Harringay, Haringey - So Good they Spelt it Twice!
Benefit cap to begin in Haringey in April
The Department for Work and Pensions today confirmed the four London local authorities where the Benefit Cap roll out will start in April. It will be introduced in Bromley, Croydon, Enfield and Haringey and rolled out across the country throughout the summer.
The cap will be in place across the whole country by summer 2013.
The Benefit Cap will see the amount people can receive in benefits capped at the average earned income after tax and National Insurance for working households of £500 a week for couple and single parent households – the equivalent of £26,000 per year.
It will apply to the combined income from JSA, Income Support, Employment and Support Allowance, Child Benefit, Child Tax Credits and other benefits.
Certain households including those with someone in receipt of Disability Living Allowance or the Support Component of ESA and war widows and widowers will be exempt. To increase the incentive for people on out-of-work benefits to find work, households with a member who is entitled to Working Tax Credit will also be exempt from the benefit cap
The Department for Work and Pension’s has allocated £100 million in Discretionary Housing Payments to help support vulnerable people affected by this change.
For a useful guide to how the cap will work, see this factsheet from Disability Rights
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Replies to This Discussion
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Permalink Reply by Michael Anderson on
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Hmm, more poorer people driven out of London. Well, I suppose it's not the end of the world. To put the money into context an inner London borough spends £1bn a year.
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Permalink Reply by Liz on
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Do have a look at the factsheet I linked to. The issue here is the high cost of housing and Michael's point that many families will be driven out of parts of London is important.
Bear in mind that the average rent in 2010 for a house in Haringey was £300 per week and that a significant amount of a family's money is taken up with the cost of renting. Average gross weekly pay in Haringey was £562.80, lower than the average in the rest of London despite the impact of the west of the borough on this figure, and many working people people will be eligible to claim some housing benefit on top of this.
Moreover, East Haringey has the highest rate of unemployment in London and fewest number of available jobs. So the thinking behind this, that lowering benefits will force people into work is somewhat flawed since the jobs are not there to take and many people in work are struggling to get enough hours to keep their income up and get that Working Tax Credit that would exempt them.
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I don't think it is a gross distortion Billy. I have a friend who has a one bed flat on Mount Pleasant Road in Tottenham and pays over £800pm. A quick look on Rightmove and you can see how expensive the east is.
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Of course, most people don't actually get £500pw. That figure is the maximum that potentially could be claimed. Housing benefit is the biggest chunk of that but a single, jobless person under 35 is expected to live in a room in a shared house and will be paid £71pw which is the amount the state says (note I don't say government ) says you need to live. With soaring food, energy and transport costs, this amount hardly represents a fortune.
People can, of course, move somewhere cheaper, although the abolition of the social fund means budgeting loans to help people with those costs will no longer be available, but inevitably those cheaper places are also likely to be places without job opportunities. Soon even traditionally cheaper places like Tottenham are likely to be too expensive. Already landlords are getting jumpy about the HB cap and I'm coming across people being given notice as soon as it is revealed they have lost their job. .
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Permalink Reply by Birdy_Too on
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I am sure that many of the Labour controlled councils will be doing a 'Kensington' and trying to displace benefits recipients around the country in cheaper areas such as Stoke on Trent! Maybe they shouldn't have sold off all those council properties (boroughs still doing it now) and now have to pay well over the odds to the private sector.
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Permalink Reply by Zena Brabazon on
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I read about Haringey being a pilot for the benefit cap in yesterday's Guardian and am asking some for some further information about how this pilot will operate and what lessons are going to be learned. The Guardian article says the delay in rolling this out 'may suggest the government is realising that the cap could have unexpected consequences'. I suspect that is a masterpiece of understatement especially for the families and children caught up in this turbulence. The Council is supporting hundreds of families in temporary accommodation (as legally required) and unless rents are reduced the gap between the benefit paid and the rent will be too big for the families or the Council to cover. Of course maybe the market will work and rents will go down drastically or maybe families can find the money to plug the gap somewhere.
There isn't any available public housing to speak of so only the private sector is available. Poor people have been demonised and the only people who do well out of this are landlords. Rents are extortionate in Tottenham and they have made huge profits from the public purse. Rent control would be a socially responsible policy instead of relying on the market and having to move people away from their communities but hardly likely with this government.
Regarding selling off Council properties Haringey and every other authority in the land had no choice about selling council houses and flats since this was and is national policy. Council flats bought by their original tenants are now rented out for three or four times the council rent on the private market and are lost to the public housing stock.
Zena Brabazon
Cllr, St. Ann's Ward
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Permalink Reply by tigha on
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last time I was looking to rent a 1 bedroom flat in the area, the cheapest i could find was bout £600 for a bedsit, not much good for a faimly- and that was about 4-5y ago as well
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Permalink Reply by John McMullan on
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Billy you may be able to accuse a Labour government of selling Gold cheap, but how on earth can you say that they sold housing off cheap? The Conservative government of Margaret Thatcher bought the working class vote (divide and conquer) by offering them the option of buying their accommodation from the local authority that was renting it to them. That is a fact.
Please explain to me how the council alone are responsible for the scarcity of housing in the borough?
Do you think they have the option of demolishing all the medium density housing within a 5 minute walk of Turnpike Lane station and building high density housing (which is what is effectively being done by dodgy landlords according to the latest census)? Well? Just where are they supposed to magic these extra houses, assuming they can afford to buy them?
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Permalink Reply by Seema Chandwani on
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The quicker a single universal benefit is brought in that replaces housing, income, disability, tax credits and all the other benefits the better.....
Thankfully in Haringey you and your 2 friends in the Tory party are a minority....
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Sorry Little Willy, are you now claiming this move by the Tory/Lib Dem Gov is to make it easier for people who are entitled to claim benefits to do so??
Happy New Year!!
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There is a reason systems like this get complicated, they are fair and end up getting gamed. Of course an unfair/simple system is much harder to game.
I'm willing to bet that if you charted the world's benefits and taxation systems with "fairness/universality" on the Y and "complexity" on the X you'd get a pretty straight line with an up gradient.
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