Welfare Reform Bill

Very good. Of course, this issue is having to be considered, as has been said, against the backdrop of the overall funding for council tax benefit being reduced by 10 per cent but with commitments to protect awards of council tax support for pensioners and possibly for other vulnerable groups. This means, as has been said, that support for working age claimants is to be squeezed dramatically. The consultation on this proposition, the Localism Bill, closed two months ago, and perhaps we can know when the Government’s response to this will be forthcoming. Quite apart from the administrative consequences of the proposed localism of the benefit, there is, as my noble friend pointed out, a fundamental difference compared with what happens currently. Under present arrangements, council tax benefit is demand led. Whatever the calculation shows is due is made available to the claimant, by offset against the council tax bill, with full reimbursement from the DWP. It is, as my noble friend explained, the AME—annually managed expenditure—bit of government spending. This will in effect change under a localised system. If claims under a localised system exceed the budgetary amount locally, authorities will have much more limited resources from which to meet the increased demand. They might dip into reserves, if they have any, or they might make the system less generous in a subsequent period. They might switch expenditure from other local authority spend, but given the savage cuts to local authority budgets that have been made recently, there does not seem to be much room for manoeuvre to do that. It is suggested that local authorities might approach a localised system on some consortium basis, and therefore that other local authorities will help out. I suggest that the prospects for this are not strong. One consequence of these constraints will be that local authorities will inevitably budget on a prudent basis, building in contingencies that will further diminish the resources available to claimants of a localised system. That indeed is what the risk assessment will dictate. The main reason advanced by the Minister, Grant Shapps MP, in evidence to the CLG Committee for the localisation of council tax benefit was that for local authorities, "““the big advantage is that they will have a stake for the first time in what people who live in those homes are doing; in other words, an incentive to help get the person back into work””." This is a rather strange view: that it takes possible savings from a benefit pot for local authorities to have an incentive to help people back to work. It is a view that ignores, or is ignorant of, the proactive and imaginative work that many local authorities do to help local residents into work. However, in any event, the driver for having clear incentives to support work is supposed to be the universal credit itself. If there is any incentive in the system, there is a risk that local take-up campaigns will diminish, as any wider take-up will come from the resources of the council. We have yet to know how much central direction there will be for a localised system. If the Government run true to form, there will be quite a lot. This was certainly the outcome of the Localism Bill, which espoused localism and gave additional powers to local authorities but came with lots of strings attached, as the noble Lord, Lord Newton, will recall, despite some of those strings being removed in your Lordships’ House. There will clearly have to be central direction if the position of pensioners is to be protected, and some form of direction to deal with tapers and work incentives. We understand, to follow the line of questioning by the noble Lord, Lord German, that the Minister will say that he cannot support a change to the universal credit to include a council tax benefit now. However, there is nothing to stop it being included in the future, as the Bill now stands. If this is the Government’s position, will the Minister confirm that he considers that regulations under Clause 11 will be the route to effect this? The noble Lord, Lord German, also raised some fascinating questions about how this works for Wales and Scotland. Can the Minister say whether the proposition that he will advance tonight will be, ““Don’t worry about it now—you can get it all back in due course.””? What changes would have to be made to the systems that are currently being built to put this into effect? Including council tax support as part of universal credit is of course not without its challenges, particularly the payment issue, so perhaps we can hear whether there has been any thinking around that matter. However, we support my noble friend’s strong contention that the sensible, practical and principled way to deal with council tax benefit is to include it as part of universal credit. We believe that the Minister, a very logical person, must have come to the same conclusion. If a strong vote today will help his cause, we are more than prepared to play our part.