Europe's Banks May Get €200bn Bailout

A potential €200bn (£175bn) recapitalisation of the European banking sector loomed yesterday after the French and Belgian governments unveiled a rescue package for Dexia to stop the bank's woes from contaminating the wider financial system.











The planned boost to banks' capital reserves will see national governments in line to inject new cash if the lenders cannot raise the money in the market.

The urgency of increasing eurozone banks' buffers against losses was heightened by the near-failure of Dexia, the French-Belgian bank with big exposures to debt issues by Greece and other financially stretched countries.

The deal to bail out Dexia was designed to stop the bank's crisis spilling out into the rest of the banking sector. The fates of troubled eurozone countries and the region's banks are intertwined and threaten a vicious spiral of losses.

European leaders yesterday delayed by a week a meeting scheduled for next Monday to leave time to receive a definitive report on Greece's fiscal crisis.

Belgium will pay the Dexia Group €4bn for the Belgian retail banking business and provide 60 per cent of state guarantees for a "bad bank" to house Dexia's troubled assets. France will provide 36 per cent of the guarantees, which cover up to €90bn of funding, with Luxembourg supplying the rest.

Dexia's balance sheet of €518bn is bigger than the entire Greek banking sector and is a similar size to the total assets of institutions rescued in Ireland. The bank passed European "stress tests" in July that were meant to shore up confidence in the banking sector.

France and Germany have agreed that Europe's banks should be made to raise extra capital to cushion the impact of a Greek default. The International Monetary Fund has calculated that the region's banks need up to €200bn of extra cash to withstand losses.

Alistair Ryan, an analyst at UBS, said: "If capital is to have any chance of stabilising the banks, it will need to be large: we would start with the IMF's €200bn." He said eurozone governments could end up owning 40 per cent of the sector if they supply the capital.

Markets were calmed by hopes that France and Germany would finally come up with a plan big enough to support the eurozone's banks when Greek defaults – an event seen as inevitable.

The Eurostoxx 50 index closed up 2.3 per cent and the euro rose 1.9 per cent to $1.3648.

The cost of Dexia's bailout has raised questions about France's and Belgium's national credit ratings. France's Finance Minister, Francois Baroin, stressed that Dexia was a "unique" case and that other French banks would not need bailouts. However, many believe France's Société Générale and BNP Paribas would be part of the recapitalisation plan.

UK Economy Needs More Than Quantitative Easing To Recover

Britain's cycle of rising debt and dependence on consumption to drive growth make it unlikely to bounce back any time soon.












Britain has just been through what is now officially the deepest slump since the Great Depression – pictured, the unemployed marching in London in 1930.

Britain has just been through what is now officially the deepest slump since the Great Depression. Economic data from the pre-war era is not 100% reliable, but the drop in output after the sub-prime mortgage crisis appears to have been almost on a par with the contraction following the Wall Street crash. What's more, the recovery – such as it is – has been even slower than in the 1930s.

Talk of a lost decade is not misplaced. The economy is likely to grow by barely 1% this year and will struggle to do much better than that in 2012. At this rate of progress, it will be 2016 before output returns to its level when the recession started in early 2008.

This performance looks all the more miserable when you consider the amount of stimulus that has been thrown at the economy. Interest rates were cut to 0.5% in early 2009 and have remained there. The government has borrowed £390bn in total in the last three fiscal years. After printing £200bn of electronic money, the Bank has decided that is not enough and has announced plans to do a further £75bn of quantitative easing. The image that springs to mind is of John Cleese's response when Michael Palin's pet shop owner insists that were the Norwegian Blue not nailed to its perch "it would nuzzle up to those bars and 'voom'".

"Voom?! Listen mate, this bird wouldn't voom if you put 4 million volts through it. 'E's bleedin' demised."

This is not the view of George Osborne or Sir Mervyn King, although both admit it is taking a while for the dead parrot to awake. King said last week that the UK was in the grip of a financial crisis at least as severe as that in the 1930s and perhaps the worst ever. The chancellor has repeatedly warned that it will take a long time to recover from the debt binge of the last decade. Most post-war recessions were caused by a tightening of economic policy in response to inflation, but that of 2008-09 was the result of individuals and banks borrowing too much.

