Half a million more people claiming housing benefit under coalition

Britain’s failure to build affordable homes has led to a soaring housing-benefit bill – with half a million more people now relying on state handouts to pay their rent than when the coalition came to power, a damning new analysis reveals.

The coalition’s crackdown on welfare has failed to prevent an explosion in the number of people relying on state help in recent years, with a total of five million people now claiming housing benefits. And with 1.8 million on waiting lists for social housing, hundreds of thousands more have, instead of escaping welfare dependency, fallen into the hands of private landlords charging increasingly exorbitant rents.