Lib Dem chief secretary to the treasury Danny Alexander has published a robust defence of the Coalition’s welfare reforms in The Sun on Sunday. Here’s how it starts:
Last week a young woman came to talk to me about her housing situation. Her frustration was obvious. She was working hard in a low-paid job and was stuck in an overcrowded home with a young family and desperately needed to move to a bigger home. She couldn’t understand why she had to wait so long to get a home that was the right size for her and her family. It’s a story that will be familiar to Sun readers across the country.
But this young woman’s frustration would have quickly changed to disbelief if she’d also known about Labour’s better-off bedroom blockers. Right now, there are thousands of families with children who are forced to share a bedroom with their parents. In Scotland alone, there are nearly 60,000 living in homes that are too small for the size of their family. And during Labour’s 13 years in government, waiting lists in England almost doubled — from just over one million to nearly 1.8million households.
But despite millions of people waiting for a decent home, Labour continued to hand out around £75million a year to subsidise the lifestyles of high-earning social tenants. Social tenants live in homes that are let at low rents to people in housing need. They are usually provided by councils and not-for-profit organisations such as housing associations. Under Labour’s rules, such tenants — reported to include the likes of Bob Crow, the RMT union general secretary who earns £145,000 a year — have their rent subsidised by you and me. Even Labour MPs were able to get in on the act. Frank Dobson lived in social housing when he was earning a six-figure salary as a Cabinet minister under Tony Blair, claiming he “wouldn’t be able to afford” to pay market rents.
There are about 20,000 households with an income of more than £60,000 being subsidised in this way. Each of these households receive thousands of pounds from the taxpayer every year. This is unfair and wasteful, yet during 13 years of government, Labour did nothing to bring it to an end. Where Labour failed, the Coalition is putting things right.
Danny lists the measures taken by the Coalition to, in his words, “make sure the wealthy pay their fair share”:
- the cap on the total amount of benefits households can claim at £26,000, the average annual income;
- the end of the subsidy on spare rooms (aka ‘bedroom tax’) which he says will “help free up some of the one million bedrooms not being used in this country and ease pressure on housing stock”;
- giving social landlords the power to charge tenants with an income of more than £60,000 a fair level of rent;
- a new super-duty ‘Mansion Tax’ of 15% on the purchase of homes worth more than £2 million by certain companies; and
- by increasing to £10,000 the amount you can earn without paying income tax.
He concludes:
If you are working full-time on the national minimum wage your income tax bill will have been cut in half. And everyone who had their tax rate doubled by Gordon Brown’s 10p shambles will be paying no tax at all. Next April, that tax cut will go up to £700. So from April 2014, there will be no income tax at all on the first £10,000 of your salary. That was the Lib Dem promise in 2010. And we have delivered.
You can read Danny’s article in full here.