First Drafts - The Prospect magazine blog

Housing minister Caroline Flint proposed yesterday that unemployed council housing tenants should be obliged to seek work if they want to hold on to their accommodation. This is all very well, says CentreForum’s Jennifer Moses in a short article for Prospect online, but Flint ignores two powerful disincentive effects at work in the British welfare system—the fact that the rate at which housing benefit is withdrawn as earnings rise creates a powerful disincentive against seeking paid employment, and the fact that a council tenant who moves house to another local authority to seek work will automatically find him or herself at the bottom of the waiting list for social housing, a powerful disincentive when you consider that social housing is typically  a third cheaper than private sector accommodation.