̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge - welfare

Queen Elizabeth I would tell Boris to tax the rich rather than cut universal credit, a new book argues

ta385 — Mon, 11 Oct 2021 09:00:00 +0000

̽��ֱ��Tudor Monarch introduced the world’s first universal welfare state in 1601, groundbreaking at the time, in response to repeated plague outbreaks and famines. ̽��ֱ��‘Poor Laws’ required all of England’s 10,000 parishes to take responsibility for their poor – anyone who refused to contribute could face prison. For the next 200 years, England was better placed to weather plagues, crop failures, and recessions than anywhere else in Europe and it laid the foundations for the Industrial Revolution.

Simon Szreter, Professor of History and Public Policy at Cambridge and co-author of After ̽��ֱ��Virus – Lessons from the Past for a Better Future, said: “ ̽��ֱ��evidence of history is that societies and economies fare much better with a strong welfare state and when you cut welfare to make savings, you damage society and the economy.

“Elizabeth was able to introduce an extraordinary and comprehensive response to the problems that had worried her for so long. Her ‘Poor Laws’ of 1598 and 1601 put the responsibility on local communities to care for their neighbours to make sure no one would fall into destitution. This included orphans, widows, the old, infirm, sick, involuntarily unemployed and single mothers and their children. This was the world’s first social security and welfare system – nothing like this had existed before.”

In After ̽��ֱ��Virus, Szreter and his co-author Hilary Cooper, a former government economist and senior policy maker, explore why the UK was so unprepared for the Covid-19 pandemic and suffered one of the highest death rates and worst economic contractions of the major world economies.

̽��ֱ��book draws lessons from history and its authors say that ‘Good Queen Bess’, as Elizabeth I became known, was truly revolutionary and would not have accepted Boris Johnson’s government’s cut to universal credit. ̽��ֱ��£20 weekly increase to universal credit was introduced last year in response to the Covid-19 pandemic, but it has been controversially halted in October 2021.

Cooper, an expert in labour markets, children’s services and local development, said: “Elizabeth would absolutely have taxed the rich to support the poor in the aftermath of a virus that has claimed the lives of nearly 140,000 people in the UK.

Cooper said: “ ̽��ֱ��lesson today is the same: we cut welfare – including education and health - at our peril. Covid-19 hit the poorest the hardest, with death rates highest in deprived areas and among people of colour. We must learn from the successes from our past and start investing in our population’s wellbeing instead of repeating the mistakes of austerity.”

Szreter, Fellow at St John’s College, said: “Britain had the world’s first welfare state – put in place 400 years ago by Elizabeth I – and the country actually became richer for it. With an unavoidable responsibility to provide for the poor the wealthy increased their philanthropy, funding alms houses, schools, apprenticeships and hospitals to prevent them falling into hardship in the first place.

“It was a welfare system that worked because the prosperous set about contributing and investing in their fellow citizens while Justices of the Peace rigorously enforced payments into the poor law funds. With the old and the sick cared for, the young in particular were liberated to follow the work, migrating to towns and cities where new jobs were becoming available, secure, too, in the knowledge that their parish would support them if things didn’t work out.

“This security ended famine nearly 150 years ahead of other European nations and paved the basis for Britain to emerge as the world’s first industrial nation. ̽��ֱ��labour mobility and rapid urban growth that was unique to Britain in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was facilitated by the security the poor law provided.”

Szreter’s research encompasses economic, social and public health history. He was the first non-American to win the American Public Health Association’s Viseltear Prize. He added: “This week’s cuts to universal credit and the continued inflexibility of the five-week wait to receive benefits will not encourage anyone to take risks in today’s labour market, while the dire state of social care leaves many unable to move from where they can easily care for ageing relatives. Welfare savings are simply a false economy.”

Although the book offers optimism and a clear manifesto for change, it also offers a warning – that Covid-19 is a ‘dress rehearsal’ for bigger crises ahead. Cooper explained: “Covid-19 is a warning shot across our bows, there are going to be many more global crises – climate change and biodiversity collapse are the big threats. Perhaps Covid-19 will be the warning the world needed to learn lessons from the past.”

Reference

After the Virus: Lessons from the Past for a Better Future by Hilary Cooper and Simon Szreter is published by Cambridge ̽��ֱ�� Press.

