Rent Officers (Housing Benefit and Universal Credit Functions) (Modification) Order 2026

Motion to Take Note

Moved by

That the Grand Committee takes note of the Rent Officers (Housing Benefit and Universal Credit Functions) (Modification) Order 2026.

My Lords, noble Lords can tell from me advancing to the wrong place that I have never done anything like this before. It shows that this is something about which I feel absolutely passionate, from my role as the housing spokesperson for the Liberal Democrats and from my own experience as now patron of a local homelessness charity in Watford, New Hope, which I hope I helped not only to survive but to thrive during my time as the elected mayor. This issue is close to my heart.

I have been asked to give a few apologies to the Minister. The noble Lord, Lord Best, and the noble Baronesses, Lady Lister and Lady Tyler, all wished to speak today but are unable to do so due to genuine, legitimate commitments elsewhere.

I start by looking the Minister square in the face and saying that I know she understands this issue and that I know where her heart is. I am doing this because I feel that there are real issues here that are not being factored into the Government’s assessment and financial considerations. That is where I am coming from.

Local housing allowance is not just an abstract welfare lever; it is the mechanism that decides whether people can pay their rent or lose their home. Freezing it again is not fiscal housekeeping—that is where I am coming from today. It is a political choice that knowingly widens the gap between rents and support until families fall through it. A freeze—that is what it is—does not freeze rents, eviction notices or hardship; it freezes help and support while everything else keeps rising.

How did we get here? Local housing allowance was designed to reflect the bottom 30% of private rents. That link has been systematically dismantled from 2011 through caps, below-inflation uprating and then—the most damaging decision of all—a complete freeze between 2016 and 2020. Meanwhile, rents were rising year after year. That period matters because that was when the system tipped from strain into crisis. When the Government reset LHA in April 2024, it was not a solution; it was damage control. As the Joseph Rowntree Foundation said at the time, it was

“a necessary correction after years of policy drift—not a fix for the underlying problem”.

A one-off reset achieves nothing if we immediately allow the same drift to resume, which is what I fear is happening here. We look for some reassurance from the Minister that that is not the case. Freezing LHA again simply recreates the conditions that caused the crisis in the first place.

Nowhere is that clearer than on affordability. At current LHA rates, only 2.7%—I repeat for emphasis: 2.7%—of private rented properties are affordable. For households relying on LHA, the affordable market has almost vanished, and obviously more so in certain parts of the country. In practical terms, in a search of 100 homes, around 97 are simply out of reach. Crisis has been blunt about this, saying that housing support now “bears little resemblance” to the real cost of renting. When fewer than three homes in 100 are affordable, “affordability” has ceased to be a meaningful concept.

What does this mean in real life for the families out there who are low-waged and struggling to make ends meet? As has been said, when LHA falls short, people do not absorb the difference and make adjustments; they make harsh, relentless choices between essentials. They cut back on food, they ration heating and they fall behind on council tax—how I know that—and energy bills. They borrow, juggle and go into arrears—not because they are irresponsible but because there is nothing else to give.

Shelter has repeatedly warned that people cannot budget their way out of unaffordable rents. These are not poor decisions; they are survival strategies. They only delay the inevitable, because when the shortfall persists, as it surely will, arrears grow, landlords lose patience and eviction follows. Even in the new Renters’ Rights Act, arrears in rent is still one of the grounds for eviction.

That brings me to the point that I think the Government are keen to blur. The wonderful title of this take-note Motion makes my point: freezing local housing allowance is not a technical adjustment and it is neither neutral nor passive. It is a deliberate policy choice taken in the full knowledge of what will follow. The Government know that rents will continue to rise, although I am sure the Minister will tell me that there has started to be a slow up—I try to follow the trends. They know that freezing LHA widens the gap and, because we have already lived through it, that this leads to arrears, evictions, homelessness and—this is one of my key points—higher costs elsewhere in the system. Calling it a freeze makes it sound almost accidental, but it is not. It is an active decision to withhold support while costs rise, knowing exactly who will bear the consequences. This was not the intention of the original policy, which we would support.

The consequences are written clearly in homelessness figures. Since the freeze period began in 2016, homelessness pressures have risen relentlessly. Over 134,000 households —that is a fairly large town—are now in temporary accommodation, including 176,000 children, the highest number ever recorded. Thousands of families are stuck in bed and breakfast accommodation for weeks and months, and there is now growing evidence that some of them are stuck for years, despite everyone knowing how damaging that is for children. It is the same story with rough sleeping: it has risen from 1,800 people in 2010 to 4,800 on the single night when we do the sleeping-out count—again, the highest figure on record. As Crisis has said very plainly,

“when housing support falls behind rents, homelessness rises—the link is direct”.

Local authorities see this daily. The Local Government Association has warned that freezing local housing allowance

“undermines homelessness prevention and pushes councils into far more expensive crisis responses”.

This brings me to the Government’s preferred defence: the public finances. Freezing LHA, in my view, is not fiscal responsibility but fiscal displacement. It moves spending from prevention to crisis—from predictable support into the most expensive parts of the system. Councils are now spending an eye-watering £2.8 billion a year on temporary accommodation alone. The LGA has said that this is money spent

“reacting to failure rather than preventing it”—

and, I would add, at premium rates.