Thanks to the Bevan Foundation, thousands of tenants in Wales and the rest of the UK get more help with their rents.
Local Housing Allowance (LHA) provides people on low incomes with help with their rents. LHA rates are used by the Department for Work and Pensions to calculate how much help with rent can be received by people claiming Universal Credit or Housing Benefit. There are different rates for different types of property and for different areas. LHA has been frozen since 2020, despite rising rents.
Insights
The Bevan Foundation found that in many parts of Wales very few if any properties were offered at rents at or below LHA rates. The Foundation found that the gap between LHA and asking rents made it difficult for people to find a home they can afford and sometimes caused severe hardship when benefits or wages meant for food and heating costs had to be used to cover the shortfall in rent. We found low LHA rates increased the likelihood of people becoming homeless and made it harder to move people out of temporary accommodation.
Ideas
The Bevan Foundation called for LHA to be unfrozen and to be uprated annually so that it keeps pace with rents. Our findings prompted debates at Westminster and by a Senedd Committee, and brought together other housing organisations across the UK to call for a change.
Impact
The Chancellor announced in November 2023 that all Local Housing Allowance rates would be set at the 30th percentile of rents from April 2024, and reviewed annually thereafter. As a result, thousands of tenants in Wales will get more help with the costs of their rent, reducing or eliminating the shortfall between benefits and rents and making it easier to find a new home.
As an indication of how far behind LHA had fallen, sometimes areas will have a relatively large increase – for example, in Cardiff LHA for a two-bedroom property will increased by £40.27 a week, while LHA for shared accommodation in Swansea will go up by £23.80.
Find out more about our work on LHA here.
