Welfare Reform Bill

Baroness Hollis of Heigham Excerpts

Monday 23rd January 2012 Lords Chamber

Amendment 61 seeks to place in the Bill an exemption from the benefit cap for households who are provided with interim or temporary accommodation by a local authority. I have already said in my response to Amendment 58D that it is too early to say how we are going to treat people in temporary accommodation for housing costs purposes in 2013 and beyond. Following our informal consultation with key stakeholders last year, we are considering the policy design for temporary accommodation and will share more details about our plans before too long.

[Baroness Hollis of Heigham]

Can I ask the Minister whether “before too long” would be before Third Reading? We have had lots of debates in Committee on the words “too long”, “too soon”, “soon”, and “very soon”. Could the Minister help us? What sort of timescale does he have in mind on that?

[Lord Freud]

No, that will be beyond the Bill becoming an Act, so we are looking at how we do this in regulations.

[Baroness Hollis of Heigham]

Given that we are expecting a localism Bill next year—I guess—would it be incorporated in that, so the House would have a chance to amend? The trouble with regulations is that you cannot amend, whereas with primary legislation you can.

[Lord Freud]

My Lords, we are going to spend a lot of time on getting this right. It is not something we want frozen in primary legislation. In fact, it would be very uncomfortable to freeze these items in primary legislation. Regulation is the right place to do these things. We have a consultation paper out on how we may move forward with temporary accommodation. There are some very obvious solutions within that—I touched on them earlier this evening—comprising separating out service charges and housing costs rather than bundling them up; that is where the temporary accommodation becomes so expensive. We need to get a solution to this so that we do not have a ludicrous go-round of people moving into expensive temporary accommodation which they can no longer pay for because of the cap. We are absolutely aware of this and have measures in train to get a solution in the round to that issue. However, it is not a simple set of issues.

--- Later in debate ---

In the previous debate we discussed one of the options—that of a grace period in the transition. Clearly, as we develop those protections and transitional approaches, we will bear very much in mind how they affect kinship carers. Therefore, rather than have a specific exemption for a very small number in this way, we need to design something. It is not appropriate to put this into primary legislation. The trick will be to design the overall structure in a way that gives kinship carers the kind of protection that they need and deserve. However, as I say, my main interest here is in looking at how we can best fit kinship carers into the benefits system so that they slot in beside formal fostering arrangements and what we do for parents, including single parents.

[Baroness Hollis of Heigham]

If the noble Lord were to combine child benefit, for example—given today’s decision by this House—with the guardian’s allowance, having each of those as a per capita sum for each child coming in through kinship caring, and take that out of the benefit cap, it would get him there.