Ministers today hailed benefit reforms and claimed that 7,000 London households were earning more money or now had access to a bigger home thanks to the “bedroom tax”.
They said that official figures released today showed that households which had housing benefit cut under the controversial Coalition reform were now in a better situation.
This week, church leaders claimed the reforms were making people “destitute” but Work and Pensions Secretary Iain Duncan Smith said the figures showed that his policies were helping people to turn their lives around.
He said: “Reforming housing benefit was absolutely necessary to ensure we can maintain a strong safety net.”
Mr Duncan Smith has reduced housing benefit to council tenants with unused bedrooms and believes that it will encourage them to move to homes more suitable in size, releasing larger homes to families more in need.
Statistics for November last year showed that 52,200 social housing tenants in London were hit with the “bedroom tax”, down from 59,900 last May. Mr Duncan Smith said the drop meant that tenants had increased earnings and no longer claimed housing benefit, or had found a smaller home.
But Chris Bryant, Labour’s shadow minister for welfare reform, said: “David Cameron’s bedroom tax is pushing hundreds of London families into spiralling debt and forcing thousands of hard-pressed families to rely on food banks.”
Mr Duncan Smith’s claims came after the Archbishop of Canterbury Justin Welby backed his Roman Catholic counterpart’s claims that reforms were driving people into poverty. Commenting on criticisms made last week by Vincent Nichols, the Archbishop of Westminster, Archbishop Welby said religious bodies had seen an increase in dependency on their charity. He said: “I am entirely with him.”
The criticism, which also saw 27 Church of England bishops write a letter attacking the cuts, prompted David Cameron to write a newspaper article in which he said of Archbishop Nichols’s view: “I disagree with it deeply.”
Today, two single parents lost a legal challenge to the benefits cap after Court of Appeal judges upheld an earlier ruling that the policy was lawful.
