Impact of LHA cuts

My local council has just got round to announcing its new LHA rates from April, so using the DWP impact assessment and the Council’s website I did a few calculations. They’re pretty messy as the DWP didn’t have enough info on the actual rates of all the claimants in Basingstoke, but by extrapolating I worked out something along these lines.

There are known to be 10 households claiming at the 5 bed-rate who will lose a maximum of £173 a week, the difference between the old 5 bed rate and the new 4 bed rate (there are very few privately rented large houses in the area). The 1500 LHA claimants, in a town of around 100,000, will between them lose around £11,000 a week (£750,000 a year). But the council’s total housing benefit budget is £43m, so the savings are under 2% of the total.

Where does that get anybody? And has anyone else done a similar analysis?

Anybody dependent solely on benefits will fall badly short in four bderoom homes too.  I have a short paper analysing that situation if anyone’s interested.