Welfare Reform Bill

I listen to the Minister’s passion—““We have to do this, we have to do this””—and I find myself thinking that that would be fine if we were in normal circumstances and the benefits were not changing but were pretty much going on as they always have, and people were not going to be facing major drops in their benefit levels or having to adjust to having to move because of all sorts of rules about underoccupancy or because of the tying of benefits to the consumer prices index and so on. There are so many ways in which people on benefits are going to be losing—that is the context—and this is not the time to be determined to bring all these people into line with people in work. Can we not wait until things are stable and then maybe introduce the rather nice idea of bringing these two groups together?