We won an end to the four-year housing benefit freeze

What was the housing benefit freeze?

In March 2020, the government froze the local housing allowance (LHA) rates, which set the amount of housing benefit that private renters can receive.

LHA rates should allow renters to afford at least the cheapest 30% of properties in their local area. But, with rents rising at record rates, by 2023 just 5% of privately rented homes being advertised were affordable to people claiming housing benefit.

Why did the freeze increase homelessness?

We know that the main cause of homelessness is not being able to afford a home. And, housing benefit is supposed to be a lifeline for people who struggle to afford the cost of private renting.

But, by breaking the link to the real cost of rents, the freeze on LHA rates pushed more and more people into homelessness.

By February 2023, 58% of private renters claiming housing benefit had a shortfall to the cost of their rent. On average, these shortfalls were £163 a month. People on low incomes were forced to find this money, or risk falling behind with their payments and potentially face being evicted.

The shortage of homes that people claiming housing benefit could afford also made it very difficult to find somewhere new to live, if they needed to move house. So, more and more people had to go to their local council for help because they were homeless.

What did we do about it?

In July 2023, we launched a campaign calling out the government for its failure to tackle record levels of homelessness. As part of this, we:

joined forces with campaigner, Vicky, who wrote to Chancellor Jeremy Hunt asking for a meeting to explain how ending the freeze would help homeless families like hers get out of temporary accommodation
worked with our Merseyside and Bournemouth hubs to gather evidence on how the freeze was affecting local people
campaigned with other organisations in the Cover the Cost coalition
held a stunt in Westminster handing out ice lollies to show the treasury that, while ice lollies should be frozen, housing benefit definitely shouldn’t

What did we achieve together?

All of our campaigning helped to put the issue to the top of the political agenda and made the government listen to our calls to unfreeze housing benefit.

In his autumn statement in November 2023, the chancellor, Jeremy Hunt, finally announced that from April 2024, LHA rates would be restored and housing benefit be unfrozen. This was a massive relief to millions of private renters and has started to bring down the number of people who are homeless living in temporary accommodation.

But, we won’t stop campaigning as we know that there is still more work to do. This is because:

many families won’t feel the full effect of the LHA rates going up, because they will be hit by the household benefit cap, which we called to be abolished in our general election manifesto

So, we will be putting pressure on the new government to make sure housing benefit remains a real lifeline against homelessness.

If you're sick of our broken renting system where people endure sky-high rents in return for poor housing conditions:

Join our campaign to fix renting

If you want to see more genuinely affordable social rent homes, so that people aren't pushed into a broken private rented sector:

Help us call for more social housing

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