16 October 2023

With the Chancellor’s 2023 Autumn Statement approaching, Glass Door joined 18 other organisations in writing a joint letter urging the restoration of Local Housing Allowance (LHA) rates to cover the bottom 30% of rents in a given area.

LHA rates determine how much housing benefit people can get, but have been frozen for years while rents have sky-rocketed. News site Government Business covered the letter, including a quote from it:

Ahead of the Autumn Statement (now confirmed for November 22), we urge you to restore LHA rates to cover the bottom 30th percentile of local rents, as is your stated policy. There is wide consensus that an end to the freeze is now vital if the government is to tackle needless suffering due to record levels of homelessness and destitution.

One piece of context given in the article is the government’s latest statistics on statutory homelessness in England: “between April 2022 and March 2023, almost 300,000 households were owed a homelessness duty by their council due to either experiencing or being threatened with homelessness, a 6.8% increase on the previous year.”

The article also quoted Glass Door’s CEO, Jo Carter:

These extremely worrying statistics reflect what we are seeing daily on the front-line. The increasing unaffordability of the private rented sector is pushing more and more people towards homelessness. To address this housing crisis it is vital that the government takes the immediate step of raising Local Housing Allowance (LHA) rates to cover the bottom 30% of rents in a given area.

The full article can be found here: https://governmentbusiness.co.uk/news/16102023/hunt-urged-unfreeze-local-housing-allowance-combat-homelessness