Liam Byrne chose an interesting line of attack at a very testy Work and Pensions Questions today. The whole session had been rather like a mounting pile of passive aggressive notes on a fridge, with ministers rising to answer questions by saying ‘I’m glad the honourable member has asked me about such and such a policy because it gives me the opportunity to cite new figures showing we’re doing very well and that the last Labour government made a terrible mess of everything’. Byrne decided to raise the underoccupancy cut/’bedroom tax’/’spare room subsidy’ as his topical question. Here is the exchange:
Liam Byrne: I wonder if the Secretary of State will tell the House whether he thinks the bedroom tax is proving a runaway success?
Iain Duncan Smith: It is proving a success because what it’s doing is finally drawing a light onto the failure of the last government to sort out the mess that was in social housing, a housing benefit bill that doubled in ten years, set to rise by another £5billion, and after all I never hear from him or anybody on the other side about their failure because they left so many people, a quarter of a million in overcrowded accommodation, a waiting list that had grown to 1.5million and when he gets up, perhaps he’d like to tell us is he going to reverse this policy or is he not?
LB: If the Secretary of State thinks the bedroom tax has been a success then he is living in a different planet! Back in 2011 the pensions minister said to the House that this bedroom tax would solve overcrowding. On the BBC this morning, we hear that there are houses lying empty from Teeside to Merseyside. They are not overcrowded, Mr Speaker, they are empty! We have councils up and down the country saying arrears are up 300%. We’ve got military families saying they have been lied to and cheated. When is the Secretary of State going to realise this costs more than it saves and this government should be taxing mansions, not bedrooms?
IDS: Well, just let me tell him something on the empty homes. They left huge amounts of empty homes when they left. It was something like 710,000 empty homes now, 73,000 below the peak in 2008 under them. 259,000 long term empty homes, down 20,000 since they left office. And the reality is this. The party opposite, the party opposite left a shambles and what we’ve got now is people in overcrowded accommodation never once do they hear from the Labour party about them, they are having to suffer while we subsidise to nearly £1 billion people who live in houses with spare rooms. Let him perhaps one day say if he is not, if he ever got into office going to reverse this, why doesn’t he stop moaning about it?
There was clearly a news hook for raising this benefit policy as the BBC has been running stories on its efficacy all day. Byrne clearly decided to attack it even though he must have known that Duncan Smith was going to aim straight for his weak spot, which is whether he would reverse the policy if he hates it so much? Byrne couldn’t answer. And therein lies Labour’s problem. It has already had to drive back over months of wailing about the cuts to child benefit to say that it would not reintroduce this payment for higher earners. Now Byrne finds himself trying to criticise a policy without being able to say what he would do because he wants to play two cards at one: compassion and responsibility. He cannot choose between the two because to go for the former would undermine the work the two Eds have done on the party having ‘iron discipline’ on spending, and to pick the latter would provoke howls of protest from those further left than he (read Owen Jones’ latest Independent column for evidence of this). Duncan Smith was able to argue that it was not compassionate to oppose the cut because of the number of families in overcrowded accommodation. Byrne misfired on both counts today.
It is strange that Byrne chose an attack on which he is so clearly poorly defended. The Tories are taking great delight in ramping up their ‘well, would you reverse it?’ attacks, and today he gave them another opportunity to do so.
P.S. At least Byrne tried to engage with the policy itself, unlike Ian Austin, who decided to give Iain Duncan Smith a lecture about hunger when he asked his question. Unfortunately for him, Mr Steerpike was watching...
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