According to today’s Daily Telegraph the Work and Pensions Secretary, Iain Duncan Smith, is expected to announce that families will not have their housing benefit significantly reduced from April next year, as previously announced, but will be given until the following year to arrange somewhere cheaper to live.
Senior Liberal Democrat members of the Coalition are understood to have demanded the changes and some Liberal Democrat backbenchers had threatened to vote with Labour in Parliament in an attempt to block the changes .
Mr Duncan Smith will tell MPs this week that while all new benefit claimants will have to follow the new rules from April 2011, the changes will not come into force for existing claimants until January 2012.
A government spokesman said:
“This will give families more time to make their arrangements. If they have children at schools in the local area, for example, they will have more time to find another school. It will also give councils more time to look for accommodation for the families they have to move.”
It is understood Mr Duncan Smith has spent the month since his announcement consulting with ministerial colleagues, including Liberal Democrats opposed to the changes, to find a way to implement the reforms more sensitively.
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