Welfare Reform Bill

My Lords, may I tack some concern on to my noble friend’s amendment, given what we discussed earlier about the RPI and CPI rates? Had universal credit been uprated by RPI, housing costs, including assumptions about mortgage interest payments, would have been included in the RPI assessment. As my noble friend says, with CPI it is not because 5 million of the 8.8 million are on housing benefit and nearly 250,000 are on the support for mortgage interest. That means that around 3 million owner-occupiers who are paying mortgages and mortgage interest, and who are on universal credit, will now see universal credit uprated by the lower rate of CPI without any of the protection that RPI offered them by including housing costs. What would the Minister suggest to those people? I do not want to get into the language of hard-working people and so on, but we are talking about people who may be fairly marginal owner-occupiers. They are on low incomes, which is why they get elements of universal credit. If interest rates rise they will find it problematic to repay. Therefore, they face the possibility of longer-term repossession if we are not able to help them with the sort of issues that my noble friend has mentioned. In other words, they are fully exposed to an uprating that gives them no protection on their housing costs, unlike those in rented accommodation who qualify for HB. What does the Minister think might be done to help in that situation so that we do not find that those people are, effectively, hit twice over?