News Articles
The following news articles are not written or endorsed by Torbay Advice Network but are provided for informative and self-help purposes.
New articles are uploaded on a regular basis
A Council Housing Revolution
BRIEFING: ROADMAP TO THE FUTURE OF COUNCIL HOMES
Social homes provide a stable foundation for families to put down roots and for communities to thrive.
They are the only genuinely affordable homes, with rents tied to local incomes.
That’s why we need a new generation of 90,000 social homes a year for 10 years - to provide decent homes families can afford to live in for decades to come. History shows, the way to do this is to get councils building.
Landlord Service Charge Abuse
A proportion of tenants (renters) and residents (shared owners and leaseholders) pay for services such as, but not limited to, communal cleaning, lighting and heating. These payments are service charges.
It is commonly believed that service charges only apply to leaseholders and freeholders, rather than full renters. This is not the case.
It is true that for some renters, service costs are incorporated into their rent. However, in other cases, tenants make an additional, discrete service charge payment.
What better benefits data means for poverty in the UK
The Department of Work and Pensions (DWP) have improved the income data we use to measure poverty in the UK by linking administrative data about the social security benefits that people receive to their survey responses in the Family Resources Survey (FRS).
They have done this for the first time with the 2024/25 data but have also looked back and retrospectively linked people’s benefit records from 2021/22.
While this helps us to get a better picture of people’s incomes in the UK, it means that there is a break in the series so we can’t compare the data from before this change in method, to after. This restricts what we can and can’t say about incomes and poverty in the UK, particularly if we want to talk about change over time. Here we explain:
- what has changed
- what challenges this raises
- how big a difference this has made to poverty measures
- what we can and can’t say about poverty.
Exploring the relationship between problem debt and risk of homelessness
Executive Summary
This review examines the role of problem debt in increasing the risk of homelessness among low-income renters, and the strength of evidence on interventions that may prevent or mitigate this risk.
The findings point to a clear and consistent conclusion: problem debt is a systemic driver of homelessness, not a marginal or individualised issue.
Debt operates as a key mechanism through which wider structural pressures – such as insufficient and unstable incomes, high housing costs, rising essential bills, and the design of the welfare system – are translated into housing insecurity and homelessness.
Fragile Budgets, Difficult Choices: The Cost of Living for Pensioners in 2026
This report sets out the latest evidence from Age UK on the cost-of-living pressures facing pensioners across Great Britain, drawing on polling conducted in January 2026 among people aged 66 and above, alongside direct engagement with pensioners through discussions and a workshop.
There are modest signs of improvement compared to 2025. The proportion of pensioners feeling less financially secure than the previous year had fallen slightly, from 33% to 30%, and lower levels of worry about energy costs may in part reflect the restoration of the Winter Fuel Payment to over nine million pensioners.
But the improvement is not transformative. Too many pensioners remain unable to afford the essentials, and too many others are only just coping. Energy bills remain more than £500 higher than at the end of 2021, and prices look set to rise again.
The risk of another spike in energy prices – and the inflationary consequences for other household spending – is a real concern.
Healthy life expectancy trends in the UK: a watershed moment
A healthy population is a nation’s most precious asset. Good health helps people to live fulfilling lives, fuels the economy by providing a productive labour force and supports people to contribute to their communities.
Healthy life expectancy in the UK fell by over 2 years between 2012–14 and 2022–24, from 62.9 to 60.7 years for males and from 63.7 to 60.9 years for females.
This decline reflects a reduction in the proportion of life spent in good health, from 79% to 77% for males and from 77% to 73% for females.
England, Scotland and Wales experienced steep falls of over 2 years, while the decrease in Northern Ireland was more modest.