Why raise social housing rents so much?

Wokingham Borough Council will make around £19.1 million this coming year from letting its 3,000 or so social housing properties (source: supporting documents for item 97 of the 22nd February Executive meeting).

Council rents in Wokingham are already the highest of any local authority social housing provider outside London (source: ONS) but, this April, the Council is increasing them yet again, this time by a whopping 7.7%, nearly double the current rate of inflation.

When challenged, it says that Universal Credit or Housing Benefit will cover things.

Wrong on several counts. The majority of tenants claim neither and, for those who do, the benefit uplift nowhere near matches the rent increase.

Another excuse is the Council is following the Rent Direction issued by the Housing Regulator, as it must by law.

This is the biggest lie of all because the direction only sets a maximum yearly increase permitted but makes clear that councils are free to set a lower increase, no increase or even a reduction, should they so wish. Wokingham BC does not so wish. The only time it did was last year and that was only by a paltry 1% below the ceiling (ie still representing a 6% rise, in the teeth of the cost-of-living crisis).

The final sleight of hand is the Housing Revenue Account must support itself. This is the ring-fenced account that all council rents go into to pay for repairs and improvements.

It is self-funded by tenants, not Council Tax. It is in the Council’s direct control and has never once being in deficit in the past 30 years.

Cllr Rachel Bishop-Firth and Cllr Conway ostentatiously wring their hands at the plight of the Borough’s poor and mention what sterling work the Council is doing by way of initiatives to help address it.

In terms of those who struggle to pay their council rents, this amounts to a miniscule £125,000 of bad debt provision set aside from the £19 million income. Some help.

But, as Cllr Conway mentions, Wokingham is very good at ‘signposting’ people to charities, in order to avoid doing anything in the way of providing real support itself.

How about not driving people further into poverty in the first place, when it is completely avoidable? Or not seeing tenants as captive cash-cows who can be extorted at whim? Unfortunately, the Liberal Democrats are no better than their predecessors, who did exactly the same. Can you believe it took central Government to intervene and insist that councils reduce rents by 1% between 2016 and 2020 because of continual, excessive increases? It really says something when the Government believes people are being fleeced! This reduction was wiped out in Wokingham within the space of two years after the moratorium ended and it imposed maximum increases thereafter.

And 3,000 households correlates to a lot of votes in wards boroughwide, where winning majorities are typically only ever in the hundreds, sometimes much less.