There is some rare good news this April, as well as bad

Sometimes it feels like I’ve written a blog every year at this time with the headline ‘April is the cruellest month’.

It’s not that I have a TS Eliot fixation, nor (I hope) that I repeat myself endlessly, but because ever since 2010 the start of the financial year seems to have meant yet another benefit cut or housing policy change with which to cope.

This year is a bit different not so much because there is no bad news but because there is some good news as well.

Here are some examples:

• The U-turn on the withdrawal of support for housing costs for 18 to 21-year-olds under Universal Credit announced on Thursday. This was a cumbersome policy that required significant exemptions and barely saved any money but it’s still a significant change to the original pledge to make young people ‘earn or learn’.
• The Homelessness Reduction Act passed in 2017 applies from April 3.

The legislation should be a big step forward in ensuring that more people receive help earlier but despite a recent announcement on funding there are still well-founded concerns about whether councils have the money to implement it.

• Claimants already getting housing benefit who move on to Universal Credit will from April be paid an additional two weeks of housing benefit.

That may not be much consolation for the (in theory) five-week wait for their first Universal Credit but the payment (worth an average of £233) should ease the transition a bit – and it is not recoverable.

• It will be unlawful for landlords to give new tenancies on the least energy efficient property from April 1 – all rented property will have to qualify for at least an Energy Performance Certificate rating of E so (in theory) tenants will no longer be stuck paying high heating bills for the worst F and G property.
• More measures introduced against rogue landlords in the Housing and Planning Act 2016 come into force, including powers for councils to issue banning orders against the worst offenders and implementation of a database of landlords and letting agents convicted of some offences.

Remember too that it is not so long ago that I would have been writing about plans to apply a Local Housing Allowance (LHA) cap to social and supported housing from April 2018.

For all that good news, though, the suspicion remains that it will at best mitigate the impact of policies already implemented and still in the pipeline.

Despite a recent slight fall in homeless acceptances, the number of families in temporary accommodation continues to rise and the number of people rough sleeping is soaring.

“We are actually still only halfway into the post-2010 programme of benefit cuts”

The worry is that whatever the act can do to reduce homelessness will be counteracted by other policies that seem certain to expand it.

Perhaps significantly, the written statement by work and pensions secretary Esther McVey announcing the U-turn on 18 to 21-year-olds says that it is ‘in line with the government’s launch of the Homelessness Reduction Act and our commitment to eradicating rough sleeping by 2027’.

Is it any wonder, for example, that loss of a private rented tenancy is the main cause of homelessness when LHA rates are frozen until 2020 along with most other working age benefits?

This April will see some flexibility in targeted affordability funding but the freeze is still guaranteed to increase rent shortfalls for tenants.

For all the talk of austerity being over, we are actually still only halfway into the post-2010 programme of benefit cuts and rising inflation means the government is saving more money than it originally planned.

And all the other cuts remain in place: the benefit cap is also frozen at its reduced level; the bedroom tax ‘celebrates’ its fifth birthday on April 1; and cuts to council tax support will have even more of an impact when councils increase the bills significantly from April.