Still, the mainstream view is that sooner or later things will get back to normal. Over the past two centuries, western economies have always bounced back from economic traumas, no matter how severe. It is taken as read that industrial capitalism is inherently robust and adaptable. It is perhaps time to challenge this assumption.

The first piece of evidence comes from the Office for Budget Responsibility, the independent fiscal watchdog created by Osborne when he became chancellor. Forec asting has been outsourced to the OBR, which expects growth to be quite perky in the years ahead, leading to a fall in the UK's budget deficit. Crucially, though, this is only because the OBR expects household debt to rise in the years ahead, from £1.6tn in 2011 to £2.1tn in 2015.

Alert readers will spot the circular argument here. Britain has a personal debt bubble that goes pop. Government steps in to clear up the mess and ends up with record peacetime debts itself. The cure for this is to get individuals borrowing again. Well, maybe. All the signs are that this will prove harder than the OBR imagines, resulting in weaker growth and a higher budget deficit.

This leads on to a second point, which is whether the UK variant of modern industrial capitalism is really as robust and adaptable as our policymakers would have us believe. The story of the past 25 years and more has not been of a new model of sustainable growth emerging from the old. Not since the mid 1990s has there been a period where the motor of growth has been production rather than consumption. For the rest of the time it has been the tale of asset-price booms, the withering of the productive base and the onward march of big finance. Following the bubble to end all bubbles, the taxpayer had to dig deep to bail out the banks and prevent an even deeper recession, pauperising the state in the process. A model that relies on excessive personal indebtedness and ends with the innocent suffering from extreme austerity seems neither robust nor adaptable, just bankrupt.

Britain has not been alone in its long march down this dreary road, but it has travelled further down it than any other developed western country. King and Osborne agree something has to change. The upbeat vision of the future goes something like this: Britain, despite everything, has a sizeable manufacturing base and can enjoy the benefits of a 25% drop in sterling since 2007. The UK has top-notch scientists who will deliver a new wave of innovation. It has an independent central bank that knows what it is doing and a Treasury determined to keep interest rates low. The banking system is being repaired. Credit will eventually start to flow again, taxes will at some point come down, consumers will pay off their debts and firms will start investing.

The dystopian vision of the future sees Britain displaying many of the traits of a developing country. Here's what a typical developing country looks like. It is governed by an elite and there is a gulf between rich and poor. The elite extracts economic rents from the rest of the population, then salts them away in tax havens. Developing economies often rely heavily on one commodity, which crowds out activity in other sectors. To the extent that they have an industrial base, it is as an assembly plant for foreign-owned transnational corporations. The country tends to be deficient in physical infrastructure and human capital. All too often the best brains leave the country.Now consider Britain. The country is dominated by the City, which exerts an extraordinary amount of political power. There is a widening gap between rich and poor. The rich find ingenious ways to avoid paying taxes. Large parts of the country are dependent on the public sector, while the private sector is increasingly dominated by financial services. Industry makes up a smaller and smaller part of the economy and not one world-class manufacturing firm has been developed from scratch since the second world war. Firms complain they can't find skilled labour. The infrastructure is a joke – witness the lack of snowploughs to keep Heathrow open during last winter's snow. This is not an economy that is going places: it is going south.

Economic Crisis: What Is The End Game?

The cycle of woe and uncertainty surrounding the economic crisis continues, with gloomy surveys predicting a double dip, and even fears of a ‘Great Depression'. Sir Mervyn King, Governor of the Bank of England, believes this could be the worst financial crisis ever - even beating the 1930s for gloom - and the economy is in breakdown, so what we want to know is:



















How grim are things going to get?

Yesterday various reports told us the UK was bottom of the global confidence league, 43% of finance directors were preparing for a second recession while companies had delayed or cancelled £4.7bn of spending, reports the Daily Telegraph. "Today we report the OECD's leading indicator falling for the seventh month in a row, pointing to a slowdown, and the British Chambers of Commerce warning on stagflation."

Mindful Money asks commentators what they think will happen:

While we don't know if the recent injection of more QE will do any good, we do know that it automatically invites stagflation into our economy by pushing the pound down, say commentators.

