Welfare Reform Bill

My Lords, I, too, spoke in the debate last week that the noble Lord, Lord Kirkwood, initiated, so I will not repeat all the arguments that I made then. I was much more persuaded by the Minister’s speech on that occasion than others seem to have been. I thought that he made some very good arguments for what we are doing here, although I still have some concerns. Let us not forget that we are trying to find savings of £200 million here, and that has to be taken into account. What is the priority? I would much rather that we spent money on dealing with the problems that we were discussing the day before yesterday, on the underoccupation issue, than thinking that we can just ignore this change. If we are going to improve on where we are with this legislation, we must be very fine-tuned in what we are trying to do. Everyone accepts that it is not right that people not in work should have separate accommodation when people in work cannot afford it. A quite convincing statistic—if it is true and I assume that it is—is that, in 60 per cent of the locality, two-bedroom local housing allowance rate is less than twice the shared rate. We have to accept that in these times we should be trying to encourage children to stay longer in their homes. When times are hard that is inevitable. It is happening in the private sector because people cannot take on mortgages. It also has to be accepted in this sector as well. There have to be some economies and that is an obvious one. Anyway, a very high proportion of people in this age group—some 40 per cent—are already sharing. We have to recognise that that happens. The Government have tried to make a number of exceptions. It should also be said that not all shared accommodation is bad. Some people benefit from it, particularly the lonely and some of the vulnerable people that we have talked about today. The trouble is that there is not enough of it and it could be improved. The Government have also set aside extra money for the discretionary grants. I know that there are various concerns about those grants but how do you define that? How do you get the fine-tuning? In any event, somebody will have to assess the people with these difficulties. Obviously, they can be helped by that route. Everybody was very moved by the comments of my noble friend Lady Browning on autistic people. We would all share that. Somebody has got to assess those people. There will never be any certainty until they are assessed in the situation. We have to accept that we are into fine-tuning this legislation. I will say four things. First, we need to look at pregnant women as a group. When I went to midwifery classes with my wife, I was always told that you do not have a baby, move home and start a new job all at the same time. I have always passed that lesson on to other people. It is a lesson that we need to look at carefully in this case. We do not want women having to move twice, when they become pregnant and then before the birth or just after it. A second problem needs looking at. The Minister said in his speech that the market is not static. I agree with that. Looking at the statistics, the rental market has moved quite a lot in the last five years, in all sorts of ways. Yet there is the severe problem of shared accommodation. If we increase the pressure from the 25 to 35s in this market, we will make it more difficult for the under-25s to get accommodation where they most need it. The Government have to look at this area and make it a priority. I have two other points. In certain areas, we have already heard the issues of London and the south-east but it is rural areas in particular that will have a problem because there is simply no shared accommodation. Extra helps needs to be made available through the discretionary grant and we need to look at providing more accommodation. I say again that this is an area where we are inevitably looking for important savings. We may not want to do that but we have to, so we have to be sharper in pinpointing the real priorities in this area.