How Housing Benefit Policies Leave Young People Behind

By Daniel Lewis, Communications, Policy and Insights Officer at Glass Door Homeless Charity

It is often assumed that if young people fall on hard times, they can rely on their family or social circle for support. This assumption has had a significant influence on the way policy is shaped but ignores the very large number who do not have a support network to fall back on.

Young people who might not have support networks include if:

• they have moved to a new area (or even new country) far away from their family and friends.

• their family don’t have enough space or resources to help them.

• they have a difficult relationship with their family meaning they can’t rely on them.

When policy makers do not think enough about people in these situations, it can lead to flawed policies that let people fall through the gaps. At Glass Door Homeless Charity, we see damage these policy failures cause on a weekly basis.

What are we seeing?

We are not a youth homelessness specialist charity, but rather an open-access charity welcoming anyone over the age of 18 who is experiencing or at risk of homelessness.

We run night shelters which offer a safe place to sleep and a hot meal in the winter, and year-round our team of caseworkers help people build a route out of homelessness through expert advice and advocacy. When different groups become more likely to approach us for support, it gives us an indication of who is struggling the most.

Over the last couple of years, we’ve seen more and more young people coming to us in increasingly desperate situations. Finding accommodation has become more difficult across the board, but we have noticed that it has become especially difficult for young people.

Why? The Shared Accommodation Rate

One reason for this is that young people are put at a disadvantage by the way that housing benefits are structured. Under-35s are only entitled to the Shared Accommodation Rate (SAR) of Local Housing Allowance (LHA) unless they are given an exemption. The SAR is the lowest rate available and means that they will get less in housing benefits than people aged 35 or older, who get the higher one-bedroom rate as a minimum.

Some under-35s are exempt from the SAR for reasons like having dependent children, being a survivor of modern slavery or domestic abuse, having a disability or having stayed in supported accommodation.

Accommodation providers are incentivised to prefer those who are entitled to a higher rate, as they can make more money from them. We interact with quite a few providers who used to accept young people but will now only take those who are either older than 34 or exempt from the SAR.

Given the extreme shortage of social housing, lots of low-income or vulnerable young people have no alternative to the Private Rented Sector. When their level of housing benefit entitlement is not enough for them to afford to rent anywhere, young people often find themselves pushed towards homelessness.

How did this come to be?

There were two particularly important policy decisions that helped shape the situation that we see currently.

The first was in 1996, when the SAR was first introduced. One of the main reasons that the Department of Social Security (now the Department for Work and Pensions) gave for the SAR’s introduction was that it would ensure that young people receiving benefits were not being encouraged “to leave the parental home unnecessarily”. The assumption that low-income young people have a ‘parental home’ they can stay in was clearly baked into it.

The second significant policy change came with the transition to Universal Credit in the early 2010s. Previously, the rate that someone got depended, in part, on what kind of accommodation they were living in. Someone in a self-contained one-bedroom apartment would receive the one-bedroom rate (if they were entitled to it), while someone in a room in a shared house would get the Shared Accommodation Rate no matter their age.

Afterwards, this was no longer the case, and the rate became attached to the person rather than the accommodation. This meant that two people could live in exactly the same area and type of house, but get different amounts of money if, for example, one of them was in their early 20s and the other in their late 30s. Officials from the Department for Work and Pensions described this change as a “simplification” of “the legacy system”.

There have been a number of other changes over the years, including the extension of the age category that the SAR applied to and the lowering of LHA rates overall. At every point, the people that have been negatively impacted the most have been young people without networks to lean on for support. They are the most likely to end up living in situations where they are unsafe or at risk of exploitation, or to have no choice but to sleep on the streets.

Things might also be very difficult for those who do have a family home where they can stay. Some young adults know that they will not be able to afford private rents even with housing benefits and so feel forced to stay with their parents much longer than would be ideal, in homes that are not big enough for the number of adults living there. This can lead to conflict between family members and have a ruinous effect on people’s mental health.

What can we do?

Too often, the unique challenges facing young people are not properly taken into account when housing and homelessness policies are being made. Youth homelessness is not inevitable, but the problem is immense.

To tackle it, there needs to be a combination of wider policies to tackle the housing crisis and a specific youth focused strategy.

In addition to policies that address the roots of the housing crisis more generally, it will be vital to have a focused strategy bringing together different areas of government with significant input from young people’s lived experience.

Calling for a #PlanForThe136k, a national strategy to end youth homelessness, is one way to put pressure on the Government to build young people into the system, and make sure they are not left behind. You can write to your MP or local councillors and share this blog and the campaign on social media.