According to Mindful Money economist blogger Shaun Richards, the most likely outcome if both politicians and central banks continue with the policies that they have now is, indeed, stagflation.

But he adds: "Those who look at the past I think miss an important point which is that it doesn't have to be 10% inflation to hurt people. A continuation of 5% a year combined with wages only rising say 2% will gradually turn the screw. Let's face it this has been happening already for the last couple of years so in general people are poorer."

Investors Chronicle says that Andrew Sentence, a former member of the BofE MPC believes that inflation is a bigger concern for the UK economy than a recession."High inflation and slow growth are inextricably linked."

What happens if stagflation hit?

Stagflation is a term which is formed by joining the words stagnation and inflation. It is used in modern macroeconomics to give a description of a period of uncontrollable price inflation combined with sluggish output growth. Stagflation raises unemployment.

The last time stagflation held the western world in a seemingly lethal grip was 30 years ago in the 70s and 80s, and it is threatening to emerge from the shadows again. Such fears are dismissed as irrelevant by those in favour of pumping money into the economy through quantative easing (QE), which they think will stimulate growth and avoid the dreaded ‘double-dip' recession. But so far, this policy has failed to prompt the necessary growth.

Thursday's announcement of another £75billion worth of QE played well with the stock market, but it is unlikely to cause much cheer for long. On the contrary it threatens to stoke inflation even higher, and meanwhile, there is the threat that growth stagnates.

"Stagflation" remains a word not uttered in the polite company of the financial world.

"But there remain only a few more tumblers to fall into place for a return to that awful word that conjures up images of the "malaise days" of the late 1970's and early ‘80s, where rising inflation and slumping employment tramped down economic growth," says CNBC,

However, some economists believe stagflation isn't something to fear at present.

Azad Zangana, European economist at Schroders, says: "While the current environment feels like a typical stagflationary environment, this is set to be temporary. The outlook is more positive as we expect inflation to fall from its current level back down to below 3%, mainly due to the passing of the VAT effect from the start of 2011.

"Meanwhile, we forecast growth to improve in the second half of 2012, and so the balance between real and nominal growth will improve. To conclude that we are entering a fully fledged stagflationary period, we would need to see significantly stronger inflation and wage inflation, and a continuation of weaker growth as seen in the 1970's. In our view, this is unlikely to occur."

What other threats may there be?

Another danger, however, is the rising threat of hyper-inflation. Shaun Richards says: "Whilst the self proclaimed "financial geniuses" persist in buying every gilt they can find there is a danger of this. Also it is the nature of things that when problems happen these days with the speed of trading it happens so fast that it is better not to run the risk at all. But I see this as rising but still low.

"So for now the danger is the silent drip drip of inflation and this is the enemy. The biggest problem of all is that as I keep pointing out it should not be a problem at this stage of the economic cycle and furthermore is being inflicted on us by individuals whose own contracts protect them against it.."

And if we're being warned that this crisis beats the 1930s, what happened then?

What happened in the 1930s, given the governor believes the gloom beats this decade? This was the ‘Great Depression', where in America millions were genuinely destitute, and unemployment hit a staggering 25%. Two million Americans tramped the country, sleeping rough as they looked for nonexistent work, and malnutrition was widespread.

Southern England escaped reasonably lightly, but in the North there were pockets of extreme hardship. On Tyneside the collapse of shipbuilding left unemployment standing at 70%, prompting the famous Jarrow march.

There were soup kitchens on the streets and millions of families were subsisting on bread and margarine. In Germany, economic misery that had begun with hyperinflation in 1923 helped another world leader to power in 1933: Adolf Hitler.

So is there any cause for hope with growth and falling inflation?

Henderson's chief economist Simon Ward gives his opinion: "Assuming that an EMU break-up is avoided, the global economy may start to regain momentum from early 2012. Such a scenario depends on the US economy doing better next year, as suggested by recent money supply strength...

"Another reason for thinking global growth could revive from early next year is a fall in headline inflation due to recent weakness in food and energy commodity prices. Rising inflation has been a major contributor to the recent economic slowdown by squeezing consumer spending power and forcing monetary policy restriction in emerging economies."