A new book about how Covid-19 rocked the world argues that Elizabeth I would have supported the poor in the aftermath of the pandemic.

̽��ֱ��evidence of history is that societies and economies fare much better with a strong welfare state

Simon Szreter

National Portrait Gallery, London

Queen Elizabeth I by unknown continental artist (c.1575), NPG 2082.

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Military spending did not 'crowd out' welfare in Middle East prior to Arab Spring

fpjl2 — Tue, 24 Jul 2018 11:00:34 +0000

Research casts doubt on the widely-held view that spiralling military expenditure across the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) 'crowded out' investment in healthcare and public services, leading to civil unrest that eventually exploded in the Arab Spring revolutions.

̽��ֱ��so-called 'guns versus butter' or 'welfare versus warfare' hypothesis – that prioritised military spending resulted in neglect of health and education, thereby creating conditions that fomented public rebellion – is considered by many experts to be a root cause of the uprisings that gripped the region during 2011.

However, a team of researchers who analysed economic and security data from MENA nations in the 16 years leading up to the Arab Spring found no evidence of a trade-off between spending on the military and public services, specifically healthcare.

̽��ֱ��researchers from Cambridge and the Lebanese American ̽��ֱ�� argue that much of the evidence for the ‘guns versus butter’ causal link come from analyses of wealthy European nations, which has then been assumed to hold true for the Middle East.

They say the study’s findings, published today in the journal Defence and Peace Economics, provide a “cautionary note” against a reliance on simplistic correlations based on data from OECD nations to draw important policy conclusions about the causes of turmoil in the Middle East.

“Our research finds reports of this apparent spending trade-off prior to the Arab Spring to be somewhat spurious,” said Dr Adam Coutts, based at Cambridge ̽��ֱ��’s Department of Sociology.

“Academics and policy-makers should be careful in assuming that models and results from studies of other regions can be transplanted onto the Middle East and North Africa,” he said.

“Determining the cause of unrest is a rather more complex task than some experts may suggest. Historical experiences and political economy factors need to be considered.”

While only Saudi Arabia is in the top ten global nations for military spending in terms of hard cash, when calculated as a share of GDP six of the top ten military spenders are MENA nations.

Coutts and colleagues ran World Bank data through detailed statistical models to explore the trade-off between spending on military and on welfare – health, in this case – of 18 different MENA nations from 1995 up to the start of the Arab Spring in 2011.

̽��ֱ��team also looked at casualties resulting from domestic terror attacks in an attempt to estimate security needs that might have helped drive military spending in a region plagued by terrorism.

They found no statistically significant evidence that increased military spending had an impact on health investment. “Contrary to existing evidence from many European nations, we found that levels of military expenditure do not induce or affect cuts to healthcare in the Middle East and North Africa,” said co-author Dr Adel Daoud from Cambridge’s Centre for Business Research.

̽��ֱ��researchers also found no evidence for casualties from terrorism affecting either health or military spending – perhaps a result of the routine nature of such occurrences in the region.

“There may have been a policy adaptation in which regional conflicts and security threats are no longer the main influence on government security and military spending decisions,” said Daoud.

Adam Coutts added: “It has been argued that Arab populations accepted an ‘authoritarian bargain’ over the last forty years – one of societal militarisation in return for domestic security – and that this came at the expense of their welfare and social mobility.

“However, health and military spending cannot be predicted by each other in this troubled region. Policy analysts should not single out military spending as a main culprit for the lack of investment in public goods.

“Once again we find that straightforward explanations for unrest in the Middle East and North Africa are tenuous on close analysis.”

Findings dispute 'guns versus butter' narrative as a major factor behind the Arab Spring. Researchers caution against uncritically applying lessons from Western nations to interpret public policy decisions in the Middle East.

Policy analysts should not single out military spending as a main culprit for the lack of investment in public goods

Adam Coutts

Hossam el-Hamalawy

Medics transferring injured protesters in Abbassiya Square, Egypt

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Cutting welfare to protect the economy ignores lessons of history, researchers claim

tdk25 — Fri, 02 Dec 2016 06:00:14 +0000

Cutting welfare and social care budgets during times of economic hardship is an “historically obsolete” strategy that ignores the very roots of British prosperity, a group of Cambridge academics have warned.

