Housing Benefit Age Discrimination
Did you know that if you are under 25 and single the government does not treat you as a fully grown adult when it comes to housing benefit? This scandal is known as the Single Accommodation Rate and is soon to get much worse. From January 2012 the age will be raised to 35.
While the media has paid some attention to the housing benefit reforms in general, such as the caps on upper limits, the massive injustice of SAR is frequently not even mentioned.
Local Housing Allowance was introduced in 2008 as a way of calculating housing benefit entitlement. It doesn’t affect people living in social housing – only those who rent from a private landlord and who are claiming housing benefit. Every local authority publishes a LHA table monthly on their website. For example, the July 2011 table in Brighton and Hove shows that for a 1 Bedroom self-contained flat the allowance is £144.23 per week.
So if you are a single adult or a couple without children who qualify for full housing benefit (your eligibility is based on factors such as your income and who you live with), you would be able to rent a flat up to this amount and your rent would be covered by housing benefits. However, there is an exception to this – if you are single and young you will receive substantially less.
Instead if you are under 25 you will only receive the SAR, so in Brighton a young single person currently only gets £79.81 per week. From January 2012 this will affect everyone under 35 years old. This will hit all new claimants immediately, and most other housing benefit claimants will have their benefits reduced on the anniversary of their claim.
I’ve created a Facebook Group called Scrap the Single Accommodation Rate where I’m hoping lots of people will start posting their stories, and we can use these to raise awareness of this scandal and, if there is enough support, put pressure on the government to put an end to this discrimination.
I work with vulnerable young people most are just people trying to get into work and some who are recovering from various traumas. I find LHB and DHP to be rather distressing to some of my clients. If your under 25 your not even entitled to the full SAR, I find this rather confusing because when giving the details of how rates are allocated I can’t find any where that mentions it but I am told over the phone that because of their age they will receive less than the SAR. The DHP do help but but what’s the point in having it when people are claiming to pay their rent why not increase the LHB (though increasing it isn’t necessary but removing age restrictions) and the gaps between reapplying can be distressing some times being told to wait a few months before applying because currently most applicants are being denied but in a few months there will be a higher chance of acceptance for various reasons. For some of my clients they are loosing out on job opportunities because they don’t have the money to pay for travel if a work trial comes up or pay for interview clothes even if they are offered to be reimbursed they don’t have the money to pay out they can barely afford to eat once they pay their rent. It’s worse for those that are recovering from truama that are expected to be on SAR for instance one of my clients is a recovoring agoraphobic who couldn’t live in shared accomitions because it would just add another layer on to their fears they would start to be afraid to leave their room then the house. They’re also stuck in a limbo of being on JSA the Jobcenter them selves feel this person is not fit enough for work but is unable to be refered else where that they drop the matter. Finding cheaper accomidition isn’t easy aswell even with housing assosations I had a homeless client that was high on the list for finding a new home and it took almost a year for them to be allocated a home I’d hate to think how long it would take for those that would be lower on the list and with SAR being raised to under 35 it will increase demaned for cheaper rents making it harder to find some where with increased compitition.
In a letter from Lord Freud dosn’t this just say laziness. in regards to Crisis(WR-38)
“I appreciate that the case has been made that there are many more groups of individuals who should not be expected to share accommodation. However we believe that Discretionary Housing Payments are the right approach to supporting people in more vulnerable circumstances, rather than creating a series of complex exemptions for different categories of people.”
It is worth considering the social and ecological effects of increasing numbers of people living in single person households. There is evidence for some level of correlation between single occupant dwellings with both depression and social isolation, while households with fewer occupants generally have a higher per capita ecological footprint. So while I’m not wishing people into undesirable situations, it is worth reflecting on the full range of implications for such a proposal.