Local Government Finance Bill

I support the amendments on the impact of the scheme. This debate is about people's lives, about families and people who live on the edge financially, but it is also about local authorities' ability to deliver services at the standards we have come to expect in our communities. It is a debacle: the Government's proposals on council tax benefit will simply heap greater burdens on the most vulnerable households and families at a time when the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions is already making life tougher for them. I would have hoped that the Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government had at least talked to his counterpart at the Department for Work and Pensions to ensure that their policies did not conflict in the way they clearly do. The amendments would help to deal with some of that conflict. ““Make work pay.”” That is what the Prime Minister has said over and over again, and he is determined to make that happen. No one could or should argue with that statement, but it is vital to create incentives so that it is always better to be in employment than on benefits. The Government's proposals on council tax benefits will totally undermine that objective. They are simply yet another attack on hard-working families. I know that council tax benefit is available to those on low incomes who need financial help to pay their council tax bill, but I am shocked that Ministers appear to believe that a 10% cut to the benefit will somehow—perhaps magically; we talked about magic earlier on—reduce the number of people who need it. In these harsh economic times, with high and rising unemployment as well as rising energy and food bills, this tax relief is to be squeezed precisely at the point when there is the greatest need for help among low-income households. As others have said, pensioners and vulnerable households are to be protected, and rightly so, from the cuts, but that means that the whole of the 10% saving that local authorities must make will fall on the unprotected group—mainly the working poor.