The biggest fault line in the Labour party the last decade has been the obsession that our leaders have had with life in London. From London orientated health reform, to London school dominance, to a love of the City of London and now a London-centric welfare debate.
I could not afford the housing prices of central London so I commuted in. I rented cheap accommodation in south London, not expensive property north of the river and I still do.
There is no justifiable reason why an overheated London property market should determine our attitude to welfare reform.
If families living in large houses in central London, paid for by benefits, have to move to outer London or outside London, they are no different to low paid working people. If someone wants to build lots of affordable rental housing in central London then do so. But why should my constituents pay for London landlords to make a fortune?
£26,000 in benefits is more than my constituents earn each year. With tax and with the Bishops’ amendment, my constituents would have to earn £50,000 a year before tax to compare. The actual majority of my constituents do not take even half of this home. The government’s welfare cap may appeal to middle England, but it is voters in places like Bassetlaw who are the angriest. Not only are they seeing their living standards decline and their services cut, but it is their sons and daughters who are being denied council housing and failing to find work.
The majority of Labour collective leadership live in London, work in London, educate their kids in London. They eat, drink and live London.
It is about time we got real about the world around us, not least in the constituencies of the United Kingdom. Failing to understand welfare reform is a bigger problem than a single vote on a cobbled together House of Lords amendment. Are we or are we not the party of working people? Can we or can we not clearly and precisely define what the welfare state we believe in is? And can we win the argument 0n doorstep Britain? If not, we have got our approach dangerously wrong.
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John Mann is the member of parliament for Bassetlaw
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John. You are a mischievous scamp. I agree about the London centric view of the party and the leadership. It would be hard for anyone to deny it. However to suggest that people who are low paid should be pitted against people who are on benefit, for whatever reason is spurious and I suggest you know it is.Where you are right is to say that we need to have a policy agenda driven by the needs of real people in real places not a handful of (worthy or otherwise) benefit claimants living in central London. You didn’t say that actually but i am sure you would have done if you had more time to think!! 🙂
I agree with John. I oppose anything which needlessly vilifies those on low incomes or no incomes. However, I think it is worth pointing out that despite earning a good salary and being in a two income household (with three children), I am subject to market forces which mean that I live 85 miles out of London, in a town where I can afford a small house (just) big enough for my family, requiring me to spend huge sums on commuting into London where I work. This is not a complaint, but a statement of fact. I would very much like to live nearer, or even in central London, but cannot afford to do so and have adjusted accordingly. It doesn’t seem unreasonable to expect someone who cannot, through their own income, afford their housing costs, to consider moving to an area which is cheaper in order to have those costs paid in full by the state. Requiring someone to move home is not making them homeless, it is requiring them to move home. London has one of the best transport infrastructures in the advanced world, making it perfectly possible for people to travel to work. We in the Labour Party need to understand that many people who would support our party earn far less than the cap of £26,000 per year.
So is it the suggestion that people are claiming benefits in order to move into London thereby unfairly leaching off the rest of us who have to live in the sticks? Where is the evidence base for this? Or is it more likely that those on benefits in central London have been born and raised there and, for a variety of reasons, may now be claiming benefits which, if subjected to a £26k cap will force them to leave their community, their friends and probably family members, take their children out of school and schlep to somewhere miles away? Isn’t the welfare state about security for all? Or does it become selective based on the extent to which you’re a burden on the state? If you have the misfortune to live in Greater London or parts of the South East (despite what John Mann says, this isn’t about Westminster), then you are to be evicted from the neighbourhood? And can anyone explain how such a move with all its dislocation, alienation and destruction of networks (social capital anyone?) will actually help individuals find work and rebuild their lives? This is madness. And for Mann and Byrne and others to go down this route is shameful.
I agree with John. I oppose anything which needlessly vilifies those on low incomes or no incomes. However, I think it is worth pointing out that despite earning a good salary and being in a two income household (with three children), I am subject to market forces which mean that I live 85 miles out of London, in a town where I can afford a small house (just) big enough for my family, requiring me to spend huge sums on commuting into London where I work. This is not a complaint, but a statement of fact. I would very much like to live nearer, or even in central London, but cannot afford to do so and have adjusted accordingly. It doesn’t seem unreasonable to expect someone who cannot, through their own income, afford their housing costs, to consider moving to an area which is cheaper in order to have those costs paid in full by the state. Requiring someone to move home is not making them homeless, it is requiring them to move home. London has one of the best transport infrastructures in the advanced world, making it perfectly possible for people to travel to work. We in the Labour Party need to understand that many people who would support our party earn far less than the cap of £26,000 per year.
