Welfare Reform Bill

My Lords, I suspect that we have taken this as far as we can today, but I am sure that we will return to it on Report—perhaps we should already be thinking of booking an extra couple of days for that. I have a technical question for the Minister. As I understand it, before we get to universal credit, the variety of benefits that people have will be looked at. That will go into the calculation on one side. We will compare that with the earnings comparator and the difference will be withdrawn by way of reduction of housing benefit. Is that right? So that will be administered by local authorities. What if people are in receipt of mortgage interest support or the housing benefit element is not necessarily sufficient to cover the shortfall? What happens with all the local authorities that have outsourced their housing benefit and council tax arrangements? There are a lot of them. Have they been engaged? Presumably, there are extracontractual costs because they will be required to do things in excess of current entitlements. On universal credit, is it likely that the withdrawal will be in respect of only the housing component of the credit or will the broader range of support that is in universal credit be subject to the clawback?