Skip to main content

Housing Benefit Changes

I am pleased that the government has made two changes that I asked for to the Housing Benefit proposals.

The first was to allow local authorities more discretion to pay Housing Benefit directly to Landlords. This will enable Landlords who charge a reasonable rent to be more certain that they get paid.

The second is to defer the percentile shifts for existing claimants. This will allow some market movement to occur before the new percentiles come in. It should result in a far smoother introduction of the percentile change with far fewer people having to move.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Why are babies born young?

Why are babies born young? This sounds like an odd question. People would say "of course babies are born young". However, this goes to the core of the question of human (or animal) development. Why is it that as time passes people develop initially through puberty and then for women through menopause and more generally getting diseases such as sarcopenia, osteoporosis, diabetes and cancer, but most of the time babies start showing no signs of this. Lots of research into this has happened over the years and now I think it is clear why this is. It raises some interesting questions. Biological youth is about how well a cell functions. Cells that are old in a biological sense don't work that well. One of the ways in which cells stop working is they fail to produce the full range of proteins. Generally the proteins that are produced from longer genes stop being produced. The reason for this relates to how the Genes work (the Genome). Because the genome is not gettin...