And anyway, nobody knows.

Mindful Money's resident psychologist Kim Stephenson says: "Let's assume that Shaun's right..

"Afterwards, lots of people who said that we wouldn't get stagflation but something else (hyperinflation or whatever) will say - "ah, well, it depends on how you define stagflation (or hyperinflation, or whatever)", they'll twist it round to show that they were right when they were actually wrong. Or they will point to some action or event - from the Bank of England, IMF, German Government, something, and say "if that hadn't happened, it would have gone the way I predicted". Human beings don't like being wrong and they will selectively remember what they want to remember to avoid having to admit they were wrong.

"Similarly, human beings like being able to predict and control their world . The economy isn't just out of our personal control, it's clearly out of control (or even prediction) of anybody like the Chancellor, the EU etc. that are supposed to be able to control it. That is very scary. It's like when you're a child and you realise for the first time that your parents don't know everything, can't solve every problem, can't ease the pain, stop the bully or get you on the team every time. It hurts and it makes us afraid, so we desperately cling to the belief that somebody can predict it (if not control it) and that we can have some measure of understanding of what is going on. To contemplate the fact that actually nobody controls it, nobody really understands it or can predict it and that most of our predictions are going to be wrong is simply too much to take."

Immigrants Must Pass History Test To Earn UK Passport: Exam Will Cover Everything From Boudica To Churchill

Migrants will have to pass a quiz on British history and culture to receive a UK passport, David Cameron announced yesterday.

In a wide-ranging plan to ‘get a grip’ on our borders, the Prime Minister also urged the public to report suspected illegal immigrants to Crimestoppers.

And he admitted there was ‘discomfort and tension’ in some communities over the levels of migration.















Crackdown: David Cameron urged the public to report suspected illegal immigrants to Crimestoppers in a wide-ranging plan to 'get a grip' on our borders.













Pledge: The speech contained a suggestion to consider making forced marriage illegal - an idea critics claim could leave victims less likely to come forward.

Foreign nationals wanting to settle in the UK permanently have been required to sit a multiple-choice ‘Life in the UK’ test for the past six years.

But, in a highly controversial move, Labour ministers ruled it should not include a history section because there was ‘too much and it would not be fair’.

Instead, migrants are grilled on the structure of the European Union, state benefits, equal rights and discrimination.


















Yesterday, Mr Cameron said ministers would ‘revise the whole test to put British history and culture at the heart of it’.

Subjects to be covered include Roman Britain, Boudica, the Norman Conquest, Magna Carta, the Wars of the Roses, Elizabeth I, the Civil War, the Battle of Britain and Winston Churchill.

To make room, questions on the operation of the single market and on the differences between the Council of Europe, EU, European Commission and European Parliament will be dropped.

Making only his second major speech on immigration, Mr Cameron said he wanted to bring much-needed ‘fairness’ to the system.

‘While it’s crude and wrong to say immigrants come to Britain and take all our jobs, there’s no doubt that badly controlled immigration has compounded the failure of our welfare system and allowed governments and employers to carry on with the waste of people stuck on welfare when they should be working,’ he said.

The Prime Minister said that – in order to meet his promise to reduce net migration to the tens of thousands – the Government had to crack down on student visas, work visas, marriage, settlement and illegal immigration.

There were also proposals to make migrants pay a bond, possibly of thousands of pounds, before they are allowed to enter the UK. This would work to stop them disappearing into the black economy.

Plans were also unveiled to crack down on any migrant who owes the NHS £1,000 or more for non-emergency treatment.

They will either not be allowed a visa – preventing them from getting any follow-up treatment – or refused a renewal of their permission to stay.

Officials estimate the proposal to tackle ‘health tourism’ could save £20million over five years. The rules will not be applied retrospectively.

The speech contained a pledge to consider making forced marriage illegal – an idea critics claim could leave victims less likely to come forward.

A move to make firms count the number of foreign staff they employ was abandoned. Mr Cameron drew direct links between the culture of welfarism in Britain and the fact so many foreign workers, such as hard-working Poles, had secured jobs.

