---

Housing Benefit (Loss of Benefit) (Pilot Scheme) Regulations 2007

I am very pleased to follow the noble Lord, Lord Taylor, and I concur with just about everything that he said. The Committee should be very wary of taking on additional pilots. I think that there is already a feeling that the department is more or less ““piloted out””. It is very easy to agree that we should look at these issues and, indeed, many of them benefit from pilots being run, but one wonders to what extent we overdo the technique. However, as has been said, we will look at this pilot programme with great interest once the results have been evaluated and made available. I have a number of questions for the Minister. He is right to say that we had some full discussions about the principle during the passage of the Welfare Reform Bill. He will know that the legislation was amended to the extent that we have a sunset clause, under which, unless we have further primary legislation, the legislation will be brought to an end by 2010. That has an impact on its interaction with these pilots, and I should be very interested to know how he sees that working. Of course, the power for the sanctions can last for up to five years but, as there is only two or three years to go between now and 2010, it will be interesting to watch how these things interact. I have serious doubts about a post-eviction policy. I absolutely concur with the analysis of the evil and damage that anti-social behaviour does and the fact that there is a need to do something. I understand that there is always pressure on Ministers to be seen to be doing something, but they must resist the temptation to do that. I also have serious doubts about using the benefits system to impose penalties as part of the so-called respect agenda. I do not think that you do that easily without potentially damaging very fragile households. The pilots are interesting and they need to be watched but I think that Ministers need to be careful about how they are rolled out. I should be much more interested in devoting resources, time and energy to a preventive strategy. I know that that has been tried. The Minister has said, rightly, that the experience of the work carried out at Dundee and the research at Sheffield Hallam University indicates that you can get considerable returns from actively preventing people being evicted and getting involved in anti-social behaviour in the first place. If I were given the choice, that is the direction of policy that I would take. It is not the one that we have before us this afternoon, which looks at the requirement for post-eviction support services to try to reduce anti-social behaviour. I do not think that that is the right way to do it. One immediate question that arises is that this power derives from 1992 regulations, which are UK wide, but the pilots are only English in their dimension. Does that mean that the policy as currently constructed is intended in the long term to be rolled out only in England if it is rolled out, or are there discussions with colleagues in Scotland, Wales and indeed Northern Ireland about what happens in the longer run? As far as I can see, there is certainly not a great deal of demand for these policies. What do the local authorities that have volunteered—and that is an interesting verb to use sometimes—actually feel about this? Their view may be that this is another additional tool that they might use as a way forward in future, but I get no sense from the stakeholders or local authorities that people are queuing up to press the Minister for these measures. One reason for that is that the proposals will involve additional complexity. The guidelines are much more extensive than I expected, but they are to provide protections for those who are subject to the regulations. It all gets a bit convoluted, and we all know that the benefit system is complex enough as it is. We need to guard against increasing complexity where we can. I shall be interested to know why these areas were chosen and whether they were volunteers. As far as I can make out, in the timescale for which figures are most recently available, only 28 families in total were evicted across these eight areas. That suggests to me that we have a potentially very small sample here, which is something that needs looking at very carefully. I should also like to try to work out what control arrangements there are. Will there be interviews and will evaluation be attempted for those families who are evicted but are not threatened with a sanction to get a control that makes the evaluation a bit more scientific? Perhaps something could be said about that, if not this afternoon then by way of a letter to me and the noble Lord. That would be helpful. There is confusion here about responsibility, too. The respect agenda is a Home Office matter, for which there is a budget and a rollout for national policies. The delivery of these pilots will be exclusively in the hands of local authorities, which will have some discretion in that regard while obviously being subject to the Department for Communities and Local Government. The DWP seems to fit into this process simply because it is that department’s money that is potentially being sanctioned. Can I have some assurances that there have been meaningful talks between all these various government departments so that they all know what they are trying to do? As for the policy outcome and evaluation, will we not end up with the pilots eventually evaluating nothing much more than the quality of the service packages available in these eight areas? If they are very good service packages, a lot of people will readily accept them. Therefore, I do not see how the evaluation of the actual policy can be unbundled from the extent and provision of the package of services of support that are available. I