"The Bedroom Tax" war of waffle

Polly Toynbee in The Guardian kicks off the festival of f-wittery with this:

Mass evictions (1) of the most vulnerable are no way to tackle the housing benefit bill,(2) and we must do all we can to stop them... One distraught woman who is paid a carer's allowance for looking after her severely mentally ill brother (along with her own three children), said she would have to leave him to social services: his room would now be counted as "spare" because a brother doesn't count as family."(3)

1) There won't be "mass evictions", the Tory policy, as ill-judged as it might be does superficially have the reasonable aim to optimise use of existing council housing. So in theory at least, some council tenants will trade up and some will trade down; they will swap places. So this might be part of the answer, but the Tories are - maliciously and deliberately - overlooking the fact that there is no natural limit to the amount of social housing; the fact that there is so little of it is a purely political decision, it's basic Home-Owner-Ism.

2) The total cost of Housing Benefit for social tenants is precisely £ zero. The council/Housing Association (collectively referred to as "RSL") demands a made-up figure for rent which some tenants can't afford and then it gives them an equal and opposite amount in Housing Benefit. It's about as daft as me charging my kids £100 a week rent each and then giving them £100 each pocket money to help them pay the rent. So what the policy boils down to is making those people who currently live for free paying a little bit back into the system.

3) Shroud waving. Ignore. She says later on that the extra charge per "spare" bedroom will be £14 a week; don't disabled people get given extra money, why can't the £14 come out of that? It doesn't seem like an unreasonable amount to me.

She veers a bit closer to the real issue here, but then deftly veers away again:

The cuts that make most noise are those deliberately devised as eyecatching political crowd-pleasers, yet often saving small sums. Exploiting one-off anecdotes about benefit "scroungers" in high-rent Kensington palaces may have worked as a clever cover,(4) but the truth about the imminent bedroom tax is starting to emerge.

Well over a third of social housing tenants have a "spare" room and must pay an average £14 a week more – £700 a year – or move out. That's 20% of unemployment pay.(5) The north is harder hit as its social housing, on cheaper land, has more bedrooms: in Hull 4,700 families are "over-occupiers", with only 73 one-bed flats to move to. In Brighton a thousand families are hit,(6) as the council expects to lose £1m in rent arrears.

4) Spot on. Any sane person is against the cash subsidies for private landlords of £8 billion a year, although the Homey ire is directed at the tenant not the landlord, they then direct that anger against social housing generally. The hatred which the Home-Owner-Ists have towards social housing is unfathomable to me:

Claim #1: "It't not fair that the undeserving poor get to live somewhere for very cheap or for free." Subtext: I have to work hard and pay a shed load in tax and then pay rent or mortgage out of my own income.

Fair enough, so I counter this with: "We've plenty of land to build more social housing on; as long as the RSL is getting more than £80 a week in rent, then it has covered its costs; anything more than that and it is into profit, which is great - it's like Land Value Tax. Then everybody who wants no truck with 'the property ladder' can have a council house with low rent and a secure tenancy."

Claim #2: "But I don't want to live on a council estate, they are full of low-lifes. Do you not remember the horrible tower blocks from the 1960s?"

Rational response: "Well nobody says you have to live in one. You can stay where you are now if you're happy with that, and if you are renting privately, then by and large, your rent will go down a bit, win-win! The fact that other people send their children to state school doesn't stop anybody sending their children to a private school, does it?

"Further, there is let's assume a fixed number of low-lifes, one per cent of the population. If there is only enough social housing for twenty per cent of the population, then one-in-twenty people on a council estate is a low-life, which is such a high concentration as to drag the whole estate down. If everybody - including the vast majority of people who are perfectly decent neighbours lived in a council house, then a) that does not increase the number of low-lifes, it spreads them more thinly and b) the sensible policy is to try and corral the one-per cent incorrigible low-lifes into sink estates at the edge of town (effectively open prisons) which means the everybody else can live on nicer estates among nice people."

5) I really don't think that being asked to pay a small minimum is unreasonable. Price rationing is the best form of rationing. If the residents concerned are really that poor, living off welfare, maybe £14 is too high. The whole idea of working out who has a "spare bedroom" is a nonsense on stilts anyway, it's a bureaucratic nightmare and, unlike LVT assessments, really would involve "inspectors entering people's homes".

It would be far cleverer to just charge a minimum rent of £x per week per room and to dock that straight from people's benefit payments, forget about Housing Benefit. Maybe a charge of £5 per room is enough to achieve the desired right-sizing and home-swapping (if that is all you wish to achieve, rather than a bash-the-poor crusade). So some people (larger households with some earned income in smaller homes) would end up a bit better off; and other people (smaller households with no earned income in larger homes) would end up a bit worse off; the two households just have to swap places.

6) This is a land value thing. Hull is a far less desirable area than Brighton, so private rents are much higher in Brighton, so there are only 9,700 people on the waiting list for social housing in Hull and 16,000 in Brighton, and it appears that even these indirect market force means that social housing in Brighton is more efficiently allocated.

Per capita population, that's one-in-twenty-six in Hull one-in-fifteen in Brighton and in London of course it's one in ten (plus an unknown number who never even bother putting their name down because they know it is hopeless).

So it is important to look at this on a national rather than local level, so the charge per room ought to be £3 per room in Hull, £5 in Brighton and £10 in London (or whatever). Again, a bit like Land Value Tax.

And then in the comments there's the usual mix of leftie drivel, shroud waving and Home-Owner-Ist crap which I can't be bothered rebutting again, i.e.
a) blame the immigrants, or blame Labour who allowed them in.
b) social housing should be for a narrowly defined category of people - the hard-working poor. If people earn nothing they don't deserve a home; and people who have done all right for themselves (Bob Crow, Frank Dobson) don't deserve it either.
c) A lot of people are labouring under the delusion that there is a fixed or limited amount of social housing, there isn't. That's like saying "there is a fixed number of ring-tones for mobile phones" or "there is a fixed number of television sets".
d) If you don't want to pay the Bedroom Tax, then buy your own house.