AQW 2709/16-21


Mr Steven Agnew
Green Party
North Down


Tabled Date: 08/09/2016
Answered On Date: 28/09/2016
Priority Written: No


Question:
To ask the Minister for Communities (i) to detail the number of people receiving Housing Benefit that will be affected by Welfare Reform; and (ii) for his assessment of the impact welfare reform will have on social housing providers.


Answer:
The aim of the current welfare change programme in Northern Ireland is to make the system fairer, more affordable and to better assist people into work, thereby helping reduce levels of poverty. The programme will change benefits for people of working age.
At March 2016 there were 161,000 recipients of Housing Benefit of which 124,000 are Working Age.
The Benefit Cap, with a household limit of £26,000, was introduced in Northern Ireland on 31 May 2016 and 313 households were impacted. The Benefit Cap only applies if someone in the household receives housing benefit. From 7 November 2016 the Benefit Cap threshold will be reduced to £20,000. It is currently estimated that potentially 2,636 households will be impacted.
The Northern Ireland Executive has put arrangements in place to provide financial support for those people impacted by the Benefit Cap. An additional supplementary welfare payment may be available up to 31 March 2020 for households with children.
The Social Sector Size Criteria will introduce under-occupancy restrictions to housing benefit entitlement for working age claimants resident in the social rented sector, based on the number of people in a household and the size of accommodation. This is similar to how housing benefit is calculated for claimants in the private sector and it could mean that housing benefit payments could be reduced for current and future claimants occupying a larger property than their household size warrants.
It is currently planned that the Social Sector Size Criteria will be introduced in Northern Ireland in January 2017. Data provided by the Northern Ireland Housing Executive (NIHE) concluded that as at May 2015 an estimated 33,916 households in the social rented sector were under-occupying.
The Northern Ireland Executive has put in place arrangements to ensure that no household is negatively impacted in financial terms or has to move house as a result of the introduction of the Social Sector Size Criteria. A supplementary welfare payment will be made to Housing Benefit claimants who have their Housing Benefit reduced as a result of the Social Sector Size Criteria, will be available to 31 March 2020.
In addition to other benefit changes Universal Credit will replace housing benefit for all working age claimants. The implementation of Universal Credit will begin in September 2017 and during the next number of years all existing working age housing benefit claimants will be migrated to Universal Credit Housing Component.
There is a robust evaluation strategy in place to monitor the impact of the Welfare Changes programme in Northern Ireland. My department has published an extensive range of analyses of the main reforms, estimating the number of individuals and households that could be impacted along with the financial impacts. These booklets contain information on:
Size restrictions within the social rented sector;
The introduction of Universal Credit and Support of Mortgage Interest;
Additional Support for Housing Costs;
The Housing Benefit Caseload.
Assessments can be found at the following link.
https://www.communities-ni.gov.uk/topics/welfare-changes-briefing
More recently the Department for Work and Pensions with support from the Department for Communities have produced a range of impact assessments to support the passage of the Welfare Reform (Northern Ireland) Order 2015 and the Welfare Reform and Work (Northern Ireland) Order 2016 legislation through Westminster and these can be found at the following link
http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukia?title=northern%20ireland