03/05/2026
https://www.facebook.com/share/18hLkyGoPo/?mibextid=wwXIfr
In 2013, the government decided landlords couldn't be trusted to receive rent directly.
So housing benefit, which had always gone straight to the landlord, would now go to the tenant instead. Give people responsibility. Build financial capability. Trust them with the money.
I'll give them this: it was a coherent idea.
It was also completely, demonstrably wrong. And the evidence was in front of everyone within about six months.
Not because benefit claimants can't manage money. Most can.
But because "managing money" on UC means making impossible choices about which bill gets paid this month.
And rent, owed to a private individual with no power to freeze your account or cut your gas off, loses that fight regularly.
The result is thirteen years of arrears, evictions, homelessness, presentations to councils, and landlords leaving the market.
All of it predictable. All of it predicted.
Here's what I find extraordinary. We know this happened. The data is not disputed. The comments under my last post were full of people who worked in housing benefits at the time saying exactly that, they told Whitehall it wouldn't work before it launched.
And the response from government has been… nothing.
No reversal. No acknowledgement. Just a continuation of the policy while the consequences compound.
In any functioning organisation, someone owns this decision. In the civil service, nobody does. The policy just carries on, zombie-like, while the housing crisis it helped create gets blamed on landlords.
We spend £25 billion a year on housing benefit. A chunk of that money never reaches the landlord it was intended for, because the mechanism routes it through a tenant who is, through no particular fault of their own, making desperate choices about competing bills.
That's not a housing policy. That's a transfer payment with a hole in it.
Point 2 of my Build Don't Blame manifesto starts from a simple observation: the private sector is already housing millions of people on the state's behalf, with public money, under a system the state designed and refuses to fix.
The question isn't whether we want private landlords involved in social housing; they already are, massively. The question is whether we want that involvement to work properly.
My proposal is government-backed leases. Long-term. Paid directly to the landlord. At a lower gross rent than the current local housing allowance, because the certainty is worth something, and the saving goes back to the taxpayer.
The landlord gets guaranteed income and no voids. The tenant gets genuine security. The taxpayer gets 100% of the housing spend reaching its intended destination, at a lower overall cost.
It doesn't invent anything new. It goes back to what worked, and adds a structure that makes it more efficient for everyone.
The question is why thirteen years of evidence hasn't been enough to change it. And the answer is that nobody in the system is accountable for the outcome. Ministers move on. Civil servants aren't measured on eviction rates or landlord exits or the cost of emergency accommodation.
The system is broken. We know how to fix it. The fix costs less than what we're doing now.
There is no good argument for not doing it. Only inertia, ideology, and the absence of anyone whose job it is to care.
