§ Mr. DrewTo ask the Deputy Prime Minister whether the Government will meet the costs currently borne by those tenants not eligible for housing benefit through rent pooling following its introduction of Supporting People(a) for all tenants and (b) for those in sheltered accommodation. [86812]
§ Mr. McNultyThe Government is making additional funds available to meet a proportion of the costs of support that have identified as a result of the un-pooling of support costs from housing revenue accounts. After the introduction of Supporting People tenants who currently pay their own support costs, including those in sheltered accommodation will continue to do so. Any transitional relief for tenants not eligible for housing benefit will be met from the Housing Revenue Account, where an authority decides to provide such relief.
§ Mr. DrewTo ask the Deputy Prime Minister if he will make a statement on the Government's recent announcement of maintenance and management allowances for council housing, with specific reference to the outcome for Stroud District Council. [86813]
§ Mr. McNultyStroud District Council's management and maintenance (M&M) allowances have for many years been higher than their long term M&M targets.
Authorities in this position have had their allowances reduced gradually over a number of years to bring them towards their targets without imposing sudden very large drops in allowances. For 2003–04, we are proposing that Stroud's managementallowance will be set at £309.08, or 98 per cent. of last year's allowance, so that they will be 2 per cent. over their 2003–04 management target of £301.77. The Office of the Deputy Prime Minister proposes an increase of 4.7 per cent. in their maintenance allowance to £533.33, so that their allowance will be just below their new maintenance target of £533.37. In aggregate this represents an increase in their allowances of some 2.15 per cent.
488WThe Office of the Deputy Prime Minister has announced national average real increases of 6 per cent. for both management and maintenance allowances for 2004–05 and 2005–06. Together with changes to take account of rent restructuring, this is equivalent to an average cash increase of £268 per dwelling by the second year.
The Office of the Deputy Prime Minister is currently reviewing the allocation of management and maintenance allowances to ensure this new money is shared out as fairly as possible between authorities, while avoiding unnecessary complexity. It is
therefore not possible to say what the outcome for any individual authority will be insubsequent years.
§ Ms Oona KingTo ask the Deputy Prime Minister when he will publish the Survey of English Housing 2001–02. [86820]
§ Mr. McNultySome of the key findings from the 2001–02 survey were published on 20 August in "Housing Statistics Summary No. 13" a copy of which was placed in the libraries of the House. Since then tables have been produced for individual users on request. It is planned to publish a large batch of tables on the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister's website on 20 December 2002. A printed report will be published later in 2003, when the results have been updated to take account of population figures from the 2001 Census. (Results produced so far have been provisional in that the household figures used to gross the survey data have been estimates based to some extent on the 1991 Census.)