Writing in the leading medical journal, ̽��ֱ��Lancet, a team of researchers argue that squeezing health and welfare spending in order to reduce taxes, and on the basis that these are luxuries that can only be afforded when times are good, overlooks a critical lesson of British history – namely that they are central to the nation’s economic success.

̽��ֱ��authors are all part of a group based at St John’s College, ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge, which is studying the causes of health inequalities and looking at how research in this area can be used to inform policy interventions.

Drawing on recent research, they argue that the concept of a British welfare state, widely thought to have begun after the Second World War, actually dates back to a “precocious welfare system” forged during the reign of Elizabeth I, which was fundamental to England’s emergence as “the most dynamic economy in the world”.

While the Chancellor of the Exchequer has said that there will be no further welfare savings during the present Parliament beyond those already announced, the paper is directly critical of the continuation of those existing policies, which have reduced welfare spending overall in the name of economic austerity.

Referring to the statement made by the former Prime Minister, David Cameron, that “you can only have a strong NHS if you have a strong economy”, the authors argue: “ ̽��ֱ��narrow view that spending on the National Health Service and social care is largely a burden on the economy is blind to the large national return to prosperity that comes from all citizens benefiting from a true sense of social security.”

They continue: “There are signs that Theresa May subscribes to the same historically obsolete view. Despite her inaugural statement as Prime Minister, her Chancellor’s autumn statement signals continuing austerity with further cuts inflicted on the poor and their children, the vulnerable, and infirm older people.”

By contrast, the paper argues that a universalist approach of progressively-funded health and welfare spending is an integral part of economic growth, and something that modern states cannot afford to do without. That conclusion is echoed in a new educational film, developed from work by Simon Szreter, Professor of History & Public Policy at Cambridge and a co-author of the Lancet piece.

“We are arguing from history that there needs to be an end to this idea of setting economic growth in opposition to the goal of welfare provision,” Professor Szreter said. “A healthy society needs both, and the suggestion of history is that they seem to feed each other.”

Perhaps surprisingly, the paper traces that feedback loop to the Tudor era, and specifically the Elizabethan Poor Laws in 1598 and 1601. These enshrined in law an absolute “right of relief” for every subject of the Crown, funding the policy with a community tax and applying both through the local Parish.

̽��ֱ��authors say that this not only represented the world’s first social security system, but also made the elderly less reliant on their children for support, increased labour mobility, enabled urban growth and eased Britain’s transition to an industrial economy. ̽��ֱ��system also maintained a level of demand by supporting the purchasing power of the poor when food prices rose.

Rather than stifling Britain’s economy, the paper argues that the system was therefore essential to helping the country to become the most urbanized society in the world, and the world’s leading economy, between 1600 and 1800. Although the population more than doubled during this time, key indicators of prosperity - such as life expectancy - actually improved.

“Overall, it facilitated the most sustained period of rising economic prosperity in the nation’s history,” the authors observe.

̽��ֱ��authors go on to link the economic growth that the nation experienced under the welfare state after 1945 with similar universalist principles of progressively-funded health and welfare provision, arguing that these stimulated a dynamic period of per capita economic growth, and cut the rich-poor divide to an all-time low during the 1970s.

Conversely, they argue that the economy has stagnated when such principles have been abandoned. ̽��ֱ��Poor Law Amendment Act of 1834 overhauled the earlier Elizabethan Laws in an effort to prevent abuses of the system that were felt to be draining the pockets of honest taxpayers. Infamously, this involved providing relief through workhouses in which the appalling conditions, seared into social consciousness by authors like Charles Dickens, were so bad that only the truly destitute sought their help.

̽��ֱ��study suggests that there is no evidence that this approach, which came close to criminalising the poor, actually brought about much economic benefit. In fact, British growth rates gradually fell behind the country’s rivals’ after 1870 - and only recovered after 1950, in the postwar decades of the revived, universalist welfare state.

̽��ֱ��authors also point out that to cut welfare budgets because this will relieve taxation on “hard-working families” implies that those who need welfare are somehow unproductive. Just as the Victorian 1834 measures attempted to address a perceived problem with the “idle poor”, current strategies often dub benefits claimants, directly or indirectly, as “scroungers”.

