Welfare Reform Bill

My Lords, having been a serial good-behaviour person this week, I thought that I ought at least, in fairness to myself and the noble Lord, Lord Best, to join in on this, as I was in my serial offending mode at the time the previous amendment was discussed. I am not going to repeat everything I said then, but I am tempted, not by every line of argument that the noble Baroness, Lady Hollis, or indeed anybody else, deployed, but by two of the points. First, part of the problem here is that we have not got enough social housing, which is highly relevant to this. I declare an interest in that my wife is responsible for it in Braintree District Council—for action on housing, not for the shortage. The effect in rural areas was the main point of my speech on the last occasion, and it has been well illustrated by points made by the noble Lord and the noble Baroness in the past few minutes. I am not sure that the amendment, because of its genesis, is the right way now to tackle this. I am reserving my position on that until I hear the Minister. However, I do think, as a practising politician and as an MP who used to have constituents complaining about this kind of thing, that the Government are playing a very dangerous political game, without quite knowing what will hit them when this comes into force. I will give some possible illustrations. I do not know the answers for any of them, but the Minister might like to bear them in mind. For example, a 16 year-old in north London is killed, by a bullet or a knife, by a gangster. His parents have a spare room, and soon after the inquest, somebody turns up and says, ““You’ve got to move. You’ve got a spare room””. A carer looks after an elderly parent for 20 years. The parent dies and somebody turns up and says, ““You’ve got a spare room—here’s the penalty”” or, ““You’ve got to move””. We can think of a lot of such potential cases. My concern is that the Government should not charge down this path in a mechanistic way without thinking what they are going to do at the point of transition and in relation to the numerous hard cases that will arise. Otherwise, as I said in my previous speech, this will not last five minutes. I would like to hear the Minister on those points. I am slightly scarred by one bit of experience. As part of the social security reforms in which I played a modest part alongside my noble friend Lord Fowler in the mid-1980s, we proposed some fairly draconian changes in housing benefit, which were, to be blunt, forced on us by the Treasury. They were introduced happily. Two years after I ceased to be Minister for Social Security, I was Minister for Health—another bed of nails. In my recollection, although I have not checked the books, the impact of those changes was such that the then Prime Minister ordered their reversal within a month, because the flak simply could not be withstood. That is the risk the Government are running here, and I hope they will think about it very hard.