Housing benefit is supposed to ensure that hard-up people can afford to rent the cheapest 30% of homes on the market. But that is far from the reality, a new investigation by the Bureau of Investigative Journalism has revealed.
On a single day, the Bureau checked listings for 63,000 two-bed properties across Great Britain and found only 6% had rents that would be covered by housing benefit.
The average housing benefit would need to increase by £100 each month to make the bottom 30% of the two-bed properties sampled affordable.
In some cities there were no affordable properties at all.
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