Welfare Reform Bill (Programme) (No. 2)

My hon. Friend is absolutely right. The scheme is not voluntary. Voluntary downsizing has a proud history. Good local authorities and housing associations provide voluntary downsizing, which is sensible. The Government's measure requires 108,000 households whose properties have been adapted for disabled purposes to take, within the next 18 months, a significant cut in their housing benefit, or to move, regardless of the value of that adaptation. The Minister implies a mammoth bureaucratic exercise to evaluate every one of those adaptations, and to establish individual cost-benefit analyses in every case, in the hope, which I suspect will be a forlorn one, that an appropriate property will be available for people to move into when they fall foul of such analyses. That appropriate property does not have to be within the local authority area or even the region where those people have family, friends, support and, in some cases, employment. Those two concerns, of the many that the Opposition have on housing costs, are the subject of the amendments that we have tabled. I hope that the Minister, who has made sympathetic noises on both issues in Committee, goes a little further tonight, and gives us solid and binding reassurances that there is a way of resolving the benefit trap that will catch so many people, in order, as Ministers have frequently stated in the media, to deal with a very small number of high-value claimants who dominate the media agenda. It is not fair to capture 108,000 disabled people and 750,000 claimants of local housing allowance, all of whom will be affected by the housing benefit cuts, in order to deal with a small number of extreme cases, on which we could otherwise have had a sensible debate about attempting to resolve.