Osborne’s housing benefit cuts look decidedly fragile

Published: 4th November, 2010
EDITOR'S COMMENT

THE George Osborne cuts on housing benefits were announced with a bang but now that the smoke is clearing, all is not what it seems.

At first, the anticipated cry of protest from Labour was rebuffed with confidence.

But what is worrying the Coalition much more is the growing discomfort publicly expressed by such leading Lib-Demmers as Simon Hughes, and the maverick Tory Boris Johnson.   

This is a turn of events  the Coalition probably did not foresee.

It is not so much a question of where will those families go, who are driven out of central London boroughs by the benefit cap, but what back-up services will be provided for local authorities that have to provide a haven for them.

Will they be expected to find extra funds to pay for additionally needed school places, social service facilities and hospital beds?

Has the government pencilled in the extra costs these bolt holes will need?

Or is this something both the Coalition cabinet and their civil servant advisers have simply overlooked?

Or have they thought it through and simply ignored the consequences?

If families in their hundreds are forced out of Camden, Islington and Westminster, to settle in the lower rental areas in Tottenham or Barkingside won’t Haringey and Barking councils require extra funds?

Commonsense says yes.  But this is something political circles are notoriously short of.

Apart from that, civil servants have often been spectacularly wrong with their calculations.

The most recent howler was at the start of this decade  when the great minds in Whitehall advised the government that only 14,000 visitors would come in from Poland if EU travel restrictions were lifted. By the end of the first year, more than 750,000 had migrated from Poland alone.  

The civil servants had been looking at the wrong columns showing the number of holiday visas applied for.

Again, no planning or thought was given to the resultant impact on the social services of the localities where they settled.

Pressurising the government, Camden, Westminster and Kensington and Chelsea councils, hope they may pick up about £500,000 a year each to help ease the pain for what will amount to the forced resettlement of hundreds, if not thousands, of families.   

A small sum – and not one, we suspect, that will placate the vultures circling the government, neither Boris Johnson nor the dissident senior Lib-Demmers.