My Lords, briefly, I think that the Minister has a choice when he responds to the amendment, which was so effectively moved by my noble friend. He can say either that children of a certain group—disabled children, children in poverty or whatever—are exempt from the application of the bedroom tax to the tenancy, or he can say, on the contrary, we will leave it to local authorities to exercise their discretion, so that the response you get is a lottery based on where you live, and you have all the problems associated with what is effectively means testing.
The advantage of the first path is that you can perfectly easily have ways of ensuring that certain families with children do not come into the category of the bedroom tax as such. You could say that children on disability living allowance, for example, would simply be exempt, but discretionary housing payments apply to other people, which may include disabled people and so on. If that is the way which the Minister wishes to go, that would be the clean and clear way to do it.
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If the alternative is to rely on discretionary housing payments, as the Minister keeps doing, then two or three things follow from that. First, that depends on the initiative of the family to go in for, effectively, a local means-testing regime. What we know at the moment, and the Minister will know this as well as anybody in this House, is that what happens with a means-testing regime is that more than a third of pensioners, for example, who are eligible for means-tested
benefits do not apply and therefore do not get them. We know that many families who are entitled to council tax benefit—again, it is something like 40%—do not apply and do not get it. He is dependent on the ability of that family to touch resources to which that family may have no access. That money therefore does not get drawn upon and, as a result, that family goes short and hungry.
Secondly, if you are relying effectively on the means-testing principle, you are relying on the insecurity of the local authority. I can tell the Minister why that money is not being spent. Something like 18 or so months ago, my own local authority, Norwich, ran out of its discretionary housing payment money by November. The Minister is very fond of quoting at me on the Floor of this Chamber—he has now done so twice—what has happened in Norwich. After November, other families in distress who needed the support could not access any more money because it had gone.
As a result, local authorities across the country are trying to calibrate need, knowing that demand fluctuates in the course of the year, particularly after Christmas when the energy bills go up and the debts begin to fall in. That is why so many local authorities are being extremely cautious and careful about how they spend that discretionary money. It is not that they wish to withhold it, but they are terrified of being in a situation where so many of them have been in the past.
I know that the Minister has fought for additional moneys. Every time that he fights for additional moneys, at the end of the day it will not make a penny of savings on this whole damned policy. It is a lousy policy. By the time he has got to £180 million, taking into account arrears, voids, administrative costs, eviction costs and the costs of those who go into the private rented sector, which increases their HB, he will find that there will be no savings left but he will have put hundreds of thousands of families—two-thirds of them disabled and about a third to a quarter of them with children—through the stress and insecurity which the noble Lord, Lord Martin, has just described to us from the Cross Benches.
The Minister has a choice. He can either go back and change the housing benefit regulations following this amendment, so that children are taken out of its application, or he can rely on his principle of means testing, knowing that it has failed repeatedly. We have a Pensions Bill at the moment which is taking means testing out of the system because we know of its inadequacy. The Minister is now importing that back into the relief of children in poverty, which he does not need to do. I hope very much that he will listen today to the powerful speeches made on behalf of children because his policy is a cul-de-sac. It is a dead end and the sooner that it is abandoned, frankly, the better.