I hope that as I continue to respond to the debate I will answer the question that the noble Baroness has just asked.
We have commissioned a consortium, led by Ian Cole of Sheffield University, to carry out an independent review of these changes. The interim report is due to be published in spring this year and the final report in early 2014. In addition, to monitor the specific effects of LHA uprating we have put in place a process for publishing on an annual basis a comparison of local housing allowance rates and the 30th percentile of market rents.
The first annual publication of these data took place in November last year and was carried out independently by the rent officers who set LHA rates and collect the most authoritative data on market rents. The noble Baroness, Lady Hollis, asked for some evidence. The published data show that only one-quarter of LHA rates have been subject to the CPI limit and more than one in 10 rates have actually fallen in line with local rents, to answer the point that my noble friend Lord Bates raised. At this moment we are not seeing a general divergence between LHA rates and market rents.
The noble Lord, Lord Best, and the noble Baroness, Lady Hollis, referred to several different potential outcomes from the changes that we have made. A couple of things were proposed, suggested or estimated during the passage of the Welfare Reform Act, one of them being a suggestion that 42% of landlords would scale back on housing benefit tenants. The reality is that the housing benefit caseload has actually risen in London by 5% in, I think, the past year.
The noble Baroness, Lady Hollis, suggested that no properties would be available to benefit claimants. Private sector landlords are not turning away housing benefit claimants. Since April 2011, when we introduced our first reforms of the LHA, the PRS caseload, as I just said, increased, and that includes London and the south-east.
The noble Baroness also made reference to rent control and suggested that that might be the way forward. We absolutely dispute that; we say that it would not make more homes available at rents that people could afford. We experienced regulated rents in the private sector some decades ago and they shrank from 55% of households in 1939 to 8% by the late 1980s.