Welfare Reform Bill

My Lords, I share the credit for Amendment 13 with my noble friend Lady Meacher. We always expect forensic analysis from the noble Baroness, Lady Hollis, and she has excelled herself this afternoon. I will take a slightly different approach because I do not think that there is anything much to add to the critique. I cannot understand where this came from. We are talking about single working-age benefits. To my certain knowledge, for 10 years, it has always been expected that any change of this kind would embrace council tax benefit. For me—I am in favour of universal credit—this is not a constructive step to take because, as the noble Baroness has just said, it diminishes the effectiveness of universal credit. It goes in the opposite direction—not to mention the fact that it will inevitably cost local authorities more, and not to mention the confusion and conflicts on tapers and capital limits. My main question is: who is asking for this? It does not seem to me to be local authorities, certainly not in Scotland. There is a very strong briefing from COSLA stating that it would much prefer to stay with the current set-up within universal credit. Where is the evidence that this is going to help anything? What is the impact assessment of the costs? There is a whole raft of things that local authority colleagues will have to face in the midst of a period of substantial change. It is the last thing that they need. So my plea is: will the Minister help me understand where this proposal came from, who it is designed to advantage and what it will cost in the fullness of time? If he will help me with that, I will be very grateful. This is a serious subject for the Grand Committee. We will come back to it when we debate Clause 24, so we have a bit of time, although as I said earlier, I want to concentrate on the big issues. This is a big issue: it certainly is for me and I hope that it will be for other noble Lords. I hope that we can get an understanding of the politics of this. Another thing is that the better-off calculation is going to be much harder to work out in each local authority area. How will that help claimants? I see no advantage in the Government’s suggestion, other than their claim that local people in the big society will all get together and it will all be fine. I say to the Minister that, if it was me, I would be resisting this tooth and nail, because it may diminish his very important work, which the rest of the Committee are well prepared to support him on. This just seems to be taking a step in completely the wrong direction.