Welfare Reform Bill

My Lords, universal credit is about using benefits to encourage behavioural change, and above all to encourage people to seek work by reducing its risk and increasing its reward. Like most people in this Chamber, I am deeply supportive of that, as the Minister knows. The House is extremely grateful to the Minister for the care and attentiveness with which he has introduced the changes made by universal credit through the stages of this Bill. However, this amendment in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Best, has nothing to do with universal credit, nothing to do with behavioural change and nothing to do with urging people into work. It is simply a means of making savings that will come from cuts which will fall on some of the poorest. The Minister has already said, by referring to Moody’s, that we cannot afford to lose those savings, yet none of them falls on me although they could do so. I would be happy to indicate to the Minister, if he so wishes, where they might. In my view, this is about political and moral choices. Do I pay or should a disabled child suffer? I want to make three brief points. First, I believe that at the core of the policy on underoccupation is a fundamental dishonesty. I do not accuse the Minister of this, but the position is a dishonest one. That is because it states that people of working age must downsize if they have one spare bedroom but, as the Government acknowledge in their own impact analysis, those smaller flats and houses to which people should move do not exist. The Government acknowledge that 85 per cent of people will therefore have to stay put. If they do not, and instead move into the more expensive private-rented sector, the savings will not be made. Let us think about this. The Government are publicly requiring people to downsize and then, knowing that the stock is not there, they hope and expect that people will ignore what the Government are telling them to do—otherwise they will not make the savings. The Government are calling for one outcome but want people to do the exact opposite. We are asking the House not to collude in that false choice. Secondly, the Government’s position, as has been well outlined by the noble Lord, Lord Best, is deeply unfair to particular groups of people. I shall take just one: the couple with disability who need a bedroom each on occasion. He may have early prostate cancer and be going to the loo half a dozen times a night; she may have a respiratory problem and cough heavily through much of the night. On most nights, they need a separate bedroom otherwise one is being required to go without sleep or the other to sofa-surf in her own home night after night—a 60 year-old woman is being asked to sleep on a sofa night after night because of the change. The same problems apply to disabled children being expected to share bedrooms with their siblings. If those disabled children need regular night-time care, their siblings are going to go to school without enough sleep, tired and upset, and almost certainly underperforming. Do we really believe that such families should carry the cuts on behalf of us all? I think not. The third and last point is the consequences for housing associations such as my own—I declare an interest as chair of Broadland Housing Association, half of whose housing is in rural Norfolk. I cannot currently rehouse pensioners in rural Norfolk who want to downsize because I do not have the stock in the villages in which they want to live, yet it is among pensioners that underoccupation is most common. In future, the disabled family which does not want to move will be required to move, while to the pensioner who wants to move we will have to say, ““You’ll have to stay put””. Can your Lordships think of a more foolish as well as—in many ways—more selfish policy, whereby people who do not want to move are made to move, and those who do want to move cannot, even though the costs of the one and the other would balance out? That cannot be right. What will we do? As the noble Lord, Lord Best, said, families who cannot move, including those with a disabled child, will have to take a hit on their housing benefit through no fault of their own because they cannot move, and they will within weeks fall into arrears. What do we then do in a housing association? Either I evict a family with a disabled child into temporary accommodation or bed and breakfast—how I can do this to them?—or they stay put and arrears mount. I have already trebled the amount in my accounts for increased arrears. As the noble Lord rightly said, that money is not available to pay the debt charges of new building which alone will solve the problems of getting our stock right in the longer term. The Minister says that such people may make a contribution out of their benefit, by which he means, frankly, that they must either eat less or heat less. A disabled child and their family are being asked to eat less or heat less in order to bridge the gap between their housing benefit and the home in which they live. I return to my opening point: we do not have to do this. It is about our political and moral choices. Families with a disabled child will lose £14 a week, while most of us enjoy a tax-free winter fuel allowance or find for the second year running that our council tax has been frozen. Not a penny of these cuts is falling on me or, I suspect, on very many of your Lordships, yet we are asking disabled families and families with disabled children to carry those cuts for us. I hope that your Lordships will put themselves on the side of the very modest amendment moved by the noble Lord, Lord Best, put themselves on the side of disabled children, disabled people, war widows, foster carers and kinship carers, and support the noble Lord’s amendment.