Welfare Reform Bill

Lord Best Excerpts

Wednesday 29th February 2012 Lords Chamber

Moved by

[Lord Best]

At end insert “but do propose Amendment 3D as an amendment in lieu”

3D: Clause 11, page 5, line 21, at end insert—
“(3A) The Secretary of State shall commission an independent review (“the review”) of the impact of the provisions of sections 11 and 68 of this Act.
(3B) The review shall assess the impact of those provisions on—
(a) families; (b) the incidence of poverty;(c) the incidence of homelessness;(d) levels of underoccupancy;(e) local authority resources;(f) rent arrears; and(g) any other consequences of sections 11 and 68 of this Act which the Secretary of State or the reviewer consider should be covered by the review.(3C) The review will commence six months after sections 11 and 68 of this Act come into force (or, if the provisions of sections 11 and 68 comes into force on different dates, six months after the latter of those provisions comes into force).
(3D) The review will conclude with the making of a report within six months of the review commencing; and shall be repeated one year after it commenced.
(3E) Reports made under subsection (3D) shall be laid before both Houses of Parliament.”

[Lord Best]

My Lords, in response to the Minister’s defence of the inclusion in the Bill of this underoccupation penalty, perhaps I could briefly spell out the position that we have reached this evening.

Before Christmas, this House asked the other place to reconsider the idea of requiring several hundred thousand tenants in council housing or housing association homes to move out or pay a fine if they were deemed to have a spare room. The amendment that we sent to the other place would have meant that although the requirement to move out or pay up would still stand for all these households, it would not take effect unless a suitable smaller home to which they could go was available. This would have removed the injustice of penalising people through a reduction in their housing benefit, which they would have to make up from the rest of their extremely low income, when they had no option but to stay put. The fine, or bedroom tax, of an average of £14 per week would have to come out of the tenant’s other income—for example, from a single person’s income from jobseeker’s allowance of just £68 per week—even where they had no chance of escaping this significant reduction in their living standards. Of course, rent arrears will follow, which means evictions and more cost. Long-standing residents in council housing, not least in rural areas, would have to move away over considerable distances to avoid the financial penalties of staying in their own homes.

Despite support from your Lordships on all sides, in the other place this amendment was rejected on financial grounds since the measure was expected to cut the deficit by some £470 million per annum. I put forward a modified amendment, which your Lordships again accepted. Under it, the delay in imposing the penalty charge until an alternative smaller home could be offered would not apply to all the households hit by the underoccupation rule, but only to the most vulnerable, such as disabled people, war widows, those caring for severely disabled people or children under one year-old and others not required or expected to seek work.

On the issue of caring for a disabled relative, perhaps I could elaborate a little on the Minister’s comment that a spare room would be allowed for a carer looking after an older relative. This will apply only to a non-family member who is a carer and lives there all the time, exercising their caring duties. However, that spare room is often for the daughter who comes on a temporary basis when her mother comes out of hospital or to look after another member of the family. Having that bit of space can save the National Health Service money as well. Strong speeches were made in favour of the amendment in the other place, including from the Conservative Benches. For example, the particularly acute position in Northern Ireland was highlighted. There was recognition that disabled children often need their own bedroom, as do adults when one of a couple is disabled, and older people for whom an extra room for a family carer who just visits from time to time can be so important. These arguments have fallen on stony ground and the Bill is now back with us.

So that there are no threads still to be untangled, perhaps I could pick up on a couple more of the points that the Minister made in defence of this measure. He very fairly made the point that an additional £30 million in discretionary housing payments has been found to give the extra benefit back where there are foster children in the home—that is very welcome—or where the property has been adapted and it would be foolish to move people out to somewhere smaller and have to adapt that property, possibly with the adaptations to the previous property going to waste. However, the £30 million that has been found to increase discretionary housing payments in those cases has come from increasing the fine for everyone of £13 per week—the original average figure that we heard in Committee—by an extra £1 per week for everyone who is not exempt. Although the £14 that we now face means that the extra funding will help as many as 40,000 households—I am pleased that it will—the remaining 670,000 households will all pay another £1 a week, which is where that funding has come from.

I turn to the amendment that has now come back to this House. I must say that I was tempted to bring forward an amendment that would lessen the cost to the Government since it is clearly the level of expenditure that has inhibited the Government from going anywhere near my amendments so far. However, frankly, to modify the earlier amendments by taking out yet another group of those trapped by the penalty would become invidious as we try to choose between different categories of highly vulnerable people, and select some but not others for the already limited protection that the earlier amendments would have afforded.

Instead—and I apologise to those who hoped that this House could save the day but will now be deeply disappointed—the amendment that I have brought before your Lordships takes a different tack. It would rely on high-quality research to show the consequences of this measure. The amendment places an obligation on the Government to review the impact of the underoccupation penalty on the families concerned and on levels of poverty and homelessness; to calculate the cost to local authorities and housing associations; to look at whether levels of underoccupancy actually fall; and to consider other foreseeable and unforeseeable consequences. The exercise would begin six months after implementation of the provisions in the Bill. It would be completed within a year and repeated a year after that. My hope is that the Government would prove willing to make some in-flight corrections and to take mitigating action if the evidence shows clearly that the consequences of this measure are dire.

