Post date: 19-Oct-2011 12:26:29
A spare bedroom is not a luxury but it is civilised and civilising. Anyone who has perforce lived in the restricted space of a bedsit or flatlet knows that the only ambition it encourages is to find somewhere permanent. It is somewhere to escape from and not a home to invest in.
Cheap housing may not be an individual’s right but it is a necessity for a consumer driven economy. Householders buy commodities whereas the homeless survive as best they can which has been apparent since the earliest stages of industrialisation and the capitalisation of the west. However, profit driven landowners have failed to provide this economic and social essential.
The UK Government is proposing to penalise anyone in social housing with a spare bedroom and claiming housing benefits the sum of £11.00 per week for the ‘luxury’. The excuse for reducing the poorest members of society to levels of income below subsistence is the housing shortage that is itself the creation of narrowly conceived Government policy and investor capital indifference. The Government claims to wish to force single tenants out of two bedroom housing and into smaller dwellings even though there is a greater shortage of single bedroom flats than of any other type of accommodation. If their concern is the efficient use of the housing stock why don’t they adopt the Soviet policy of enforced space sharing or the more traditional British solution of a ‘land clearance’? Simply tell the disadvantaged to go somewhere else!
Or we could extend the concept of mixed economy and commercial endeavour into the hands of benefit claimants. Let us simply tell benefit claimants in social housing that if they arrange to let a spare bedroom at cost they will receive an extra £11.00 per week from the housing benefit saving. The reduction in the housing benefit spend would be far greater, housing pressure reduced and it would cost far less to administer. Most importantly, at least for me, it is a morally clean solution.
We live in hard times and perhaps the hardest task we face is killing the sacred cows that have crippled our social welfare system. People on benefits are disincentivised from helping themselves by the rules that restrict their earning capacity. Many people on benefits would like to help themselves but the returns for effort are so meagre that the effort is not cost effective. If we dispose of the holy cow that the poor are not part of our system and cease to treat them as benefit slaves and conceive instead of mutually beneficial partnerships perhaps we can reduce the benefit spend and place more disposable wealth in the hands of consumers.