Chris Curtis

I sit on the Housing, Communities and Local Government Committee, and we have discussed raising LHA a lot. However, the Conservatives’ proposal goes even further, and would ultimately have a real effect on the temporary housing bill. Last year, councils in England spent £2.9 billion on temporary accommodation. In London, the number of homeless children in such accommodation is equivalent to at least one in every classroom—if you cut in one place, it whacks the cost up somewhere else. That is before we get on to the wider costs, including disrupting schooling, parents being forced out of work, and pressure on the NHS. Most horrifically of all, in the six years since 2019, 104 children died with temporary accommodation recorded as contributing to their vulnerability, ill health or death. Seventy-six of those children were under the age of one. We all accept that policies involve trade-offs, but that is probably one that we should all find pretty difficult to stomach. For the Conservatives to put forward such a policy without even having modelled its impact on temporary accommodation and wider impact on the welfare bill, shows that those proposals have not been well thought through. Yes, we need to come up with sustainable ways to address the welfare bill. We will see more from the reviews that are coming forward, and I will be proud to support them.