Welfare Reform Bill

My Lords, Amendments 104A and 104B, tabled in my name, are similar in intention to an earlier suggested amendment to Clause 102. These two amendments will ensure that where a claimant’s benefit is paid to a third party, usually a landlord, recovery of any civil penalty, along with recovery of the associated benefit overpayment, may be made by making appropriate deductions from that benefit payment. Currently, there is a slight difference in the wording used by this clause and Clause 102 when specifying that amounts are recoverable. This was unintentional. Amendments 104A and 104B remove that difference and ensure a consistent read across. This will mean that, in the limited circumstances in which the third party benefit payment is the only one from which we can make a recovery, we can ensure that whenever a civil penalty is imposed, that penalty and the benefit overpayment may both still be recovered by deduction from that benefit. In every civil penalty case there will always be an overpayment of benefit and we intend that the civil penalty will be added to the overpayment and recovered in the same way. Being unable to recover the civil penalty in the same way as the overpayment would mean that some claimants could evade the consequences of their negligence or failures to provide accurate and timely information and unnecessarily limit the methods of recovery available for civil penalties. We want to make it clear that the civil penalty is always recoverable from the person at fault, even if in practice the claimant’s benefit is being paid to a third party. The process for recovery of the civil penalty needs to fit appropriately with debt recovery processes. Aligning the wording in new Sections 115C and 115D with that used in Clause 102 helps us to do that. Amendments 104AA and 104ZA seek to prohibit the setting of targets for the civil penalty and limit our ability to impose a civil penalty to cases in which there has been a failure to provide information. The noble Baroness, Lady Drake, and my noble friend Lord Skelmersdale asked about negligence. We consider that the requirement of negligence in new Section 115C already implies that there is no reasonable excuse for the failure to take care of their award or claim. However, new Section 115C(1)(b) ensures that if reasonable steps to recover the error have been taken, the penalty will not apply. I certainly understand the possible ramifications if targets were attached to a penalty such as this. It is for exactly those types of reasons that we are not attaching penalties. Perhaps I may update the noble Baroness, Lady Drake, on the figures in the impact assessment and the number of penalties. Last week, on 22 November, a revised impact assessment was issued that reflects updated estimates relating to the new civil penalty. We are assuming that the changes based on assumed overpayments of above £65, rather than the overpayment of £15, which was part of the earlier working assumption, has led to a substantial revision, and the number of penalties that we will consider moves down to 400,000 a year. We expect to make only half of those, 200,000, which is a substantial decrease on the figures mentioned by the noble Baroness.