Shadow home secretary Yvette Cooper said: ‘Another week, another rewritten speech from the Prime Minister. Yesterday Downing Street said David Cameron would require companies to publish lists of foreign employees, and within 24 hours it has been dropped.

Will The Increased Offer Of Declining Pound Save British Economy?

Forex news. World economy is under the threat of crisis, which can become the most difficult ever and have more large-scale consequences than the Great Depression in the 20th century. This is how the current situation is viewed by Mervyn King, the Governor of the Bank of England.










The decision to expand the quantitative easing program, which was taken by the Bank of England on Thursday, is predetermined exclusively by the difficult economic situation worldwide, particularly in Britain.

Drawing historical parallels, Mr. King claimed that the current condition of world economy is characterized by the total deficit of money supply. Therefore, Central Bank emission is aimed at solving this problem, and the Bank of England decision to increase money supply is to be regarded exclusively from this point of view.

However, global crisis can only be overcome provided that there is a consensus at the highest level.


It is predicted that the entire sum of emission, ₤75 bln., will be directed at stimulating economy and increasing money offer. At the same time, Mr. King assured that inflation is unlikely to result from held recession. In general, he predicts that inflation will increase up to 5 percent in the nearest future; however, next year it will stop increasing and start declining rapidly.

Meanwhile, the rate of British pound has stopped forming long-term wave А(С) or reduced wave С(С) within long-term bear motion, which will be proved by passing pivot Mf at the point of 1.5665. Experts of the Department of Masterforex-V Trading System claim that subsequent FZR will start long-term correction wave В(С). Passing the bottom line of 1.5271 will continue long-term decline; however, before this happens GBPUSD pair will meet support at the points, where pivots MF are placed, namely, 1.5468 and 1.5296.

For Fox Sake, Call This Politics? That's Scandalous

Neither the idiot-abroad UK defence secretary nor scandal-mongering critics seem able to separate important public issues from personal sleaze.

There are, apparently, still a lot of ‘unanswered questions’ about the precise details of the Fox affair, involving UK defence secretary Liam Fox, his man-friend Adam Werritty and some murky meetings at the ministry and with foreign dignitaries. So, here are a few more to add to the list.










How could an allegedly senior Tory statesman be so unworldly and moronic as to imagine that it would be alright to take his bestest friend along on diplomatic jaunts pretending to be an official adviser, as if they were two little boys playing ministers and aides? And then to imagine, rather like that rugby-playing royal lackey, that if he simply denied it all, the video evidence would just go away?

On the other hand, the question is: how could the Labour opposition be so pathetic as to imagine that the way to criticise the Tory defence secretary is not to attack the international policies he is pursuing, but to trawl through his diary and Google photos for evidence of meetings with his chum at the MoD and elsewhere? Don’t they know there’s a directionless, disastrous war on – in fact two, in Afghanistan and Libya – with Fox as defence secretary in the political frontline? Did it never occur to the spineless Labour Fox-hunters that attacking the conduct of those foreign adventures might be more important than tracking his jollies around the world?

One possible answer for all these questions emerged when Fox, having insisted that he had done nothing wrong, came forward over the weekend to issue a half-hearted apology for, umm, doing nothing wrong but allowing others to imagine that he might have done. The defence secretary’s statement began by acknowledging that he had mistakenly allowed ‘distinctions to be blurred’ between his professional and personal affairs. Or as Conservative prime minister David Cameron put it, in attempting to defend his defence secretary on the TV news yesterday morning, ‘the personal and the political had become too entwined’.

Truer than they imagine, those statements describe not just Fox and his shenanigans with Werritty, but the entire British political class and its conduct today. Across the board, the line has become blurred between the proper public-political sphere and the sphere where things are private and personal, with damaging effects for both. This can help to explain both Fox’s bizarre antics and the opposition’s shrill reactions to them.

Spiked has often commented on the trend for public bodies and authorities to interfere in private matters, most recently through the politics of ‘nudge’. The flipside of this is the way that private and personal concerns have often come to dominate public debate.

As the horizons of political vision and debate have shrunk, public figures have come to stand not on their beliefs, but on their personal behaviour, PR image and ‘character’. Sleaze and scandal have replaced politics, with politicians more likely to be judged on their expense returns and mortgage applications than election manifestoes. The slogan ‘the personal is political’, once the preserve of the feminist fringe, has gone mainstream. All parties and leaders now try to give the personal touch (whether we want it or not) and sell themselves on their alleged integrity rather than their ideas.

