Welfare Reform Bill

My Lords, many years ago when my noble friend Lord Brooke was my temporary boss in Northern Ireland, never in a million years did I expect that he would ever be described, or indeed would describe himself, as St Sebastian. The reason I mention that is that I knew that when he became Secretary of State, he had moderately recently been a Treasury Minister. My job in Northern Ireland, inter alia, was to look after the Social Fund in the then 32 Northern Ireland social security offices. It quickly became apparent that the calls on the Social Fund in any particular office at any particular time were extremely erratic. I asked my civil servants if London would object if I moved money around the system in order to try to balance it up. Of course the following year I had to do it again because of that erraticism. It is all very well expecting the Social Fund, which is expatriated to Scotland, Northern Ireland and Wales as a whole, to operate well with ring-fencing, but I find it absolutely impossible to believe that ring-fencing can ever apply when it is expatriated to local authorities in England for the simple reason that one local authority will build up a certain amount while another will be permanently in deficit. That is not going to help the people which the Social Fund is intended to help in the first place.