In response to a Motion that I moved on the regulations that introduced earlier housing benefit cuts, the Minister put in hand a thoroughgoing research project on the impact of those changes. I have been delighted by the extent and quality of this research project and I remain very grateful to the Minister for that initiative. I know that he fully understands the value of high-quality research and hope that he feels able to go forward with this amendment. After the long journey we have all taken in pursuit of this matter, that would at least mean that a modest outcome would result from all our deliberations.

--- Later in debate ---

I close by reiterating that this measure is not about making people move. Rather, people living in the social rented sector, like those in the private sector, will have to make informed choices about where they live and what they can afford. Some may choose to move but for people who do not want to do so there are a number of options to help to meet the shortfall, and we have discussed those over the past months. They include the employment option, increasing working hours, asking others in the household or the extended family to contribute, or taking in a lodger. We have now done this to death and I close by asking the noble Lord to withdraw his Motion.

[Lord Best]

I am extremely grateful to all noble Lords who have spoken from all sides of the House, including the Bishops’ Benches. I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Lister, who made the point that breaking up social networks by requiring people to move or face a penalty that they find very difficult is disruptive. Once it is known that a Member of your Lordships’ House is involved in these things, we of course get targeted. One of the most moving e-mails that I received was from a woman who, with her husband, has two rooms and will, I am afraid to say, face a charge of £25 per week. Her husband is partially disabled and they live on a very meagre income. Her mother is a neighbour, living not very far away, and this lady provides a full caring service for her. She has looked into the possibility of moving elsewhere and she can move some miles away. However, she is not going to be able to get back to see her mother twice or three times a day. She cannot afford that £25 a week and is going to have to do something. These are the kinds of social network issues that are raised by this measure.

I am very grateful to the noble Lord, Lord German, who spelt out the need for milestones when one brings in new legislation of this kind. To the categories that we ought to look at, he added the disruption of education. Moving children to a different area and taking them out of school can set them back, and that can have life consequences.

I am grateful to the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Ripon and Leeds, who has talked on children’s issues eloquently throughout the Bill. From the intelligence on the ground, he is worried that the level of homelessness will increase, and that is certainly an issue that research would look at carefully.

The noble Lord, Lord Kirkwood, who has throughout on this and other aspects of the Bill been absolutely tireless, makes the point that rents may not go down, as the Government hope. I hope that the Minister does not get the blame when the housing benefit bill does not fall. For example, I received some new figures just this week which show how the number of claimants of housing benefit has gone up recently because of the effects on the economy, with more unemployment and more people having to claim housing benefit. That is not the Minister’s fault and I hope that the Treasury does not hold it against him. The housing benefit bill is very hard to curb. The noble Lord, Lord Kirkwood, draws attention to these knock-on effects of everything that one does and calls for a much wider review, which sounds entirely sensible.

The noble Lord, Lord Boswell, to whom I am grateful, stressed the importance of housing more generally and the value of an independent evaluation of the kind that is proposed in this amendment.

The noble Baroness, Lady Sherlock, raised a point to which the Minister responded. I believe that he is genuinely interested in the outcome of an independent review, upon which good policy can be based.

The noble Baroness, Lady Grey-Thompson, highlighted—quite rightly, as it probably has not had quite enough attention in this debate tonight—the fact that very many disabled people are in the accommodation that we are talking about, with fixed incomes and no opportunity to go out to work. They will be particularly badly hit and we must look carefully at that.

The noble Lord, Lord McKenzie, having followed this every inch of the way and to whom I am extremely grateful for his support, made the point that the long list of potential escape routes, such as taking in a lodger or using up one’s savings, are not really viable alternatives to having to move or pay out. He concluded that this was going to place unacceptable burdens on the most vulnerable.

I am extremely grateful to the Minister for accepting the necessity for an evaluation and for committing himself to bringing forward full-scale proposals when the regulations come to us. The noble Lord, Lord Kirkwood, made the point that when regulations come before us, we have another chance to look at these matters; we even have a chance to vote on them, and we are able to hold the Minister to account on this. I think we will be pleased with what is brought forward, not least because he also committed himself to full consultation on this research project with the stakeholders concerned; to consulting, discussing and working with the stakeholders, including myself, the subsequent action—the strategy and the guidance—that follows from this.

Therefore, I must be satisfied with the Minister’s response. He will, he said, be keeping under review the very key ingredient: the level of discretionary housing payments with which local authorities are provided to top up and help people who are in difficult circumstances. I do not think local authorities are going to be very keen to bail out the Government on this one and make up the deficit themselves, but if the Treasury finds, as a result of the research that we do, that there are sufficient hard-luck stories where one cannot really resist having to pay out more housing benefit, the discretionary housing benefit will be one lifeline which could be substantially influenced by research, when it comes along.

At the end of what seems to have been a very long innings on all of this, I thank the Minister for his response and for the courtesy and good humour with which he has approached all aspects of this Bill; I am grateful to him in all those respects. I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.

Motion A1, as an amendment to Motion A, withdrawn.