Welfare Reform Bill

My Lords, the Committee owes the noble Baroness a debt. These amendments are entirely appropriate and I support them. She has built intelligently upon the debate that we had on 12 October. That is also valuable as it gives us a twin approach to the Government’s reaction to these important issues. As the noble Baroness said, we are dealing with a relatively small group of 62,000 or 63,000 people, but they are extremely vulnerable to being prejudiced against by up to £41 a week, which is an enormous sum of money to lose in their circumstances. These two facts in themselves require us to spend some time asking the Government to reflect carefully on how we take this whole thing forward. I was struck in the Chamber debate of 12 October by the extent to which a lot of expert opinion was deeply concerned about this. There was a York University report, a Crisis survey, the Merits Committee report and, of course, the Social Security Advisory Committee review that the Government received. They all in their different ways picked up on points that the noble Baroness has made, and expressed concern. We should weigh that in the balance as well. I support these amendments. I am not going to speak for very long, but I will make two points. First, on the spatial incidence of the effect of this measure, the suggestions of the Minister, who gave a full reply in the debate of 12 October, were predicated upon an urban—in fact, a London-based, south-east—context that bears no relationship to Selkirkshire where I live. I do not know what further detailed work has been done as part of the impact statement on the spatial dimension of the client group of 63,000 that we are dealing with, but I would certainly be concerned that those who were left in disparate communities in the United Kingdom would be put in a very invidious position indeed. The Government may be correct in cosmopolitan and busy environments such as the capital city and major cities, but the prospect is entirely different in rural areas. Secondly, I have a point to make, which the noble Baroness has correctly made on a number of occasions, and it would be helpful to get a considered reflection on it in the course of the Committee. Discretionary housing payments are the answer that the Government properly put forward in many of these interlocking housing issues. We are dealing not merely with shared accommodation and rent; discretionary housing payments are expected to carry the weight of a whole lot of, perhaps unintended, consequences for some of these housing changes. When the Minister responded on 12 October, I was slightly surprised by two of his sentences. He was talking about the Merits Committee conclusion that discretionary housing payments were a temporary solution in their view, but he said that there is no limit on how long they are paid for. He went on to say: "““We review the allocation of DHPs to local authorities annually and will continue to do so””.—[Official Report, 12/10/11; col. GC467.]" We know that discretionary housing payments have been increased to £190 million over the period of the comprehensive spending review. Can we learn a little more about what guidance has been given to local authorities and how the allocation of that money will come? Does it begin to be adequate? Some of us in the Committee are concerned about the quantum of money that is being clawed back from the housing budget over the period of time that the deficit reduction is being applied. You might well mitigate a lot of that by discretionary housing payments if they were intelligently applied, if the guidance was clear and if the finance was adequate, but certainly some of us are beginning to wonder how far £190 million will go in dealing with all these things at the same time. Perhaps the Minister could give us some reassurance, if not now then in the course of Committee and later stages, on this basic question: if it is discovered that £190 million does not meet the task, given the load it is expected to carry, is there an expectation that the Government will look at it again and increase that amount of money? I think it is inevitable that they will have to do so, although this is a guess based on the complexity of the situation we are finding and the number of changes and cuts that the discretionary payments have to make up. I always believed that discretionary housing payments were temporary and in this I agree with the Merits Committee, although the Minister seems not to. If I am wrong and there is some misunderstanding, it would be helpful if he could clear that up.