The housing Traps / Housing benefit creates an unemployment trap

If we’re to move away from using housing benefit to prop up a dysfunctional housing market, we desperately need to think much more carefully about rent levels and wages, writes Rebecca Tunstall.

Housing benefit is preventing poverty and homelessness, but propping up a dysfunctional system and hindering work incentives. We need lower housing costs to make work pay and close the unemployment trap.

The traditional role of housing policy has been to improve living conditions, but over the past 20 years policy-makers have tried to extend its impact. A report for the Joseph Rowntree Foundation shows that housing benefits, housing costs, location and options for mobility can affect job opportunities and incomes.

Housing benefit, claimed by four million households, has a positive impact on living conditions, and it is hard to see how millions of households could avoid homelessness or hardship without it. But cuts for private tenants have already meant people going without essentials, and there is widespread concern over the changes for social tenants from April.

But like many other benefits, and in combination with them, housing benefit creates an unemployment trap.

Chosen excerpts by Job Market Monitor 

via How housing traps people in unemployment.