Social housing benefit cap: More ‘chequebook euthanasia’ for the unprivileged?
The National Housing Federation said that 2,400 planned homes have already been scrapped as a result of the cap [Image: Oli Scarff/Getty Images].
The cap would affect around 50,000 households over the course of a year, and they would lose an average of £68 per week in housing benefit.
The Tories are claiming it will bring housing benefit for social housing tenants in line with the private sector. It was announced by George Osborne in his Autumn Statement as a way to “prevent social landlords from charging inflated rent for their properties”.
But if it affects people with what we might call special housing needs – the frail elderly, domestic violence victims and the mentally ill – then the policy crosses beyond merely saving government money and into much more sinister territory.
One may justifiably ask where anybody is going to make up the loss of £68 a week on average. The standard Tory answer is that they should find work to cover it. But elderly people are beyond working age; the mentally ill may not be capable of it; and victims of violence need time to recover.
They fit – very well – the description coined by professors Karl Binding and Erich Hoche in Germany’s Weimar Republic. They considered people with disabilities to be “useless eaters” whose ‘ballast lives’ could be tossed overboard to better balance the economic ship of state.
Binding and Hoche wrote: “Their life is absolutely pointless, but they do not regard it as being unbearable. They are a terrible, heavy burden upon their relatives and society as a whole. Their death would not create even the smallest gap—except perhaps in the feelings of their mothers or loyal nurses.”
They drove home their argument by calculating the cost of caring for such people, concluding that this cost was “a massive capital in the form of foodstuffs, clothing and heating, which is being subtracted from the national product for entirely unproductive purposes”.
How is that different from the Conservative Government’s claims about housing benefit for tenants in sheltered housing?
Tens of thousands of tenants in sheltered housing, including frail older residents, domestic violence victims and people with mental illness may become homeless as a result of benefit cuts, landlords have said.
Government plans to cap housing benefit for social rented properties from April will put an estimated 82,000 specialist homes under threat of closure, leaving an estimated 50,000 vulnerable tenants who are unable to work without support.
Housing associations and charities have warned of closures on “a massive and unprecedented scale” unless ministers exempt supporting housing schemes from the housing benefit cap.
David Orr, the chief executive of the National Housing Federation, which represents English housing associations, said: “If this cap applies to specialist housing, tens of thousands of vulnerable people will be unable to afford the cost of their home and care.
“Huge numbers of people will be affected from older people and dementia patients, to disabled people and women fleeing domestic violence – they cannot go without specialist care and support.”
Source: Benefit cap on social housing will leave thousands homeless, landlords warn | Society | The Guardian
Join the Vox Political Facebook page.
If you have appreciated this article, don’t forget to share it using the buttons at the bottom of this page. Politics is about everybody – so let’s try to get everybody involved!
Vox Political needs your help!
If you want to support this site
(but don’t want to give your money to advertisers)
you can make a one-off donation here:
Buy Vox Political books so we can continue
fighting for the facts.
Health Warning: Government! is now available
in either print or eBook format here:
The first collection, Strong Words and Hard Times,
is still available in either print or eBook format here:
I remember when ‘Care in the Community’ was a flagship Tory policy in the 80s. This resulted in the closure of many enormous ‘mental nstitutions’ and the patients becoming clients who were rehoused in the community often in shared housing with carers helping to keep them safe and looked after. This policy, while being a great idea in theory was severely underfunded and much of the shortfall was made up by charities which sprang into existence in response to a quite precipitate need.
These charities gain a considerable amount of their funding these days from the added benefits that clients/residents are allocated due to their special needs. It is this funding that is being eroded incrementally by the Tory assault on the most vulnerable in society.
These people (the clients) are often severely disabled with complex needs and severe learning difficulties. They need the rest of us to advocate for them and oppose this attack on their very existence.
From armbands and red doors to make identification of ‘others’ easier to a callous removal of support for the most vulnerable, tragically this government seems to be increasingly emulating regimes that have previously been thought to have been consigned to the dustbin of history.
With so many ‘mentally unstable’ people being put on the street; given so much unnecessary grief, knowing full well ‘Who is responsible’; Is this the real reason certain MP’s have a 24hr armed guard!
And there you have it. Whether the Tories ‘Final Solution’ was a deliberate policy or they just stumbled on it by blind ignorance the results are the same and the time for denial is long gone.
So the spokesperson for the DWP makes a very comforting comment that since this doesn’t come into force until 2018 there is no need to worry.
Does he mean they will all be dead by then anyway?
If only we were all born ‘privileged’, in ‘health’ and ‘wealth’.
This is all going to end in fears and tears…..The Cons smell blood and do not know when enough is enough….the typical bully boys attitude to life. May it all come back and bite them in their large snouts.
This government clearly hates the disabled. There will be a lot more homeless people.
TORIES DON’T CARE! AND THEY DON’T CARE THAT WE ALL KNOW THAT THEY DON’T CARE.