Do you prioritise paying the rent, putting food on the table or keeping the house warm in winter? In practice, says Laura Braddock, a single mum from Wirral, Merseyside, you always pay the rent first and improvise the rest. The monthly rent for her two-bedroom flat far outstrips the local housing allowance (LHA) she receives – and the gap may widen.
She pays her landlord £550 a month, but receives £425 in housing allowance, leaving her to make up a £125 “rent gap” out of her grocery and heating budgets. The former shop worker has a range of tried and tested strategies to cope, and to shield her son as far as possible from cost of living pressures. She may pay half the gas bill.
She’ll eat cheap pasta and beans – or skip her own meals altogether. In January, however, these strategies, and the constant juggling with ever tighter budgets, failed. She was forced to go to a food bank for the first time in years to make end meet.
It’s hard, she reflects, and the stress can affect her mental health. I’ve got no energy sometimes … It’s difficult.” Hundreds of thousands of low-income households are feeling the same pressures, said Trussell, the food bank network. Unless the government links LHA more closely to actual rents, it added, many more will be forced to turn to charity food.
The growing gap between LHA rates and local rents means more than half (62%) of private renters receiving housing support have gone without food and heating in the past six months because they could not afford them, Trussell estimated. The gap is expected to reach record levels this autumn. According to the Resolution Foundation thinktank, the average difference between rent and LHA faced by a low-income household renting a two-bedroom home in the private sector is £158 a month – rising to as much as £324 a month in parts of London.
Trussell wants the government to relink LHA to the cheapest 30% of local rents. It estimates this would lift 105,000 people out of severe hardship by 2028-29, including 40,000 children. The Resolution Foundation estimates this would cost £2bn a year.
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