“ ̽��ֱ��interests of the poor and the wealthy are not mutually opposed in a zero-sum game,” the authors conclude. “Investment in policies that develop human and social capital will underpin economic opportunities and security for the whole population.”

̽��ֱ��paper, Health and welfare as a burden on the state? ̽��ֱ��dangers of forgetting history is published in ̽��ֱ��Lancet.

Amid ongoing welfare cuts, researchers argue that investment in health and social care have been integral to British economic success since 1600.

There needs to be an end to this idea of setting economic growth in opposition to the goal of welfare provision. ̽��ֱ��suggestion of history is that they seem to feed each other.

Simon Szreter

Peter Higginbotham via Wikimedia Commons

Dinner time in St Pancras Workhouse, London, 1911. Workhouses, established under the Poor Law Amendment Act, were part of a Victorian programme that cut universal welfare support and stigmatised many poor people as “unproductive”.

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Drowning in a paper sea: India’s welfare efforts failed by its peculiar bureaucracy

sjr81 — Wed, 20 Jul 2016 23:01:44 +0000

One of the world’s largest anti-poverty measures – a scheme designed to guarantee 100 days’ work to poor, rural households in India – has become bogged down in a bureaucratic quagmire, according to recently-published research.

̽��ֱ��Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act, 2005 (MNREGA) is the subject of Paper Tiger by Cambridge anthropologist Nayanika Mathur. ̽��ֱ��Act covers all of India’s rural population (or about 70% of India’s 1.3 billion people) and is supposed to guarantee work for unskilled labourers at the minimum wage.

Launched amid huge fanfare in February 2006, MNREGA’s performance continues to be the object of strenuous debate in India. “MNREGA was put forward as a radical, progressive move, enshrining the right to work,” said Mathur. “This was a sophisticated legislation that potentially has a lot of promise. But I wanted to see first hand how a law authored by elites in New Delhi, in English, gets put into practice in one of the poorest parts of India.”

Mathur chose to study this welfarist statute through an innovative anthropological method: embedding herself within the development bureaucracy of the state in a remote and impoverished Himalayan district.

She spent a total of 18 months following the implementation of MNREGA through different levels of the Indian state. Almost a year was spent living in the town of Gopeshwar in Chamoli district, in the remote central Himalayan state of Uttarakhand. With its high levels of poverty, unemployment and distress out-migration, Mathur chose to base her research in the Himalaya to see how MNREGA was – or wasn’t – being put into practice at a local level.

“ ̽��ֱ��locals thought I was very odd,” said Mathur. “They weren’t suspicious of me, but they couldn’t understand why I was there in the first place. ̽��ֱ��bureaucrats, in particular, didn’t think anything they do is of worth and feel very neglected and distant from the centre. It took months for the awkwardness to subside and for me to be accepted. But the surprise they felt at having someone take (what they consider) their dull, repetitive bureaucratic work seriously, never quite left them.”

As Mathur followed the MNREGA around the high Himalaya she was surprised to hear it described as an “unimplementable” programme. Despite the desperate need for employment opportunities in rural Himalaya, the welfare scheme was conspicuous by its absence. Paper Tiger, as it meticulously traces the implementation of the MNREGA, presents some surprising findings.

̽��ֱ��book argues that MNREGA has largely failed, not because of corruption (as is commonly assumed), but because of its anti-corruption measures. In her role as a participant-observer in small, crumbling government offices in Himalayan India, Mathur found that the legal requirement for transparent functioning had led to an exponential increase in the paperwork demanded of the state bureaucracy. Along with its sheer laboriousness and complexity, this paperwork was intervening in the traditional system of operation of welfare leading to a complete paralysis in welfare.

̽��ֱ��extreme reliance on paper, documents, and files in the Indian bureaucracy has a complicated history in India and can be traced back to the operations of the British colonial state in India. Mathur argues that the seemingly-new drive to hold the contemporary Indian state accountable to its citizenry is, in fact, aggravating the documentary foundations of its bureaucracy.

“Ironically, it is the requirements to render the Indian state transparent and accountable that introduced a crisis of implementation with MNREGA,” notes Mathur.

