I support the non-existent amendment of my noble friend Lord Bach as it is key to the changes that we are having. We should not be discussing this Bill in isolation from the Welfare Reform Act that preceded it. They represent a package of cuts and changes that will bear very heavily on 5 million to 7 million people in this country—no light measure.
To follow my noble friend, it is worth reminding the House of what we discussed at Second Reading about the number of changes that will affect people who are receiving benefits, even though many of them are in work. Those changes will happen to them all at once. We will see a new structure of benefits, brought together in universal credit—that is a structure that I welcome—but it will be accompanied, as in this Bill, and in reducing benefit inflation to CPI, by serious cuts, which many benefit claimants will think is simply an error by the department. They will go frantic with concern in trying to rectify them. That is the second change.
The third change that we are going to see is to the new patterns of payment. For example, tenants of social housing who currently have their housing benefit paid directly to the landlord will now have it paid to themselves, looped through a bank account. Very often, given other pressures of finance, debts and so on, they may be in real difficulties in making that money over to the landlord at the end of the month. So there is a new pattern of payment, with which tenants must become familiar. They will also have monthly payment of benefit, when many of them have been used to weekly or fortnightly payments, and the payment will go to a single earner or person in the household and not split. Again, that is a major change.
All those changes—the new structure, the cuts, the new method of payment direct to tenants, and the monthly payments—will be handled by an IT system, when we know that 20% to 30% of the tenants wishing to claim benefit have no familiarity with IT at all. So what will they do? What they have always done is to seek legal advice from Citizens Advice, which in the past has been funded very substantially by the Lord Chancellor’s Department. CABs have received some 40% of their funding from the Lord Chancellor’s Department, but that has been cut, and they are now 40% short. As a result, those same people facing this sequence of changes, some of which I support, like universal credit, and some of which I deplore, will make their bids for benefit on the basis of an IT system, with which they are not familiar, instead of a paper trail. Where do they go? They cannot go to the traditional advice centres because the legal aid money that sustained them has been withdrawn in the worst, most foolish and most indecent economy of which I can conceive. I declare my interest as a chair of a housing association. I am having to appoint paid professionals to do the welfare advice, to be paid for out of increased tenants’ rents, which hitherto was provided by the skilled but unpaid volunteers of the CABs, which represented a real commitment to the big society to which we all give lip service and which, I fear, is too seldom observed in this House.
My noble friend is absolutely right that this is a foolish way to proceed and I regret very much that we were not allowed to debate this properly. I speak with some concern because, as a departmental Minister for eight years, I was responsible for tribunals before they went over, via Leggatt, to a generalised tribunal system. I sat in on those tribunals for DLA and other benefits. My noble friend is exactly right—I could see within five minutes whether the person coming before the tribunal had or had not received prior legal advice. If they had not, the appeal or discussion at tribunal took five times as long, with the chairman, as they were then called—now judge—trying to tease out the issues and establish whether it was a bona fide case, whether they could take it further and even whether the person was claiming against the right benefit. In some cases, they were complaining about an incapacity benefit when it should have been DLA, and I felt like jumping up and saying, “You’ve got the wrong benefit here—let’s start again”.
That is the situation here. We are transferring the pressure of the problem away from the point that is most approachable, accessible and value for money—local services in the community funded by legal aid—to the tribunal process itself and merely distributing the pressure over a longer time, at greater cost, with greater inaccessibility and greater difficulty for everyone to understand. That is a huge folly and, like my noble friend, I beg the Government, even at this late stage, to reconsider .