am puzzled about that and would like some reassurance about that, too. There is a mismatch between the legal and practical arrangements in these orders, because I think that there is a confusion of language and definition between ““tenant”” on the one hand, who is responsible for the rent—that comes from the rent Acts and a body of law that is separate and distinct—and ““household”” or ““benefit unit”” on the other, which come from social security law. The tenant is the person who is going to be sanctioned, because he or she will get the warning letter and the terms of the sanction threat put through his or her door. But the tenant may not be responsible for the anti-social behaviour about which the complaint is raised, because it is a member of the household who is responsible. The two are not the same thing. The loose use of terms such as ““family””, ““household””, ““tenant”” and ““former occupier”” will lead to potential difficulties. The benefit unit is different from the household. We know that because housing benefit is paid to the family unit, not to the household; they are considered separate units. Deductions are made from non-dependent units, which are considered to be economically distinct and separate from the household. So you could have anti-social behaviour conducted by a non-dependent for housing benefit purposes, but how does that fit in with who gets the sanction letter and who gets the penalty applied to him or her? It is difficult to understand. I certainly do not understand it, but perhaps I am missing something here. There are some prima facie problems about human rights. I am not an expert in this area, but because these regulations discriminate households that are guilty of anti-social behaviour simply according to where they live, there is an element of potential discrimination that the Minister should get his officials to look at carefully. There are another 53 family intervention pilots in other parts of the United Kingdom that have been in place for some time, and anti-social behaviour households in those areas can refuse to co-operate and not be sanctioned. So there is a potential area of discrimination there, too. These pilots may be inherently contradictory to some of the provisions of the Human Rights Act. If the Minister cannot give me an answer today, I should like him to write to me. The ““good cause”” provisions in the guidelines will exempt just about everyone who is potentially subject to these sanctions. The Minister in his introduction rightly referred to the Dundee scheme. My figures indicate that the Dundee scheme showed that 55 per cent of families engaged with the support, and that the other 45 per cent were likely to have additional barriers. Given the fact that they have additional barriers, those with extra problems will probably not be subject to the sanctions because they will be excluded by the ““good cause”” provisions and the guidelines. So we could be left with precious few families to whom these regulations and sanctions can ever be applied. I wonder whether this is all a great fuss about not a lot at all. I may have got it wrong, but I think it is possible under these regulations for members of the household to engage in support intervention—to accept the letter to come and engage in the support intervention and therefore not get sanctioned—and to continue with anti-social behaviour and not get sanctioned. Another problem is that the former occupier as defined in these regulations could quite easily go outside the pilot area and get a housing benefit application successfully accepted in some region outside of the eight current pilots. I wonder whether they will be advised about that by the local CAB. That seems to me to be a bit of a no-brainer and I do not see how it helps the constructive evaluation of the pilots. How do you separate out the effect of a sanction from everything else that is going on at the time? I think all you will end up doing is increasing rent arrears, which is in no one’s interest. Have the department considered a disability impact statement for these regulations? The noble Lord, Lord Taylor, is right: mental illness is fundamental and at the core of this, particularly with Asperger’s syndrome sufferers. There is a great deal of evidence that such people are subjected unduly to ASBOs for reasons of their mental illness. The disability aspect has to be looked at very carefully. The ethnicity dimension also has to be considered because some minority communities—black ethnic minority communities foremost among them—feel that they are subjected to a disproportionate number of ASBOs. Can we be sure that we are not discriminating against ethnic minorities in this process? Will specialist advisers in both departments be available to the eight local authorities which are part of the pilot? We need to be careful about the guidance we are drafting. The discretion that we are asking local authorities to exercise will be very difficult and potentially very damaging for the families to which it is applied. I support intervention/prevention strategies to help the problem much more along the lines of Sheffield Hallam and the Dundee experience than going down this route. Having said that, it is a question of value for money. There is a real chance that not much useful will be learnt from these pilots outside the eight regions in which they apply. It might be interesting to see what happens within those regions but, outside of them, I do not think best practice will be easily translatable because the context will be so different. The money should go to local schemes with a proven record of success in prevention rather than anything else. At the end of the day, penalties should be reserved for the criminal justice system and not used in the benefits system in the way that these regulations suggest.