Welfare Reform Bill

My Lords, the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Ripon and Leeds made the point that the job of a member of the church is to look after children in need, but one needs to ask the question about children in need at a slightly different level. For instance, if we leave families with rents that they could never afford in work, what does that do for the children? What does it do for the children in those families when there is no working role model in them? We know what happens to those children. What does it mean to leave them in workless families given the much higher level of poverty that we know exists in them? What does it mean for the generational worklessness that we see in those families? The question that, from a religious point of view, you need to come from is much wider—What is the best thing for those families?—rather than looking at it from a narrow financial basis. Let me supply the figures because they were just slightly misquoted. We estimate that the savings generated by the cap will be £120 million in 2013-14 and £130 million in subsequent years. I think I heard £113 million. Putting those figures to one side for the moment, the reality is that the savings on this measure are not the core point. We are trying to change behaviours. If we do not cut the benefit bill by the amount we have in the estimate, that is a good thing because we will have got people into work and changed their behaviour. This measure does something different: it cuts the number of families affected by the cap from 67,000 to about 40,000. That is the real cost of this amendment. It takes the pressure away from those 20,000 families that will go on in the same way that they have been going, and we will not have the behavioural change that we want and need from those families.