Welfare Reform Bill

My Lords, my intention is to reassure the noble Lord, Lord Best, so that he withdraws his amendment. I start by trying to convince the noble Baroness, Lady Howe, and my noble friend Lord Cormack of the reason why we are doing this. It is not an arbitrary thing. We are not doing it because we want to annoy housing associations or local authorities. We are doing it for a very simple reason. If you are a tenant in social housing whose housing benefit goes straight through to the landlord and you take a job, all your arrangements for paying for your housing have to change. It is a major change in your arrangements and a real block on you taking the job. It is a major thing for you to organise, and you have to learn, when you take that first job and your housing benefit goes down within universal credit—because that is the change—that the money no longer goes through automatically to the landlord. We have to break that link. It has to be the same arrangement whether you are working or not working. We deliberately excluded pension-age people from this because we are not expecting them to work. We do not need to worry about the people who find it difficult to work. It is working-age people who we want to go into work.