Welfare Reform Bill

My Lords, I shall speak briefly to Amendment 36. This group is not as complicated as it looks because there are two sets of mirrored amendments. I look forward to the speech of the noble Lord, Lord Best, whose knowledge is well understood in this House. The meat of the group is to do with the exceptions, which relate, as the noble Baroness, Lady Hollis, accurately said, to our earlier debate. Amendment 36 does a slightly different thing. Before I speak to it briefly, I shall refer to what I said in the previous session of the Grand Committee. We are all under pressure to disaggregate groups of amendments because the people who are promoting the amendments think that they get better consideration in the Government’s reply if they are considered individually. It is better to have a debate around a wider set of amendments but it will not work for the purposes of the people who tabled them unless the Minister is able to say something about individual amendments. If he cannot, the flexibility in the Government’s position cannot be properly understood and appropriate arrangements cannot be made for Report. The Minister has a very difficult job because there are many amendments on the Order Paper, but they are all important in their own way. If he can address them individually to the best of his ability, that would be a favour. Amendment 36 tries to lift and lay the existing protections in the current provision of housing benefit in the private and public sectors under the Social Security Contributions and Benefits Act 1992. Clause 11 is very regulation-oriented. Its last three subsections refer to regulations that determine a whole series of things and are the basis for the amount of housing costs. What Clause 11 does not do is provide for entitlement to be related to rents in individual localities. These are key concepts in the existing system that we want to make sure are enshrined in the new provision under universal credit. Amendment 36 seeks to import the current levels of protection into universal credit, which is the purpose of promoting it this afternoon. It has four effects, which are, first, that housing entitlement in the private sector would be based on an assessment by a rent officer; secondly, to allow for a definition of locality, which might be slightly different from broad rental areas, so there might be some flexibility about that which we could discuss; thirdly, to allow for housing entitlement in the social rented sector to be equal to the full contracted rent, which is an essential protection; and fourthly, to assess local rents, reviewing and updating them on a monthly basis. The different elements of Amendment 36 all have these effects. It is true to say that the Explanatory Notes that we have make some reference to some of these matters. Paragraph 55 on page 10 says: "““Where the amount for housing relates to a liability to pay rent, it is intended that the amount will be calculated with reference to a claimant’s household size and circumstances as well as their actual rent, as is the case currently in housing benefit””." My case is that the Explanatory Notes are not the Bill. To make sure that these protections are maintained and developed, it would be safer to import those important provisions into Clause 11 as it stands. Doing very important things such as restoring the link between benefit levels and rents payable should be done in primary legislation and not regulations. If universal credit is to be a success, support for housing costs needs to be linked to actual rents. As well as the protections that the 1992 legislation provides, we need to think very carefully about the consumer price indexation that we are looking towards in the introduction of universal credit. In the longer term, it would be unsustainable. I know that the Government have set a period of time beyond which they will not make final judgments, and that is wise, but if you take consumer price indexation over a long period of time it becomes entirely divorced from actual rents and universal credit will become unfit for purpose. That is something that we need to understand. Social rents are controlled, of course. They are different from those in the private rented sector. But the link between rents and housing benefit enables security of tenure through periods of unemployment and reduction in wages and gives a degree of security that has been an essential part of the provision of housing benefit in the recent past. Finally, and before I sit down, I should point out that whereas the previous debate did not relate to provisions being made for retired households and older people, the housing protection benefits in the provisions generally affect retired people. One-third, 33.3 per cent, of social housing tenants are older people. We need to bear that in mind and make sure that we try to import as much of that protection, which has been very successful in terms of social protection more broadly drawn, since it was introduced in 1992. It is a well tried and trusted system and it would be a shame if we threw the baby out with the bathwater in importing housing costs into universal credit without thinking carefully about some of these provisions. I have said that I will sit down and I promise that I will, but I want briefly to support this suite of amendments, to which I have my name. Like the noble Lord, Lord Rix, I find the numbers difficult to make out. For the avoidance of doubt, I say that I am in favour of all the amendments with the noble Lord, Lord Best, and my name on them.