The Tories are far from immune from this erosion of the distinction between the public and the private. Even the death of Cameron’s disabled young son in 2009, a personal tragedy, was turned into a public event with political consequences. Parliamentary democracy was suspended for the day, some Tory commentators claimed that this experience would give opposition leader Cameron a special insight into running the health service, and the New Labour government worried over whether the media coverage of his bereavement might boost the Tories.

So perhaps it is not surprising that even somebody like Fox, supposedly a traditional Tory right-winger, should apparently have lost his bearings and all sense of where the public stops and the personal starts. His admitted failure to distinguish between his personal relationships and professional responsibilities is symptomatic of a wider loss of a proper sense of statesmanship in Whitehall, where British leaders these days seem to have trouble understanding that they are supposed to be serving a greater cause than their own advancement.

Of course past statesmen and diplomats have been involved in far bigger scandals than Fox’s mundane meetings with his best man, but they still tended to retain more of a sense of who and where they were in the world. In 1963 John Profumo, the Tory secretary of state for war (the equivalent of Fox’s post today), was infamously forced to resign after he was revealed to have lied about his relationship with a call girl who also had an affair with a Russian attaché. But one cannot quite imagine Profumo thinking it was reasonable to carry on his private liaisons over his desk at the ministry. Yet Fox imagined it would be okay for his chum to drop in at the MoD without security clearance when he liked, and tag along to meetings with foreign dignitaries and businessmen at home and abroad, as if the secretary of state were a parish councillor visiting old dears in draughty church halls.

So Fox looks like an idiot abroad who apparently does not know the difference between a former flatmate and a serving official. However, the way that this less-than-earth-shattering idiocy has been turned into the biggest story in politics is a sign that the opposition has little more idea of the proper relationship between the public and the personal.

Ever since Tony Blair launched New Labour on a crusade against Tory government sleaze in the mid-1990s, scandals and issues of personal probity have become the basic stuff of opposition politics in the UK. Lacking any political alternatives, opposition parties have retreated to personalised scandals. This culminated in the all-consuming scandal over MPs’ expenses, which benefited no party and should have taught them all that democratic politics will be the loser when debate is reduced to the swapping of scandalous and sordid allegations.

Yet here is Labour, having learnt nothing, trying to make allegations of personal sleaze a main plank of its attack on the Lib-Con coalition government. If the left wants to get Fox – widely seen as a standard-bearer for Thatcherism – there is no shortage of weapons to use against the defence secretary. Apart from the mishandling of the defence cuts, there is the small matter of two wars that should be opposed. Afghanistan has been a 10-year disaster, going nowhere slowly. Libya, despite the government’s recent bravado over its ‘triumph’, is a misguided mission that should never have been started and the end result of which remains unclear (see The barbarism of buffoons).

Yet this week, on the tenth anniversary of the launch of the failed US-UK Afghan invasion, Fox was having to dodge questions, not about all of the spurious justifications governments have offered for the war, but about his pal’s bogus business cards.

Of course Afghanistan was New Labour’s war in the first place. And in opposition the party has backed Cameron over Libya, sharing the government’s delusions in the ability of Western intervention to save the world. With a stale consensus on such big issues, political conflict can be reduced to the relatively petty public-personal morass.

Hence for the Fox-hunters, it’s a case of ‘Don’t mention the wars – take aim at his appointment books and wedding photos’.

The end game for Fox remains uncertain, and who cares either way? In proper political terms it does not matter much whether he stays or goes. The more important damage has been done by the elevation of this petty scandal into a national furore, reducing the scope and scale of public debate still further, and further blurring the political line between important public issues and inconsequential personal affairs.

This sort of thing can no longer be seen as a distraction from parliamentary politics. In the absence of anything of more substantial, scandals and scandal-mongering have become the real stuff of British political life. If this is allowed to carry on, the writing is surely on the fake business card for the future of meaningful democratic debate. Shoot the Fox if you want, but haven’t we got bigger wars to fight?

