Published: 6 Nov 2017 by Kate Wallis

We have blogged before about the continued freeze on Local Housing Allowance (LHA) and our call to the chancellor has now been supported by over 30 homeless charities, faith leaders, MPs, and housing sector organisations.

LHA is the support that low-income families receive for private rented homes and it helps around 1.2 million households to keep a roof over their head. Since 2011, government reforms have seen the amount of money people can access for housing costs decrease, whilst rents have continued to rise – most recently due to the rates freeze that came into force in 2016.

In the long term we need to significantly increase the number of genuinely affordable homes to rent, however this will not help people facing mounting rent arrears and homelessness today. As part of our submission to the Autumn Budget we are calling for an end to the freeze on LHA and for rates to be rebased to the 30th percentile of local rents.

Over the weekend the Independent published Shelter’s letter to the chancellor of the exchequer asking for him to support the 1 million families facing homelessness because of the LHA freeze in the Autumn Budget. We would like to thank our colleagues ranging from local authority leaders across the country, fellow campaigners at St Mungo’s and Centrepoint, through to the Residential Landlords Association (RLA) and National Landlords Association (NLA) for their support in this campaign, and urge Philip Hammond to listen to our call.

If you would like to support our campaign then we encourage you to tweet your MP about the issue.

For more information, read Shelter’s letter to the Chancellor of the Exchequer on unfreezing LHA.