Housing Benefit, London & a "Fair Society".

When listening to and reading recent comments about the proposed reforms to Housing Benefit, I am forced to reject many much stronger expletives before arriving at the word "Twaddle".

The status quo in the UK is simply unacceptable and unsustainable. The Beveridge/Morrison revolution that led to the establishment of the Welfare State has turned, as most revolutions do, into a nightmare. From the very beginning in the late 40s and early 50's the left in the UK hijacked this wonderful concept - that the weak and needy should be sheltered and supported - as an exercise in extending State control into every element of our lives. In general it has been one-nation Tories that have strengthened the welfare system by dragging it back time after to time to its worthy roots - that of a safety net.

I have little doubt that the reduction of housing benefit to saner levels, both in terms of eligibility and quantum, will have a profound effect on many. We should, however, remember that these proposals are not retrospective and the effect on current beneficiaries will be small to non-existent. For new claimants, however - welcome to the real world!! Why should my children - all working and tax-paying adults now -  have to struggle to rent or buy (I will deal with buying a little later gentle reader) a home at rates that reflect the aftermath of the buy-to-let frenzy fuelled by the laxity of monetary policy under the Blair/Brown Labour government?

The soft pink fuzzy warm media industry that lumps together the poor, the underprivileged, the sick, the old, battered teddy bears, puppies with big brown eyes and soft fluffy kittens are, of course, back where they are most comfortable - in opposition and able to make cooing noises of sympathy at the same time as tutting noises of disapproval without for one moment having to give thought (they never have, never do and never will do) to how it is paid for and how we administer such things.

If current benefit reform goes through, it will have little or no effect on the needy. A dry warm home of two bedrooms in Leicester is as valuable as a three-bedroom flat in Central London if you want to keep your children warm and healthy. What about work do I hear those members of the previous government with insufficient shame to keep quiet for a few decades say? Errr.... is that the government's job - or even its business? Within a very few years of the proposed reforms real jobs will arise as the labour pool grows. Then (and I do appreciate this concept is up there with incest and paedophilia for some) those self-same claimants can start paying the government back for their help by way of Income Tax and National Insurance contributions.

Going back to the specifics of housing benefit and property levels - both rental and purchase prices - it seems self-evident (a dangerous phrase) to me that the level of much rental property is set as a matter of course by the levels that will be paid as Housing Benefit. I cannot for one moment believe that the major consequence of a reduction in both the numbers of those receiving this benefit and the amounts involved for those who do will not be a substantial reduction in rent levels that will stabilise either at the new lower benefit level or at a level dictated by "real" renters looking for a home. Inevitably this will hit the private landlord hard and will, I strongly suspect, mean the speculative stock of housing built over the last few years of the Blair/Brown lunacy being sold off and a substantial drop in house prices. Such a fall would ultimately be the salvation of the working classes (by which I mean those that do the work) as both renting and buying become affordable again. The "cult of property" in the UK means that this will be unwelcome in many quarters - but homes are ultimately places in which to live, love and grow. For everything else there are pension funds and savings.

Yet again the UK media are using this as another cudgel with which to bash the coalition government, but I admire the way in which they are making the hard decisions in the glare of public scrutiny and with the internal debate hardly hidden from public view.

It is perhaps the finest single principle of British society that we protect the weak and needy. That must remain sacrosanct. The vast majority of our huge benefit budget goes neither to the weak or the needy however - and that must be stopped and stopped now.

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