MPs are continuing to press Housing Secretary Angela Rayner about the impact of freezing Local Housing Allowance rates on families in the PRS.
Florence Eshalomi, chair of the Housing, Communities and Local Government Committee, has written to Rayner after failing to get a straight answer during a committee meeting earlier this month when Rayner was grilled about the department’s priorities.
“When rents have risen so significantly, the government should look at the impact of freezing Local Housing Allowance rates on families living in private rented homes, who could face a harder time paying the rent and avoiding eviction,” says Eshalomi.
“We remain extremely concerned about the impact that freezing Local Housing Allowance rates will have on families. Quite simply, with the allowance frozen, more families may find themselves evicted because they are unable to pay their rent.”
During the session, MPs asked if equality impact assessments had been carried out before the decisions were made to re-freeze Local Housing Allowance rates. Rayner admitted that these had not been carried out, highlighting the difficulty of performing an impact assessment on individual elements.
She said: “It’s really hard to do an impact assessment on one element of the Budget when there were a number of measures that would have an impact.”
In the letter, Eshalomi adds: “If it was not possible to perform an impact assessment on individual elements of the Budget, what assessment, if any, did the department make of these two policy decisions and was an impact assessment carried out on the Budget as a whole?”
It has told Rayner to come back with a response within a month.
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