Labour continues to fall into the trap of supporting the Tory framing which is intended to drive a wedge between the working and the workless poor. Labour should be reuniting these two parts of its traditional base around an agenda based on full employment, living wages and affordable housing. The benefit cap only reduces the £192 billion benefit budget to £191.7 billion. Fat lot of good that is to the tax payer. We need serious and sustained reductions to welfare spending. This will only happen with progress on full employment, fair pay and affordable housing. The benefit cap is nothing but tabloid candy. Shame on those in the party who fall for it, doing the Tories’ work for them and failing to go out on the attack over the right to work, the right to a fair day’s pay for an honest day’s work, and the right to an affordable home!
Some facts will help in this debate. Yougov website shows the following: In Bassetlaw the two bedroom LHA rate is currently £95 pw. John rents ‘cheap accommodation is South London’. The two bedroom rate for inner south east London is £241.80 pw. In outer South east it is even higher. Also higher is South West London it is higher. The rate for Barking and Dagenham is £185. City of Westminster £290.
This shows that the problem is not a central London one buit the price of property in the South East as a whole.
We must avoid a North vs South divide on this matter which the Tories are trying to encourage with a blanket £26,000 cap which will play well in the North.
However, I have met working class tenants in Tower Hamlets living in Social housing who support the cap.
I think we need to be more honest and admit we made mistakes in relation to Housing Benefit when we were in office.
We should be in favour of scrapping the discredited LHA scheme which is based on ‘Broad Market Rental Areas’ and return to Rent Control which was based on Rent Officers determining an affordable rent for each INDIVIDUAL property!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Now normally I wouldn’t rise to such a spurious argument, but it’s been a long day already.
John could you set out what actions you took during the time we were in government to
• address the rapid escalation of private rents
• free up the income from council house sales to build more local authority homes,
• stimulate the building by other providers of affordable homes in the communities where people want to live.
If you campaigned for rent controls to be re-established and for the issue of housing provision to be at the heart of our governments agenda then I’ll engage with you points.
The impact of this cap, without dealing with the housing issues will have a devastating effect on the lives of thousands in the constituency where I was a labour candidate in 2010. Dame Shirley Porter will be laughing her head off that you are supporting the policies that she advocated, destroying our communities and creating a ghettoised mono-culture for the rich in inner London. I look forward to you coming down to join me and explain your views as people who have lived in tight knit communities, that for the record provide massive amounts of support that the state will have to provide if people are forced away from family and friends who share the caring responsibilities, are forced out of the areas they have lived in for generations. People who have recently lost their jobs in the downturn and need support will no doubt really appreciate being kicked in the teeth by you as well as the Tories. Yes we should have addressed the issue when we were in government by dealing with rents and affordable housing but we didn’t and so now we appear to only be left with your dog whistle politics.
Now let’s turn to the tired and stunningly inaccurate portrait of a London dominated Labour party. John one thing I do think you have is a knowledge of our movement’s history so you will know as well as I that our current leader is only the 3rd to be born in London after Attlee and Gaitskell (and the later moved to the home counties shortly after birth) Lansbury was in spirit of course a Londoner but was born in Suffolk. Any analysis of labour cabinets in every one of our government shows a massive under representation of Londoners or those representing London seats. By contrast Scotland, the North East and North West of England have been significantly over represented. Being Westminter village dominated is not and never has been the same as being London dominated.
Throughout our movements history London and Londoners have shown solidarity with the rest of the country so some in return would be nice. We are the party of working people both in work and those who have hit problems and are out of work. Of course we need reform of the welfare system to make it fit for our people. If you think this is the way to do it then you do what you want and play into the hands of those who seek to divide and rule us, but don’t be surprised if more and more Londoners start to highlight just how much we contribute to the rest of the country.
Don’t forget all the working people who get benefits too. As a CAB adviser, I came across plenty of people with poorly-paid jobs (probably on the National Minimum Wage), who had to apply for Child Benefit, Child Tax Credit, Working Tax Credit, Housing Benefit, etc. in order to survive. John should check this with his working constituents and get a more balanced picture. It doesn’t help Labour to divide people with jobs from the unemployed, or Londoners from non-Londoners. Divide and rule, as they used to say?
