Welfare Reform Bill

I am grateful for the comments of my noble friend Lady Hollis. We will certainly pursue that point with the Ministry of Justice. It is a very real one. I am pleased to hear that the liaison between Jobcentre Plus and the Prison Service is working. We need to ensure that it smoothes the access to benefits to which people are entitled. As the noble Lord, Lord Skelmersdale, explained, Amendment 133A seeks to alter the formulation of the Government’s Amendment 133 to Clause 20, which deals with payments on account of benefit but in no way changes the effect of a provision that has been on the statute book for a very long time. The provision in question relates specifically to making a payment on account of housing benefit when no claim has yet been made, and the relevant wording in our amendment is identical to the equivalent existing provision in the Social Security Administration Act 1992, which itself derived from the Social Security Act 1986, for which the noble Lord, Lord Skelmersdale, may have had some responsibility. This provision makes it possible to allow for such payments in circumstances in which there has been serious disruption to housing benefit services as the result, for example, of a catastrophic loss of computer services or an influenza epidemic that affected the number of staff available. The power also makes it possible to provide for payments on account in cases of individual emergency where the customer is unable to claim. However, the Government foresee no need for regulations to permit a payment on account for such individual cases if housing benefit services have not been disrupted by a more general emergency. To date, this power has not been exercised, so the housing benefit regulations currently do not permit payments on account if no claim has been made. Although there are no plans to use this power in the future, it needs to be retained to permit the Government to address the sort of large-scale emergency that I have described and which drastically affects the ability of local authorities to process housing benefit applications. The amendment tabled by the noble Lord seeks not to change the effect of this power in any way but merely to alter the language that is used to express it. The formulation in Amendment 133 has, as I have said, existed in social security legislation for a long time. It is clearly expressed and requires no change. On that basis, I ask that the noble Lord withdraw the amendment.