Access to decent, low-cost housing can increase disposable incomes, prevent material deprivation and improve work incentives. Housing Benefit helps to reduce poverty, but take-up is incomplete. It can also reduce work incentives and create poverty traps. Welfare reform and rents policy are creating tensions for social landlords, causing some to rethink their traditional role of helping the poorest. Key elements of housing and welfare policy have become localised and discretionary, and delivery is inconsistent. Private renting is set to continue growing as social renting declines. Private rents are forecast to rise by 90 per cent in real terms between 2008 and 2040, more than twice as fast as incomes, pushing up to half of private renters into poverty. Setting social rents closer to market levels could put an extra 1.3 million people in poverty.