̽��ֱ��drive for transparency at a national level also produced problems specific to the region where Mathur conducted her research. In order to stem corruption, a directive was issued asking for all wages to be paid through bank accounts. This created huge problems in the Himalayas where there are very few bank branches, and those that do exist were located miles away from most villages.

Most problematically, women were at risk of losing control over their own wages as they became dependent either on middlemen or male relatives to operate bank accounts for them. Unwittingly, the push for financial transparency had ended up creating an anti-women system.

Despite its evident problems, Mathur believes the Act is a clever, canny piece of legislation. In Paper Tiger, she uses the crisis in the implementation of MNREGA as a case study that helps make broader arguments about the nature of the state – and what it means when welfare schemes are found not to be working as they should.

Added Mathur: “My study of the operations of the state in the Indian Himalaya, allows for an understanding of the failure of the developmental Indian state that is not predicated upon corruption, violence, incapacity, sloth, or simple dysfunction.”

“Rather, my attempt here is to make us understand what the welfare state in practice is. For it is only when we really get our heads round the very nature of the beast can we hope to ever reform it.”

India’s sophisticated laws and progressive policies fail with startling regularity. A new study locates a possible reason as to why in the convoluted bureaucratic system of the Indian state and its obsession with paper

I wanted to see first hand how a law authored by elites in New Delhi, in English, gets put into practice in one of the poorest parts of India.

Nayanika Mathur

A full-page newspaper advert used to promote MNREGA

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Honeypot Britain? EU migrants’ benefits and the UK referendum

fpjl2 — Thu, 25 Feb 2016 12:04:03 +0000

A new Cambridge ̽��ֱ�� research project is gathering “robust empirical evidence” on the experience of EU migrant workers in the UK, exploring everything from hopes and expectations to how they find work and what use EU migrants make of benefits.

̽��ֱ��research is timely, as perceptions of EU migrants undercutting British workers or acting as ‘benefits tourists’ are fuelling much of the debate in the lead-up to June’s EU Referendum.

Some MPs are warning that Britain has become a “honeypot nation” with its social security system acting as a primary pull factor, leading to David Cameron’s negotiation of a so-called ‘emergency brake’ on benefits for EU migrants.

However, critics argue that the government have been consistently unable to provide any evidence that this is the case. For example, last week’s response to a Parliamentary question on the amount spent on benefits to EU migrants was simply: “the information is not available”.

̽��ֱ��EU Migrant Worker Project will aim to fill some of that knowledge gap. By combining interviews and focus groups with new methodologies for analysing available data, the research team hope to build an evidential base for EU migrants’ experiences of and attitudes toward Britain’s employment and social security systems.

̽��ֱ��project, funded by the Economic and Social Research Council, is led by Professor Catherine Barnard and Dr Amy Ludlow from Cambridge’s Faculty of Law, and is launched today (Friday 26th February) with a roundtable discussion involving Labour former Home Secretary Charles Clarke and current Conservative MP Heidi Allen among others.

Professor Barnard said: “We hope to shed new light on the big question of how we adequately regulate migration within a socio-economically diverse EU and a post-financial crisis context. This question is central to Brexit and to the outcome of the UK's referendum on EU membership.”

Initial work has already been carried out, and a study published last October in the journal Industrial Law shows that EU migrants are using UK employment tribunals at much lower rates than would be expected relative to population size.

̽��ֱ��study, the only one of its kind, is based on analysis of three years of Employment Tribunal decisions alongside field interviews. It suggests that migrant workers from EU-8 nations use employment tribunals over 85% less than would be expected, given the size of the workforce they represent.

̽��ֱ��researchers identified various factors affecting migrants’ willingness and ability to use tribunals, including: lack of knowledge of their rights, reluctance to engage with the judicial system and, for those in the UK for a short time, a desire to maximise their earnings that is prioritised over complaints about mistreatment.

Under current EU law, EU migrants have rights to equal treatment in their terms and conditions of employment offered to domestic workers.

However, this initial study suggests that when it comes to employment conditions these may be rights that “exist more ‘on paper’ than in practice”, write the researchers.

