Welfare Reform Bill

My Lords, I will deal with that straightaway because it is a point that has been raised more generally. Two things are confused here. Levels of employment are, regrettably, too high. We as a Government regret that, and we are throwing enormous resources at ameliorating that position, but this is a different issue. This is about people and families who are, and have been, excluded from the workforce entirely. They have been inactive. We need to put in place arrangements to get them able to move back into the workforce. It may take a bit of time for them to get in, but that is a completely different order of issue from helping people who are unemployed and are waiting to get a job. We must not confuse snapshot numbers of vacancies available with flows. The problem is that the flow of people going into work is, on a monthly basis, slightly less than those who are moving out. That is the problem. However, there are still large numbers of people going into work every month and finding jobs. We just need to make sure that the excluded communities become part of that process. This is one of the ways to do it. We need to make sure that that transition is organised. We need to put jobcentre staff and caseworkers on it to help those families. That is by far the most important thing we can do to make sure that this benefit cap has the effect that it needs to have. Clearly, we need assistance in hard cases, which we plan to have, but that is a second-order issue in terms of trying to work with families to get them back into work. In the Bill, we have all the powers that we need to get into the detailed design of the cap and to make sure that those circumstances are picked up and dealt with. Let me pick up on the point made by the noble Lord, Lord Best, about benefit ghettos. The reality is that 67,000 families could not create a benefit ghetto in this country. That would be 1 per cent of working-age recipients. We are not talking about massive numbers on any standards. The amendment seeks to place in the Bill an exemption from the benefit cap for households provided with interim or temporary accommodation by a local authority. It also gives local authorities the discretion to apply an exemption to people who are either homeless and in priority need, or those who are at risk of becoming homeless and in priority need as a result of the cap. In looking at the wording of the amendment, it is easy to see that any local authority could consider people threatened with homelessness and in priority need as potentially meaning any household with children. In practice, that is the same as not having a cap at all. For that reason, the Government regard this amendment as a wrecking amendment. In answer to the question on costings asked by the noble Lord, Lord McKenzie, this is not a matter of costing but a matter of rendering the policy in practice unworkable. The Opposition tell us that they support the principle of a benefit cap, but is that the reality? When we have a complicated amendment such as this, which undoes the ability to run a cap of any kind, one is driven to ask what form of cap the Opposition think is appropriate. From what we have heard in debate here and in the Commons, it appears that the only cap that they would consider to be appropriate would be so high or would have such broad exemptions that it would apply only to a few people and most households would be exempt. As I said in my remarks introducing the first group of amendments, in the court of public opinion—as the noble Lord, Lord Elystan-Morgan, referred to it—only 7 per cent of those polled would set the cap higher than £26,000 a year and only 9 per cent believed that it should not apply at all. The Government are well within the court of public opinion. We are looking at a benefits system that is desperately in need of reform. Many households receiving benefits find themselves trapped in the benefits system because there is little financial incentive for them to move off benefits. When we moved into office, more than 10.6 million working age people in this country did not work and around 2.6 million people had spent at least half of the previous 10 years on some form of out-of-work benefits. We find that situation unacceptable.