Welfare Reform Bill

My Lords, I am intervening only briefly, partly because I do not want to attack the right reverend Prelate, who seemed to be in a much less militant mood than he was on the previous occasion. I will, therefore, not repeat the remarks that I made then, when I made the point that what he was asking for was an increase in the benefit cap. I refrained from saying at that time—and the House ought to bear this in mind when thinking about all of this—that child benefit for the first child is now worth about £1,000 a year tax-free. For every other child it is a bit less than that. Bearing in mind that it is tax-free and that we are talking about a benefit cap of £26,000 net, which is said to equate to £36,000 gross, if you put child benefit on top you are looking at a position in which you would have to be a higher-rate taxpayer in order to hit the benefit cap, in terms of what you would have to earn. People ought to bear that in mind. My main point is to express some reservations about the amendments tabled by the noble Lord, Lord McKenzie. What do we mean by ““local area””? He really needs to answer that. My noble friend Lord Fowler and I—and I have already referred to some of our travails over housing benefit in 1986 to 1988—looked at this question of localisation and regionalisation. It is intractable, because housing costs do not vary on a regional basis or even on a district or city or borough basis; they vary on a street-by-street basis. Is that what the noble Lord has in mind? If so, it would become a complete administrative nightmare. He needs to think very carefully before pressing this particular line, whatever its intellectual attractions.