“While we found good evidence to suggest that EU-8 workers were fairly treated by Employment Tribunal judges, navigating the system and accessing enough advice to understand the basic elements of the rights these workers are due is deeply problematic,” said Dr Ludlow.

“In interviews, we were told that largescale cuts to local authorities have had a negative impact on resources such as Citizen Advice Bureaus. These are important sources of guidance for workers who cannot afford legal advice, including workers from the EU.”

Professor Barnard said that the introduction of Employment Tribunal fees has meant that many workers are now priced out of claiming their employment rights. “If the Government is concerned about migrant workers’ undercutting employment terms and conditions and labour standards for domestic workers, our research suggests that resource needs to be directed to enabling migrant workers to enforce their rights, and to properly resourcing enforcement organisations such as the Gangmasters’ Licencing Authority.”

Unlike some other EU Member States, the UK did not impose restrictions on the admission of workers coming from the so-called EU-8 countries (such as Poland and the Czech Republic), apart from the requirement to register under the Workers’ Registration Scheme.

Over a million EU-8 workers, taking advantage of their free movement rights under Article 45 of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union (TFEU), have arrived in the UK since 2004. They enjoy rights to equal treatment in any social and tax advantages offered to domestic workers – including the payment of child benefit and ‘in-work benefits’ such as tax credits.

Barnard and Ludlow plan to use the research design from their employment enforcement study and apply it to social security tribunals, to help give some sense of the number of EU migrants who claim benefits and the nature of the cases in which they are involved. They will also interview EU migrants and those that work closely with them, to explore migrants’ hopes, expectations and experiences.

I didn’t come to the UK just to work in any kind of job

Early interviews have highlighted the importance of online grass roots communities such as Facebook groups for migrant workers seeking advice, and that stopping child benefit for EU migrants may result in fewer family units making the transition to the UK, and an increase in younger, unattached men working in the UK, who are likely to integrate less permanently within their host community.

While some interviewees are preparing to leave Britain, citing a better quality of life in their home nation (“I'm not interested in staying in the UK just because it's possible”), the researchers also found migrant success stories.

One interviewee spoke of her determination to work in nursing: “I didn’t come to the UK just to work in any kind of job. Either I’m working my way towards nursing or, if that’s not possible, I’m going back.” After struggling through bar work and learning medical English on her days off, the woman is now a nurse in a local hospital.

“Many of the EU migrants we’ve talked to so far don’t understand our complex social security system; their only interest is in finding work,” said Dr Ludlow.

As well as one-to-one interviews and focus groups, the researchers will be making a documentary and providing migrant workers with disposable cameras. “It’s another way of trying to capture the migrant experience that offers an alternative insight to words on paper,” said Professor Barnard.

̽��ֱ��project is a two-way process, she says, with minute-long podcasts summarizing relevant aspects of the law, which will be available on EU Migrant Worker Project later this month.

“What we can offer the migrant community in return is quite detailed knowledge of the law and their rights and how to enforce those rights, both to claim employment rights but also social security benefits.”

Added Dr Ludlow: “Accusations that the UK has become a ‘honeypot nation’ has become a key issue in the debate about the UK’s membership of the EU.

“By gathering empirical evidence about EU migrants' experiences of navigating the labour market and social security system in the UK, we hope to increase our understanding of EU and domestic law as it works in practice and to inform public opinion in anticipation of the referendum on 23 June and beyond.”

If you are interested in learning more about Professor Barnard and Dr Ludlow’s work please email euworker@hermes.cam.ac.uk, tweet @eumigranworker, or contact them on their Facebook page https://www.facebook.com/eu.migrantworker/. Their project website is: www.eumigrantworker.law.cam.ac.uk.

Ahead of Britain’s EU referendum, research will explore the experiences of EU migrants working in the UK, and attitudes to employment and social security – for which there is little empirical evidence, despite intense political rhetoric. An initial study suggests workers from the EU are significantly under-represented in employment tribunals.

Accusations that the UK has become a ‘honeypot nation’ has become a key issue in the debate about the UK’s membership of the EU

Amy Ludlow

Kip Loades

EU migrant workers

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Benefit changes raise pressure on country life

bjb42 — Mon, 14 May 2012 12:49:19 +0000

̽��ֱ��study, published by the Commission for Rural Communities (CRC), says that people in rural districts who rent their homes from the local authority or housing associations may be forced away by a number of changes to the way in which benefit is allocated.