Largely irrelevant – this is not an issue about the receipt of benefit, but the total amount. And it is not Labour that “divides” the employed from the unemployed – it is the employed who do it. And they won’t thank the party that in their view sides against them….
Lots of sense here from John. What none of the “better Labour in permanent but principled opposition” types here and elsewhere simply do not see is the burning injustice people feel when they see those around them live better lives but do nothing to earn the income they get. The fact that some Labour MPs can justify this and side with a minority over a majority of the public on this issue is shameful and a reason why we will really struggle to regain credibility with the public.
Labour’s response on this issue recently was, frankly, embarrassing. John quite rightly points out that supporting the benefit cap is the only sensible and logical option. I hope this measure goes through without too many concessions.
“£26,000 in benefits is more than my constituents earn each year. With tax and with the Bishops’ amendment, my constituents would have to earn £50,000 a year before tax to compare.”
There are two reasons why this is rubbish:
1 – the relevant comparison between a working family and a family on out-of-work benefits is between their *incomes* – not the *earnings* of the former and the income of the latter. The income of a working family with three kids (say) earning £26,000 after tax is £26,000 earnings + c. £2,500 Child Benefit + Tax Credits (guesstimate – c. £2,000, depending on hours worked etc.)
2 – IDS’s ‘£50,000 before tax’ figure, which you dutifully parrot, is supposed to represent the pre-tax earnings that would be equivalent to the benefits claimed by a large family on the £26,000 prescribed by the benefits cap, plus £8,000 or £10,000 in Child Benefit (which the bishops were trying to get excluded from that cap). But of course, a comparable working family, earning £26,000 a year, would *also* be living on £26,000 + £8,000 or £10,000 in Child Benefit. So it’s just not true to say they’d have to earn £50,000 before tax to be on the same income. (A single person or couple without children would have to earn £50,000 before tax to be on the same income, but so what?)
I’m not entirely unsympathetic to your points, and if it’s true that unemployed people’s entitlement to HB means they can rent houses they couldn’t rent if they were working – so that they’d actually lose their homes if they found work – there is something very funny going on. But a one-size-fits-all cap that takes no account either of housing costs in an area, or of family size, just doesn’t make sense.
Many large families are going to face a straighforward choice between living in poverty or breaking up into two units so as to double their overall benefits cap to £52,000. (Even if a family of ten could find a big enough house for £250 a week, could they then live on £250 a week after housing costs? No. But split into two units of five and they might just manage. That kind of perverse incentive is just intolerable.)
And in practical terms, surely it’s crazy to think that pretty much every time a London family finds itself without work and reliant on benefits, that family could and should immediately up sticks and leave the capital? Because that’s what we’re talking about here. Nothing about this cap is designed to single out families that are workless long-term; parents who might reasonably expect to find work within a few months, perhaps in an industry that’s concentrated in London, are going to have to take their children out of school and move perhaps hundreds of miles away just because they couldn’t live for that few months on, say, £100 a week after housing costs.
All of these comments show that the issue is rents. Child benefit should not be part of any cap. It is (or will be until the Tories changes come through) universal. It is a critical commitment of the community to the family and to the costs of bringing up children, after universal benefit comes in it is likely in most families to be the only benefit paid directly to the mother. Johns working constituents get it on top of their earnings and people dependent on benefits should get this benefit for their children too. We must act to cap the cost of rents but if there is to be any limit on benefits it should not include child benefit, and we should commit to reintroducing universal child benefit even if we have to fund it by moving the threshold at which higher rate tax becomes payable.
At the heart of the debate to cap welfare benefits as a total monetary amount lies what Frank Field describes as the idea of a ‘lifetime pension’. The notion that one should only take a job if it pays substantially more than what one might get on benefits. I hasten to add, I don’t think we should be supporting the idea of a cap simply because it is a one size fits all approach where those genuinely in need get treated the same as those who simply lack motivation. Our party must assert that people should where they can work for as much as they can even if they end up only being a few pounds a week better of as a result. At the heart of this is how we encourage in people a sense of personal dignity. I spent two long periods being benefit dependent in the 1980s and 1990s and it seriously undermined my credibility applying for jobs, deskilled me and left me short of confidence – I still have the scars. Our attack on the Coalition benefit cap I think would be more credible and better understood if we were true to our name and promoted the dignity of work and making a contribution rather than simply defending the indefensible.
The welfare reform bill needs to be opposed people are dying because of cuts to welfare.