cannot find ways to muster up the necessary cash out of their other income. The map does not automatically mean that all claimants would be forced to move out of particular areas. Those seeking to rubbish the research will point out that it does not consider several other changes affecting housing benefit payments to private tenants.
There is wiggle room, then, for ministers to obfuscate Labour’s allegations, for the simple reason that the housing benefit changes are so complex. Their impact is not guaranteed – we don’t yet know the precise impact which shifting the housing benefit maximum threshold from the median to the ’30th percentile of the range of local rents’ will have. Nor, from 2013, are we clear how the maximum housing benefit will only be increased by consumer price index inflation rather than being linked to actual local rents.
This complexity doesn’t negate the basic projects made by Shelter. Labour’s ‘cleansing’ claims cannot be conclusively proved. They can’t be conclusively denied, either.
