Welfare Reform Bill – Impact on Low Income Households

The second reading of the Welfare Reform Bill takes place this week (w/c 7 March 2011). The Chartered Institute of Housing has raised concerns that many measures in the Bill will hit vulnerable households hard. New research from Shelter and CIH analyses the impact of two the proposed changes - the £500 benefit cap and the measure to link housing benefit to CPI rather than to real local housing costs. The research found linking LHA to CPI would ‘over time, greatly extend the shortfall between LHA payments and rents people have to pay’. It said the East of England, the East Midlands and the South West would be hit the hardest by the change. The research concludes that changes to housing benefit will make a third of England unaffordable for low income households in a decade. Download a copy of the report from the Shelter website.