Shapps plans to house everyone like Ringo

Grant Shapps was on the radio yesterday talking about saving the house in Liverpool where Ringo Starr was born and lived for 3 months.  

I agree with him, I think it should be saved.  If only to provide extra housing stock for those on benefit likely to be turfed out of their current property due to Shapps’ belief that private landlords are philanthropic souls who will reduce rents purely because their tenants are unable to pay.

Back in November Shapps claimed in an interview on Radio 4 that there were three reasons why reducing housing benefit would not be a bad thing.  
1. Landlords would reduce rent.
2. There is a discretionary fund.
3. If someone is forced to move there would be other properties available in the area.

During discussion of the first point he said:
"[firstly it is]...absolutely reasonable for the reasons I've explained"
His reasoning being that there's a "reasonable chance" landlords will reduce rent because "...if you cut off that state fuelled rent rise [then] rents will go in the opposite direction".  

This is complete speculation and incredibly unlikely, some landlords may drop their rent but many are very likely to say in the event that there is a shortfall in rent "if you can't pay then I'll start eviction proceedings", which they would be entitled to do.

On his second point:
“If landlords don't reduce rent then there is a discretionary housing fund.”
Thanks for letting the landlords know that, I expect there'll be quite a lot of requests for discretionary funding, why not revert to the previous system (pre-2008) and individually assess properties?  The system was changed in 2008 to save money, this didn’t work, but why penalise those on benefits now for that failure.

On his third point:
Even if someone ends up needing to move the Local Housing allowance system means there are still up to one third of properties in your area which you can move to - he says the other mechanisms in place will catch you first, i.e. points 1 and 2.  This ignores the fact that if you are on Housing Benefit you are either on a very low income or are unemployed, what are the chances that someone in that position can easily absorb the additional burden of removal expenses, and why should they have to.


Shapps refers to the problem starting due to technical changes to housing benefit made in 2008.  He doesn't explain the technical change but it relates to how rent was calculated, so rather than an individual property being assessed for a rental value the assessment was made based on the already known rental value from other similar types of properties in the same area.  This change was done to save the costs of assessing many individual properties.  However, rents significantly increased with the introduction of the new process.  It seems to me, and this is speculation, that the process allowed landlords to take advantage of the now known maximum permissible housing benefit and cut their rents (upwards) accordingly.  It appears that this money saving change to the regulation didn't work as loopholes appearing elsewhere are now being exploited, and of course this should be addressed.

The reason this rattles my cage is that I've have a lot of experience of the type of landlords around in the low rent economy, I've spent over 90% of my 46 years in rented accommodation, the majority of that time being in private rather than council accommodation.   

Shapps’ belief that landlords will be happy to reduce rents seems naive if not wilfully ignorant and credulous.  I don't know what Shapps’ experience of what the private rental market is like for those that are unemployed or on low incomes, but the reality of the situation is massively different to that of the private rental market for those more well off.  The people affected by housing benefit and any associated legislation know full well that they are on a different step of the ladder, where landlords regularly bend, if not completely sidestep, the legal requirements they are supposed to adhere to.  

By all means save Ringo’s birthplace Mr Shapps, but it had better have plenty of room for an extension as it’s likely to get pretty crowded in there.