The government revealed it has not tried to calculate how many people cannot pay their rent because of the freeze on housing benefit rates.

The admission has been made by the Work and Pensions Minister, Mims Davies, in response to the parliamentary question ‘To ask the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, if he will make an estimate of the number and proportion of people in receipt of Local Housing Allowance who were not able to meet their housing costs in the last 12 months.’

The written reply was ‘It is not possible to make such an estimate as data is not available on whether people meet their housing costs.’

The news comes as the claimants of the Local Housing Allowance (LHA) face a third year of their payments being frozen in cash terms. It means that housing support provided by the Government does not reflect rents as they are today. Instead, they are linked to market rents as they were in 2019.