Personal housing benefits / housing allowances lie at the crossroads between housing policies aimed at facilitating the public’s access to a basic necessity, and social policies aimed at improving the standard of living of the most disadvantaged groups. These are therefore social benefits that are closely linked to the cost of housing. As such, they have inflationary effects on rents, which in turn reduce the effectiveness of this policy. Whilst a significant proportion of housing benefits is captured by landlords, the public expenditure allocated to these benefits – over 16 billion euros – has limited effectiveness in achieving the stated objective of reducing poverty and poor housing conditions.
Given the importance of rental housing policy in France, both for potential beneficiaries and for public finances, seeking to reform the system of personal housing benefits / housing allowances in order to improve their effectiveness represents a major public policy challenge. The aim of this study is to propose and analyse several reform scenarios designed to reduce the inflationary effects of personal housing benefits / housing allowances.
