Picklesgate: How Many DWP Ministers Have Lied to the House?

The revelation of Eric Pickles' January letter to the PM expecting 40,000 homeless families as a result of benefit caps and housing benefit changes looks like touching off a row in the Commons as to whether Tory ministers have been systematically lying to Parliament.

An article in the Guardian identifies a DWP report in February and statements in the House by Chris Grayling (Welfare Minister), Grant Shapps (Housing Minister), Maria Miller (Minister for Patronising Disabled People) as all stating that it is either impossible to quantify the number of affected households or that the problem will not get worse. Yet Eric Pickles' Community Department delivered precisely that quantification of the problem into the Prime Minister's hands in January.

Labour are expected to try and force an urgent question on the issue in Parliament today.

According to the DWP it does not accept the figures in the letter and "There might be some people who have to move to a less expensive area. But that doesn't mean they won't have anywhere to live. We are very optimistic about the behavioural change that this will bring about" Behavioural change? That would be us mere plebs not expecting to be able to continue living near right-thinking, posh Tory voters then?

The DWP spokesperson also said "We cannot carry on with a situation where people on benefits can receive more in welfare payments than hard-working families" But what if those people on benefits need that amount of money simply to survive while supporting family members with complex needs?

Benefits Cap to Make 40,000 Families Homeless

...And Cost More than it Saves

According to a story in the Observer and picked up by the BBC, Eric Pickles' department warned No.10 in a letter from Eric Pickles' Private Secretary to David Cameron's Private Secretary (the standard method for a minister to draw something to the PM's attention) that the £500/week benefits cap would result in 40,000 families being made homeless and cost more than it saves.

Of the families made homeless, 20,000 will result directly from the cap, while 20,000 will result from related changes to the rates of housing benefit.

The letter claimed the supposed savings of £270m would be more than wiped out by the increased cost of caring for newly homeless families and generate a net loss, while 23,000 of the 56,000 affordable homes the government wants built by 2015 will not be built at all because it will be impossible for the builders to recoup their costs, and that this will primarily affect family homes.

The letter was apparently sent in January, casting doubt on Chris Grayling's claim before parliament last month, in respect to families being made homeless by the benefits cap, that "It is not yet clear to what extent they would be affected by the overall benefit cap."

In confirmation of the effects of the changes, Westminster Council announced on Friday that 81% of the families on housing benefit in the Borough, more than 5,000 households, were at risk of being made homeless, because rental rates in the borough require housing benefit payments in excess of the revised housing benefit cap, with most seeing a cut of £84 to £130/week, and nearly 1 in 8 seeing a cut of more than £300/week . The Tories are naively hoping that landlords will accept lower rents -- yeah, right.

80% of landlords surveyed by Westminster Council said they would rather end the tenancy than lower rents. The council's own figures show that 4,000 children would have to leave the borough and change schools (so school closures to come, I suspect), half the children on the council's At Risk register would be forced out of the borough. 300+ pensioners, 95 of them with serious health concerns, and 61 disabled people will be similarly affected.

The council warns it could be forced to find £18m in order to temporarily house 1,500+ families from next January, but in 2013 the benefits cap is extended to temporary housing and the only alternative would be to move the families affected entirely out of the borough. The report cheerily predicts that within 3 years, homelessness won't be a problem in Westminster, because it will all have been packed off to become the problem of the outer London boroughs.

Boris Johnson was widely reported to have warned that this policy would amount to the 'Kosovo-style ethnic cleansing' of London social housing, but, reassuringly for those of us whose worlds would be shaken by a Boris with a social conscience and a line in incisive social commentary, he was misquoted, is in agreement with government policy and insists that it will not result in social-cleansing and that 'no such exodus will take place on my watch'. Westminster Council would appear to be putting one of his assertions to the sword and the other to the test.

Westminster will be one of the worst affected boroughs, but other inner-city boroughs are likely to see similar effects, and all boroughs will be affected to some degree. Now take Westminster's 5,000+ and extrapolate those effects across the entire country....

The Devil is in The Details

Eric Pickles is in the New Years’ papers lambasting local authorities for being slow to follow the Coalition’s directive to publish all expenditure over £500 on the Net. On the surface, this sounds like a splendidly sensible idea for putting councils under pressure to eliminate waste. But is it really a good idea at all? Could the reality be that we as disabled people will find it to be just one more Coalition diktat  that turns around and bites us as soon as the headlines have faded and all the publicity about fiscal responsibility has been milked. Criticism is good, but only so long as it is informed criticism, and the needs of disabled people within the community are an area where the public are woefully ill-informed. Do we really want ‘Disgusted of Tonbridge Wells’ and his local fellow-travellers pouring through council accounts and pressuring councillors and officers to reduce care costs and associated spending because £500 is obviously far too much to pay to put safety railings outside a disabled person’s house, or £1500 clearly extortionate for providing a ceiling-mounted hoist? 

Other idealogy-driven fads flowing out of Pickles’ department may well have similarly problematic results for disabled people. Pickles talks about local people deciding local spending priorities and wants to drive funding down into parish councils and newly created ward councils. It’s difficult to top the BBC coverage which used the parish council from The Vicar of Dibley to illustrate this; but do we really want the local self-selected-great and maybe-good deciding funding policies when their idea of ‘Nothing For Us, Without Us’ is patting us condescendingly and telling us not to worry our little heads?

The problem at the core of the whole idea of ‘The Big Society’ is that it depends on society understanding the needs of those of us who need its support, and a huge swathe of society just does not comprehend what we as disabled people need to allow us to function in society as equals, or even just to survive from day to day. The practicalities and costs of actually providing for that are far beyond their understanding and we risk the Coalition’s ‘Big Society’ trampling ‘Nothing For Us, Without Us,’ underfoot.