The Government needs to 'face up to the contradictions' in its welfare reforms unless it wants to further increase funding for Discretionary Housing Payments (DHPs), an academic has told MPs. Giving evidence to the work and pensions select committee, Professor Suzanne Fitzpatrick, of Heriot-Watt University in Edinburgh, called DHPs a 'short-term fix'. Professor Fitzpatrick said: 'There is a general issue, across the cuts that there have been to housing benefit and local housing allowance, that the response is that the current DHPs are helping deal with that. 'We have to be careful about how much emphasis is put on DHPs as being the solution for some of these deep-rooted structural things. 'Unless the Government wants to continue to fund it at a higher and higher level, we need to face up to the contradictions in policy.' Prof Fitzpatrick continued: 'An increasing reliance on local discretionary forms of judgment calls to support people in crisis situations and on very low incomes is inherently challenging and problematic. 'There always has to be some discretion in the system, but it should be kept to a minimum because you have all these problems with inconsistency as well as under-spend.' But committee member Stephen Lloyd, the Lib Dem MP for Eastbourne, suggested using DHPs gave councils more control.
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