Third Of Tenants Face Underoccupancy Cut

Cutting housing benefit for working-age tenants who underoccupy their homes will affect around a third of those living in social housing, the government has revealed.

An impact assessment from the Department for Work and Pensions estimates that limiting housing benefit payments to the number of bedrooms that a social tenant actually needs will affect 670,000 people living in social housing.


















The report, released yesterday as part of the government’s Welfare Reform Bill, says most tenants only underoccupy by one bedroom, and will lose around £11 a week in 2013/14, when the change comes into play.

Those with two or more bedrooms that they do not use will lose an average of £20 per week, the assessment says. It also found that tenants in the north, east midlands and Wales were more likely to be affected than those living in London and the south east.

Around 46 per cent of social tenants in the north east will see their housing benefit cut by around £12 a week, while only 19 per cent of London tenants will be affected.

The National Housing Federation condemned the plans. David Orr, chief executive, said: ‘Ministers have long promised to protect the vulnerable and yet these plans could force thousands of people to move out of homes they have lived in for many years.

‘As a result of these changes, thousands of couples are no longer able to offer their grown-up children a room to stay in should their circumstances change, and many single parents will be pushed away from friends, relatives and support networks.’

Under occupancy penalty could force struggling families into hands of loan shark.

Plans to slash housing benefit for hundreds of thousands of low income families could lead to a huge surge in the number of people turning to loan sharks and doorstep lenders as they struggle to pay their bills, campaigners warned today.

The Department of Work and Pensions (DWP) intends to use the Welfare Reform Bill to slash housing benefit for tenants living in homes deemed too large for their needs - even if they have lived there for decades.

The measure will hit 670,000 council and housing association tenants - a third of all working-age housing benefit claimants in the social rented sector across Great Britain.

The DWP has suggested that households seeing their benefit reduced - by 13% for those with one 'spare' room and 23% for two or more 'spare' rooms - should 'move to accommodation which better reflects the size and composition of their household' - or make up the shortfall from other income sources.

Each claimant is expected to lose an average of £676 a year if the Government succeeds in introducing the measure in 2013. Tenants will face a tough choice of either downsizing to a smaller home to avoid the penalty or staying put and paying a much higher level of rent from their own resources.

But even for those who do look to downsize there is by no means any guarantee they will find a smaller social home to move into. Around 180,000 social tenants in England are 'under-occupying' two-bedroom homes, but just 68,000 one bedroom social homes became available for letting in a single year (2009/10).

The average social housing household in receipt of housing benefit has an annual income of just £8,320 a year. The proposed 'under occupation' penalty will leave vulnerable families with a shortfall of £676 to make up from their savings or other allowances. Many are at risk of falling into debt because they simply would not have the money to pay all their bills.

Currently, around 2.5m people borrow from doorstep lenders at rates often in the region of 272% APR for new customers. A further 200,000 are estimated to borrow from loan sharks, who can charge anything up to 2,000% APR. A majority of those financially excluded are social housing tenants.

If a tenant took out a £700 loan to cover the under occupation penalty with the doorstep lender Provident, they would pay an APR of 272.2% on the loan, according to a typical example given on their website. That would mean repaying £1,274 back over the course of a year. For people going to illegal loan sharks the rate could be ten times as much.

Federation chief executive David Orr said: "The Government's plans to penalise hundreds of thousands of low income families who are adjudged to be 'under occupying' their property is harsh and regressive.

"In the vast majority of cases, people will simply not be able to make up the shortfall themselves and could end up being sucked into poverty and spiralling levels of debt.

"The Government has repeatedly said that it will look after the most vulnerable, but pushing thousands of people into the arms of doorstep lenders and illegal loan sharks is wrong and will lead to a huge degree anxiety for many of the poorest in our society."

Niall Cooper, National Coordinator of Church Action on Poverty said: "There is a real danger that people will be pushed into the hands of loan sharks by the housing benefit cuts.

"Many tenants are already struggling to make ends meet, and can ill afford the cost of borrowing from high cost lenders who routinely charge anywhere between 200%-2,000% APR for loans.

"For some, this will push them over the edge - into a spiral of debt, or even homelessness."