Welfare Reform Bill

My Lords, the noble Lord, Lord Ramsbotham, has made a very powerful case, particularly for those serving short sentences. One can be reasonably confident that the benefit entitlement with which they enter prison will remain the same when they leave it. Could the Minister help me by fleshing out his thoughts a little further on a situation in which you cannot know in the same way, under universal credit, whether someone leaving prison is going into the household of a former partner with children or whether that household has broken up while he has been in prison? What question marks will there be? It was much easier to arrange when we were dealing with a single benefit, such as jobseeker’s allowance, which was not particularly related to the network of other benefits that a household might receive. It would clearly work for those serving short sentences or for somebody who was single throughout their sentence and expected to come out single. Could the Minister help us on how he would handle a situation in which a person was going back into a household with children, where there might be rent to be paid from his universal credit entitlement? He might go back expecting that payment to be made to him. Perhaps the Minister could help us on that.