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Benefits Simplification

I would hate to venture on to the territory of trying to make council tax fair, but my hon. Friend is absolutely right. It is a rebate because no cash ever enters an individual's pocket. It is a credit against their council tax liability. I would have no qualms at all about changing its name to council tax rebate because that is what it is. There is no cash payment. For reasons that are beyond me, and I defy anyone to explain it, in 1983, the system of housing support moved away from the Department for Social Security into local authorities, and was called housing benefit. Again, for about two years there was absolute chaos. No end of people were evicted, and tens of thousands more were threatened with eviction, because of the inability of local authorities to gear up for that big change. At the time, my authority of Bradford—the fourth biggest authority in the country; I will just stick that in—had a small department dealing with the old rent allowance. It was informed by the Department of Social Security that it would need an extra six staff to deal with the new legislation. At its peak, it had an extra 130 staff, and it is now down to about 100. It never staffed up for that change because it was not told it would need to, and by the time it had the right number of staff, incredible backlogs had occurred.