In particular, it says that the 2012 Welfare Reform Act, which comes into force next year, has exposed a shortage of smaller properties in rural areas while at the same time cutting benefits from working age social tenants if they are unable to move to smaller homes.

It warns that vulnerable and younger people may be forced to move away from these settlements, even though the provision of affordable rural housing is critical to ensure that young people growing up in rural areas are able to remain in their communities.

̽��ֱ��report, Rural Housing at a time of economic change, was produced by the Centre for Housing and Planning Research at the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge on behalf of the CRC. It is being made available for free download at https://www.gov.uk/government/organisations/commission-for-rural-communities

Anna Clarke, the lead researcher, said: “ ̽��ֱ��changing benefit criteria are likely to lead to increased demand for smaller social rented properties in rural areas. We also found problems with housing quality and fuel poverty in rural areas, and concern over the affordability of the new ‘Affordable Rent’ product, which is largely replacing the construction of new social housing.”

CRC Commissioner, Professor Mark Shucksmith, said: “Changes to benefit eligibility sometimes have unintended consequences. ̽��ֱ��Commission is concerned that these changes will affect vulnerable people in rural areas in ways that have not been anticipated and will lead younger people to move out of small rural settlements.”

“Other people, too, may lose benefit unless they move to smaller homes – perhaps away from their friends and communities. There is a real danger that such places will be less sustainable and less able to support jobs and services.”

One of the main findings in the report concerns the stipulation within the 2012 Welfare Reform Act that, from April 2013, social housing tenants of working age will only be able to claim housing benefit for the size of property they are deemed to need. Those considered to be “under-occupying” their home will be subject to a reduction of 14% of their benefit if they have one spare room, and 25% if they have two or more, forcing them to search for smaller accommodation.

But the researchers found that in rural areas, not enough smaller accommodation exists. This may force people to choose between losing benefit, or moving away from their friends and communities, often to urban areas where such properties are more common.

In addition, a higher proportion of households underoccupy in rural districts, partly because social landlords often house small or young families in larger accommodation, so that if their family grows they do not have to move on.

Now it seems that many may have to do so anyway. ̽��ֱ��report points out that there is an “acute shortage” of one-bedroomed properties nationally, but that it is worst rural areas, which typically have fewer flats. ̽��ֱ��scarcity of such property means that many social tenants could be uprooted.

̽��ֱ��study also found that homes in rural areas are substantially more likely to fail to meet the decent home standard, especially in the private rented sector. They also have much higher rates of thermal inefficiency, with 56% of private rented homes in hamlets or isolated dwellings falling into the lowest category under the Standard Assessment Procedure – the Government measure used to assess the energy ratings of dwellings. “With rising fuel prices and falling incomes and benefit levels, this raises real concerns over fuel poverty,” the report adds.

Rural housing is already under considerable strain. According to recent estimates by the CRC, the population of rural areas is growing faster than urban. ̽��ֱ��ONS predicts that the rural population will increase by 16% by 2028, compared with a 9% increase in urban areas.

At the same time, affordable housing in rural districts is hard to come by. Rural England has, over the last 30 years, seen the steepest decline in the stock of social rented homes. In 1980, 25% of the housing stock in rural areas was social housing compared with 36% in urban areas. By 2007, those figures had decline to 13% and 21% respectively. ̽��ֱ��gap between average rural house prices and cheaper, urban homes is also widening.

̽��ֱ��findings of the report will be circulated to key Government agencies including the Department for the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs. Full details can be downloaded from the CRC website: https://www.gov.uk/government/organisations/commission-for-rural-communities

Significant numbers of social tenants in rural areas may have to move away from their friends and communities because of changes to housing benefit criteria, a report reveals today.

There is a real danger that rural communities will be less sustainable and less able to support jobs and services.

Mark Shucksmith, Commission for Rural Communities

Image Worldislandinfo.com from Flickr.

Chipping Camden, Gloucestershire. A new report argues that changes to the ways in which housing benefits are administered are likely to force large numbers of people who rent from the council or housing associations in rural areas out of their communities

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