My Lords, I thank all noble Lords who have contributed to this small debate. The noble Lord, Lord Best, emphasised that housing benefit was a high-ticket item. He is right, so any percentage cuts to that benefit are highly significant in terms of the income as it affects tenant recipients. He also emphasised, and he was absolutely right to do so, the folly as well as the cruelty of sending thousands of families into higher cost temporary accommodation. I agreed with every word he said—I hope that that does not damn his speech.
I thank the noble Lord, Lord Bates, for a thoughtful contribution to the debate supporting the review. I am delighted that he agrees with the commitment of the noble Lord, Lord Freud, that such a review is desirable and necessary. Contrary to what the Minister was saying, he is right that private sector rents are alone among the housing triple tenures in rising fast. They are rising faster than inflation. That, as I tried to argue, means that it is impossible to leave that sector because by paying those higher rents you cannot afford to save for the deposit that takes you out of it. In turn, that raises rents still higher because nobody is leaving that sector but other people are trying to enter, which makes it even more impossible to leave it in the future. It becomes a vicious upward spiral in which people are trapped. The noble Lord, Lord Bates, is absolutely right that that is exactly what is happening. Poorer tenants are also faced with that higher increased pressure on rents with only housing benefit to help them cope with it, and that housing benefit is being cut three times over—first by being connected not to the 50th percentile of rents but to the 30th percentile, secondly by being capped by CPI for the forthcoming year instead of actual rent levels, and thirdly, in the subsequent two years, by a further cap of only 1%, which the Minister has confirmed to us. That means that more tenants will follow the desperately sad route that the noble Lord, Lord Best, emphasised.
As my noble friend Lord McKenzie said, quoting the Guardian article that I missed, that will mean more families with children being uprooted and spending longer periods in bed-and-breakfast accommodation. Many years ago, as a former chair of a housing committee, I saw how long it took those children, who were often traumatised by those events, to get over them. They had had to move home, move school and lose connection with their friends. At the age of seven or eight, they were reverting to bedwetting and the rest. That is what we are now going to be imposing on thousands more children because of the folly of this policy.
Finally, I come to the Minister’s comments. She emphasised that she thinks the policy is working and that according to her figures rents are already being driven down as a result. I listened carefully and I would very much like to see the evidence she has because it runs contrary to what the noble Lords, Lord Bates and Lord Best, and the National Landlords Association are saying; it runs contrary to my brief from Shelter and my experience of the housing market. It may be that the Department for Work and Pensions has a unique insight and extra special information denied to the rest of us, but it does not conform to what I know. Certainly it is the case that so far the CPI cap has applied for only something like 10 months of the current year. None the less, for the years thereafter—not next year, but two years thereafter—it is going to come down to 1%, so there is going to be an accelerating effect, a depression, on rent levels as a result of the rent benefit and housing benefit caps arising from the Government’s policy.
The Government are banking absolutely everything on the fact that by pressing and cutting down on HB, even though only 20% of those in the market have HB,
you will reduce the overall level of rents and therefore tenants will not suffer. There is not a shred of evidence that I have seen or that has been offered tonight to support that contention. The Minister is gambling on the lives of children going into bed-and-breakfast accommodation in the ideological hope that 20% of those in the market can affect the rents that the other 80% will pay. They will not do it because landlords do not have to let, and they will not let, except those who have substandard accommodation that people who do not need housing benefit will avoid. That is a form of Russian roulette that none of us should be party to.
I hope that the Minister will write to me with her evidence because it does not conform to anything that I am aware of. In the light of that, I would like to reflect on what she has said and on what evidence she can send me. I will also reflect on whether what she is saying means that the Government are continuing adequately to keep under review the possible divergence that, from all the evidence we have, is already beginning to occur between rents and housing benefit. I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.