My Lords, I very much thank all noble Lords who have spoken. I also thank the Minister. I welcome him to this Bill for, I think, the first time. Some of us are long veterans of this Bill. We have been debating it since last June. Our focus has, perhaps, been very different from the values and priorities that the Minister has been enunciating this evening. We have been very much focused on the child welfare issues and have seen those as a priority in the progress of the Bill. We have reached quite a lot of cross-party and cross-Chamber consensus on all of that.
Once again the Minister put great emphasis on the discretionary housing payment scheme. The fact is, in ways that were never foreseen when the original bedroom tax was introduced, it has already had to be increased and increased. This very much demonstrates that the policy, as originally planned and thought out, was not working and is still not working. It is making the evaluation of the costs very difficult. Indeed, the savings that were originally envisaged are now not being met. The whole policy is being turned on its head.
In all the calculations that I have heard the Minister cite, he does not take into account some of the extra costs. Noble Lords around the Chamber have given us examples, including the whole issue of managing evictions, debt, arrears, the extra costs to local authorities of going back to people to try to collect those debts and arrears, and the more ill defined, but nevertheless very much present, extra social problems that arise from some of these issues.
I am very pleased to hear that there will be an evaluation but, in the mean time, we are trying to deal with some of the problems that exist now. I say to the noble Lord, Lord Storey, who said that some of the discretionary fund was not always being used, that, for that very reason, the discretionary fund is not always the answer to those families. It is quite traumatic to go through that means-testing process. There is also an administrative on-cost for the local authorities that are trying to administer it. This is a murky area. It is not surprising that money in and money out are not always working effectively with the administration of that scheme.
Meanwhile, we have to respect the fact that the Tory-led Local Government Association is saying that there is a problem here and that other budgets are having to be raided to cope with the surge of applications. It is not me who is saying that; it is the Local Government Association. The chair of the Local Government Association’s finance panel says:
“This will have a significant impact on local government budgets, which are already stretched to breaking point by the deepest cuts in the public sector”.
Again, those are not my words; they come from the chair of the LGA finance committee .
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However, this is not about the funds. It is about child welfare and about localism—a word that this Government do not seem to use very much any more. It is also about trust. Our amendment would trust local authorities to manage their housing stock and the vulnerable families within them most effectively. The noble Lord, Lord Martin, began to illustrate that. The housing stock and the experience of people living in Glasgow are very different from that of people living in the Welsh valleys, London and other urban areas. It is very difficult for local authorities to operate a blanket scheme when the housing stock, the availability of alternative stock and so on are so different. We are trying to build in extra flexibility to enable local authorities to respond to the real needs of the families and children in their locality.
At the moment, those local authorities are trying to manage the sometimes perverse impact of that national policy on their local families. For example, they have to move families whose homes have been adapted to smaller homes, which in turn will need to be adapted all over again; or push families into the more expensive private rented sector as those smaller properties are not available, leaving behind sometimes larger properties that nobody wants to live in, which then remain empty. These are perverse events that were not foreseen but are now happening on the ground.
Ultimately, it comes back to what is in the best interests of the child. I know, from my experience as a trustee of Shelter for many years, that enforced moves and disruption can have a devastating effect on children’s health and their schooling, particularly if they are suffering from other complex problems. We have talked a little about disability, but it is not just about disability. There can be complex family problems, personal problems, things to do with special educational needs and services that they need in the locality. We have debated these on other occasions. There could be all sorts of other local services that they rely on to get by. We are in danger of cutting off those people with those problems by expecting them to move unnecessarily.
We have united across the House throughout the Bill on the need to put children’s welfare first. This is a very simple amendment that follows that logic through. It would enable local authorities to ensure that they too abide by that principle in implementing the rules of the bedroom tax. If the Minister did not like our drafting, it was open to him to come back with an alternative, but he has made it clear that he is not prepared to do so. On that basis, I have not been convinced by the Minister on this issue. I therefore wish to test the opinion of the House on this amendment.