That 'painless' benefits cap

Ther Con Dem coalition has justified its plans to cap total benefit claims for households on the grounds that it is fair, as beneficiaries shouldn't receive more than a typical working family. They've argued it is essential to take these tough measures - while also claiming the cap won't cause any real hardship - because it will save money. They lied.

Straight from the horse's horse's secretary's mouth pen ...

Firstly we are concerned that the savings from this measure, currently estimated at £270m savings p.a from 2014-2015 does not take account of the additional costs to local authorities (through homelessness and temporary accommodation). In fact we think it is likely that the policy as it stands will generate a net cost. In addition Local Authorities will have to calculate and administer reduced Housing Benefit to keep within the cap and this will mean both demands on resource and difficult handling locally.

Secondly, we are worried about the impact of this measure on our ability to build social housing for families through the new affordable rent product. To fund new affordable housing development providers need to be able to charge rents of up to 80% of the market levels but the impact of the Overall Benefit Cap will prevent them from doing so in many areas greatly reducing their financial capacity. Initial analysis suggests that of the 56,000 new affordable rent units up to 23,000 could be lost. And reductions would disproportionately affect family homes rather than small flats. For example it would be extremely difficult to fund any 4 bed properties, so desperately needed, anywhere in the country - disproportionately impacting on families and therefore children.

Finally, our modelling indicates that we could see an additional 20,000 homelessness acceptances as a result of the total benefit cap. This on top of the of the 20,000 additional acceptances already anticipated as a result of other changes to Housing Benefit. We are already seeing increased pressures on homelessness services. I understand that there may be a suggestion around requiring families to divert a percentage of their non-housing (benefit) income to cover housing costs. It is important not to underestimate the level of controversy that this would generate (likely to dwarf anything already seen on the HB only caps) and the difficulty of justifying this in policy terms as well as implementation. (1)

Awesome, Con Dem coalition. A way of reducing economic activity and worsening the housing situation (through fewer social homes being built), increasing homelessness that costs more than the status quo? Outstanding work.

And on top of that, a rather hopeful suggestion that exempting Child Benefit from the housing cap might resolve these issues - finally turning the old stereotype of the benefit queen, who has children to get a better house, into actual policy.

This coalition is so crazed Eric Pickles - ERIC PICKLES - sounds sane and reasoned.

Meanwhile - as the coalition plots to make 40,000 people homeless at the taxpayer's expense, and connives to engineer an unjustified pay cut for public servants - the Tory MP Jacob Rees-Mogg turned his attention to another group of - apparently more deserving - beneficiaries:

As a result of what I have described the Queen is paying a higher rate of tax than anybody else. We should remember that and I hope that the Chancellor will be generous. I would like the 15% provision to be increased because we want to have a glamorous monarchy that befits the status of our nation. We are a great nation, a noble nation and a nation that has had power across the globe in the past. We have one of the finest histories of any country in the world. When I see the coronation coach being pulled through the streets of London, I want to see it being pulled by the finest horses that money can buy and I want to see it gilded with the finest gold that can be bought. I want Her Majesty to have as a jubilee present the finest window that can be funded by Members of Parliament. That is the status of monarchy that we want and I urge the Chancellor to remember that. Even though I know that we are in this time of austerity, that we are all in it together and that the Opposition spent all the money, maxed out the credit card and so on, we should look after Her Majesty. (2)

Yes, as long as the proles can see the monarch trot past in a pretty carriage pulled by some pampered horses, they'll know their place and accept their lot.

These freaks are beyond satire.

1 - "Full text of letter from the office of Eric Pickles," published in The Guardian, 2nd of July, 2011. (http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2011/jul/02/full-text-letter-eric-pickles-welfare-reform?intcmp=239)
2 - Jacob Rees-Moog, speaking in the house of Commons, 30th of June, 2011. As recorded in Hansard for that date, colum 1172. (http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm201011/cmhansrd/cm110630/debtext/110630-0003.htm)

Wellington

I was in Wellington at the weekend. I don't get there as often as I'd like, but this weekend was my nephew's first birthday. Well - pedantry alert - it was really the first anniversary of his birthday. But you know what I mean.

It was, overall, quite an odd experience, like being trapped inside a bad play. Most of the action took place in two bland sets - a cheap motel room in Lower Hutt and a new townhouse clinging to a hillside at the back end of Johnsonville. The dialogue was banal and repetitive and the characters were neither interesting or believable - a rare feat in literature, as characters that are not unbelieveably interesting are usually realistically dull. The point of it all escaped me, and seemed to have escaped the director and cast as well, as they loafed through their scenes without any clear purpose. But that's my life for you ...

Houses interest me in odd ways. As a record of social processes in action, they're hard to beat. The house I'm sitting in just now in an ex-state house, built to the highest specifications in the 1940s, when socialist ideas were more fashionable and the idea that the working classes should have access to good, robust housing wasn't a bad joke. Oddly, of course, it was built during a recession and a war, which makes one wonder at the current fad for austerity.

My brother-and-sister-in-law's house, on the other hand, is a modern townhouse, built on a steep hillside. You go in at the top, and go downstairs to the tiny patch of garden (my house has a decent sized section, in accordance with the 'garden city' ethos that infused the old state house developments). The lawn is a small rectangle of grass, but it is over shadowed by the fences around it, the other houses crowding about, and the small deck, which is boosted up to the level of the main floor of the house on two stalwart columns.

The house itself doesn't rest on a knuckle of rock like a house I used to live in up in Auckland, but clings, snail like, to the hillside, supported by a generous dollop of concrete at the bottom. I'm no structural engineer, but the who thing looked a bit precarious and rather un-thought through, especially for a city awaiting a major earthquake. In fairness, the property looked a lot more securely moored than the ones I spotted across the valley, which seemed t be built entirely on stilts.

What the development reminded me of, oddly, was those hideous Eastern European Brutalist housing developments - the cramped apartments, each with their own tiny balcony, sandwiched together into a massive wall of concrete and glass, a material expression of communist ideology and conformity. Well, that attitude exists in New Zealand, in those Johnsonville developments, with their tiny token decks and tissue sized token patches of lawn, crammed together onto barely viable land.

(For the record, I'm actually quite a fan of Brutalist architecture, and one of the Palmerston North council building's few fans; but even I recognise you can have too much of a good thing)

Note, though, there's one difference between these houses and the Eastern European concrete jungles, or the old state house developments. The latter, of course, were designed to house the working classes, make affordable housing available for them. he growing Wellington suburbs - with few parks, playgrounds, shops or other amenities and connected to the rest of the city by narrow roads that are too steep for cycling or walking, and poorly served by public transport.

They're designed with the aspiring middle classes in mind. That's why they have all the features that the middle classes think they need in a house - the deck, the lawn, never mind that they're not worth boasting about. The houses are big enough to put themselves out of the reach of working class families and - probably - most middle class families on one income. As I said, without a car - or two - they're almost unlivable, as they're remote, cut off, and inaccessible by any means other than an internal combustion engine. Though you'll struggle to find parking for said engine. When we were there, the narrow street was almost blocked by parked cars - and they had completely colonised the pavements, so if you did want to walk somewhere, you had to traverse your neighbour's properties.

They're an exercise in social engineering, as blatant as my old state house development, but informed by radically different values. This is concrete realisation of the profit motive in housing - the highest concentration of high value buyers, on land that no sane person would build on, authorised by a council interested in squeezing the highest quantity of rate payers possible into the least space.