Benefits cuts prompt sofa bed advice from welfare minister

Around 40,000 people in Wales will be £11 a week worse off on average with the changes

Children of families affected by housing benefit cuts could use a sofa bed when visiting a separated parent, the welfare minister says.

Lord Freud also said families with young children in social housing who have more than their allocated number of bedrooms could "earn more money".

Labour MPs said the comments to the Welsh Affairs Committee were offensive.

The UK government is cutting housing benefit for recipients living in properties that have a spare room.

The under-occupancy rule will leave about 40,000 households in Wales £11 a week worse off on average, according to the Welsh government.

Lord Freud appeared before the committee in Westminster on Tuesday as MPs looked at the impact of the housing benefit changes.

Chair David Davies, the Conservative MP for Monmouthshire, asked him whether separated families could use sofa beds for children visiting at weekends.

Lord Freud replied: "Some people may find it is worthwhile spending the extra £12 a week to have that facility [the penalty for having an extra bedroom].

"Others will use the sofa bed.

"The issue is that dual-provision of those bedrooms is expensive; basically giving a child a bedroom in two places is a very expensive thing for the state to do and currently we can't afford that."

Lord Freud, who is a minister at the Department for Work and Pensions, admitted he was concerned about separated fathers having a relationship with their children.

He added: "Clearly, these are measures about cost and one of the things is that family break-up as we all know is one of the most enormously expensive things both for the individual and for society.

"The issue is how much of that cost can the state afford to bear?"

Overcrowded homes

Responding to a separate question about families struggling to stay in their home, he said that if they did not want to take in a lodger to fill a spare room, they could "go out to work".

BBC Wales' Parliamentary Correspondent David Cornock said a number of Labour MPs had been very critical of Lord Freud's comments.

But Wales Office minister Stephen Crabb, MP for Preseli Pembrokeshire, warned that that the cost to the state of funding "family-sized accommodation" for parents whose relationships have broken down would be "an enormous burden".

"His comments about sleeping on sofa beds were made in the context of families where the parents split apart and whether there's a duty on the state to provide benefits sufficient for each separated parent to have family-sized accommodation for the children during the same week," he said.

"Now if that's the position of the party opposite [Labour] then they should say that clearly from the front bench but that's an enormous burden for the taxpayer to pick up, picking up all the costs of relationship breakdown in that way."

The UK government says it wants to bring fairness back to the housing benefit system and that it does not expect many people will have to move home as a result.

The Department of Work and Pensions says it is making the changes at a time when thousands of people in Wales are on housing waiting lists or living in overcrowded homes.