Welfare Reform Bill

My Lords, Amendment 59 would allow families whose benefits have been capped to retain child benefit. It would do no more and no less than that. It does not challenge the basis of the cap. It does not challenge the amount of the cap. It is certainly no threat to the very welcome universal credit of which we have spoken a good deal this afternoon, but it would save some 80,000 children, according to government figures, from falling into poverty. The Government’s assessment of the impact of the cap is that some 67,000 households will be affected. The Minister spoke of that earlier as not a massive number. It is pretty massive for those involved, but the fact that it is not massive in the overall terms of Welfare Reform Bill means that it ought to be possible for us to pass the amendment without seeing ourselves as fatally damaging the Bill itself. Those 67,000 families will lose on average £83 a week. Analysis from the Children’s Society shows that those households contain around 220,000 children. Three-quarters of those affected by the cap are children, yet Clause 94 says nothing about children at all. The cap as it stands is not just, because it fails to differentiate between households with children and those without. It makes no provision for the additional cost of bringing up children, which is the purpose of our most successful and well targeted provision of family support: child benefit. The Government have decided that £500 a week should be the cap for a couple, and I have no quarrel with that; but if that is right, it cannot be right for the cap to be the same for a childless couple as for a couple with children. Child benefit is the most appropriate way in which to right that unfairness.