Naturally, the highest proportion of this is found in the Greater London area where such benefits may still be being paid where families have two wage earners!
This is because rents are so astronomically high in the capital.
'Affordable housing' should never be assumed to be the goal of the left - it should apply right across the political spectrum.
The problem has arisen because successive governments are not addressing the issue of pressures on our housing stocks - and probably the two biggest factors are immigration and divorce.
I am not attempting to be provocative - these are fundamental facts.
Take Sheffield as your example. As long as twenty years ago, a Jamaican lady JP, who was a friend of mine, owned a number of rental properties. (She was a midwife and her husband a steelworker - so enormous credit to them for being able to retire with a large pension pot having planned their lives so very well.)
It was explained to me that entrepreneurs had bought up the entire stock of really cheap housing in the city as soon as they realised that the council needed housing for migrants. In the past, these would have been starter homes for impecunious youngsters who wanted to own their own houses. This route was rudely snatched from the poorer paid Sheffielders - and effectively meant that home ownership was denied to them as so few new reasonably priced homes were being built.
The entrepreneurs apparently offered their purchases to the council for housing migrants, whereupon, the council then funded the requisite improvements needed - at significant cost to local taxpayers. Thus, the entrepreneurs gained a massive financial boost at the same time as local people were abandoned. Effectively, they got good rents from the council without having to fund the repairs themselves. So many in the Pakistani community, who really know how to strike deals were masters of this art.
All economics depends on the principles of supply and demand.
Let us compare the Spanish Costas with Engish seaside towns. In Spain, the building seldom stops. Spain may have big problems in the larger cities but elsewhere, young people are able to buy decent properties from as little as 30,000 euros.
Spain has huge problems of unemployment but for those in work, achieving a mortgage is a doddle as the monies borrowed are so wonderfully low.
We need to build. We need to build several million starter homes in the next five years - probably using modern prefabrication methods. This is not the preferred solution - but what else can we do?
We need to stop the incessant queues of migrants and we must, as a society, become less tolerant to families having two houses post divorce. Many of these situations eventually remedy themselves from an accommodation point of view - but consider those countless situations where somewhere between 10% and 20% of split families have extended unnecessarily over two dwellings into the very long term.
In the capital, sadly, building must continue to be immense tower blocks - in all other places - brown field sites exist in abundance.
This is highly complex and has to become the government's single most important target once Brexit has been sorted out.
Margaret Thatcher was one of the few to understand that along with home ownership - there comes a true stake in society and fewer demands for governments to do what everyone truly should be doing for themselves.
