The average financial loss faced by social housing tenants as a result of the government's controversial bedroom tax could heat a family home for almost a week, a North West-based housing association has warned.
According to the Regenda Group, the average £14 a week cut in housing benefits which tenants are facing is equivalent to the cost of six days heating every week.
Homelessness projects are closing down, levels of staff are reducing and bed spaces are being lost as housing budgets are squeezed, research published today reveals.
Homeless Link, an umbrella body, said 133 homelessness projects had closed and 4,000 beds in hostels and second stage accommodation had been lost since 2010.
Labour MPs from across Wales have rounded on the Government to attack the so-called bedroom tax and changes to housing benefits.
Shadow Welsh Secretary Owen Smith used Welsh Questions to attack the policy that Ed Miliband last month pledged to repeal if Labour wins the 2015 general election.
David Cameron may be forced to rethink his plan to deny under-25s an automatic right to state benefits because many of the people losing out would be single parents.
Nick Clegg is worried that parents could be affected by proposals to restrict housing benefit for the more than one million “Neets” – young people not in education, employment or training – under a strategy announced by the Prime Minister at last week’s Conservative Party Conference.
Domestic violence affects one in four women in their lives. Two women a week are killed by a partner or former partner and three quarters of a million children in the UK witness domestic violence every year.
The introduction of the bedroom tax is having an unacceptable and dangerous impact on women who have experienced domestic violence, and councils must take action.
Figures released today showed the number of private tenants in severe arrears – two months or more behind on their rent – has fallen sharply to the lowest level in two years.
The latest Tenant Arrears Tracker figures, by LSL Property Services, are the lowest since the third quarter of 2011 when the number last stood below 70,000.
The Conservative Party will look at axing housing support for under-25s as part of its manifesto for the next election, the prime minister confirmed this week.
Setting a clear direction of travel, David Cameron told delegates at the Conservative Party conference in Manchester on Wednesday that he wanted to see ‘bold action’ in ending welfare dependency among young people.
Adults and children with disabilities who are challenging the government’s bedroom tax have been granted permission to take their fight to the Court of Appeal after losing a High Court challenge earlier this year.
Giving his reasons for granting an appeal hearing, the Rt. Hon. Lord Justice Aikens said that the cases "raise issues of public importance concerning the amended housing benefit scheme and the needs of disabled/ young people and so should be considered by the Court of Appeal. Further, the points raised in the grounds of appeal and the proposed ‘skeleton’ argument have a reasonable prospect of success.”
‘Bizarre’ government guidelines place onus on landlords not local authorities to define a bedroom
Government guidance issued to local authorities this week on how to classify a bedroom for the purposes of the bedroom tax has been panned as ‘bizarre’ and ‘wrong’ by experts.
More than 50,000 people affected by the so-called bedroom tax have fallen behind on rent and face eviction.
The statistics reveal the scale of debt created by the Government’s under-occupancy charge, as one council house tenant in three has been pushed into rent arrears since it was introduced in April.