By 2015 every working household would be paying £1,515 a year for a broken Housing Benefit system. Labour are opposing the coalition government's Housing Benefit reforms in a vote in the House of Commons.
The Government has announced plans to restore fairness to housing benefit by reforming a broken system which traps people on benefits by paying for them to live in houses they could never afford if they entered work. The main beneficiaries of the current system are private landlords who have seen Housing Benefit rents rising while private rents were falling.
There is widespread public concern about the number of families currently trapped on benefits, and the absurd situation whereby in some cases over £100,000 a year to is being paid to private landlords for just one house.
Following yesterday's Opposition Day debate on proposed changes to Housing Benefit, Secretary of State for Work and Pensions Iain Duncan Smith said 'Labour have behaved disgracefully over the Housing Benefit issue and have been spreading panic and lies in a cynical attempt to disguise their own incompetence. We want to end the situation where families find themselves trapped on benefits and living in houses they could never afford if they entered work. Thanks to Labour's failure to reform the welfare system, Housing Benefit rents have risen much faster than the rest of the market, meaning that those on Housing Benefit pay far more rent than they should.'
And he added, 'We don't think it's fair for working families to be taxed to pay housing benefit bills of more than £20,000, especially when the only ones that profit are private landlords by inflating the rents. Our reforms are about restoring fairness to a system that has been allowed to run totally out of control under the Labour government. It's time we got rents down and sorted out this mess.'
Graham commented “The current situation on housing benefit is ludicrous. People in low paid jobs living in my constituency are paying taxes to subsidise unemployed Londoners to live in the poshest and most trendy bits of the capital. Anyone can see that this is unfair.”
“But Ed Miliband and the London-centric Labour Party are defending this unfairness. It shows how completely out of touch they are with people in Cheshire.”