More than half of London's boroughs contain more than 1,000 households that will be worse off as a result of the government's forthcoming household benefit cap, according to the latest impact assessment (pdf) from Iain Duncan Smith's Department for Work and Pensions. They are: Barnet, Brent, Camden, City of Westminster, Croydon, Ealing, Enfield, Hackney, Hammersmith and Fulham, Haringey, Harrow, Islington, Kensington and Chelsea, Newham, Redbridge, Tower Hamlets and Wandsworth.
These 17 comprise all but one of the local authority areas where more than 1,000 households are expected to be hit. The other is Birmingham. The assessment is just the latest from a number of sources seeking to predict what will happen as the government's welfare reform programme comes into effect.
Changes to private sector housing benefit - local housing allowance - are already making their disproportionate mark in the capital, where rents are so insanely high. The new government assessment follows a study on behalf of London Councils which foresees 133,000 households across the capital as a whole having to move house when the additional effects of the cap under the universal credit system begin from 2013. Whatever the final number, they will be households that are without work, are large or are both.
The now usual observations apply. One, nobody thinks the high welfare bill in London is desirable. Two, if there were more truly affordable housing that bill would be lower. Three, fewer households would be workless if unemployment were lower. Four, workless households that have to move will have to live somewhere else - that somewhere else might be cheaper but those households will still require benefits. Five, the financial savings accruing from people moving to somewhere cheaper need to be weighed against the possible social and economic costs of their having to move - false economies seem possible. Six, increased concentrations of poor households in parts of London or anywhere else seem inconsistent with the objective of fostering socially-mixed communities.
In other words, capping benefits risks doing more harm to London than good. Then there's the intriguing, underlying question. Did the government fail to spot that London would be harder hit by its benefit changes than elsewhere or did they know it full well and proceed with greater gusto as a result? Oh, and how are they feeling about all this in Essex?
