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Housing Benefit (Amendment) Regulations 2009

My Lords, it is a pleasure to follow the noble Baroness, Lady Meacher, and my noble friend Lady Thomas of Winchester. We owe my noble friend a tribute and acknowledgment for raising this important point on a set of regulations, which herald some significant changes. I also pay tribute to the SSAC, whose work informs our debates time after time in a very positive way. I agree with my noble friend that these regulations have not been properly considered by the Government, and I think that it is safe for the House to vote on the Motion. If it occurred to my noble friend to press the Motion to Division, I would be right behind her in the Division Lobbies. Consideration was given to a consultation that was very extensive and very consensual. That is contained in the committee’s report at Chapter 5. There were 25 very detailed responses, and the score was 24 against and one in favour of the Government proceeding as they have. That is an unusual score, even for the SSAC, and that is something that the House should consider very carefully. Personally, I am deeply disappointed by these regulations. They are short term and superficial and may be counterproductive. I have not said much as sternly as that since the new Secretary of State, Mr Purnell, took office. This is the first set of regulations under his stewardship of the department which I flatly think are wrong. That is important to recognise. The argument in the SSAC report about the motive for the policy changes is well founded. The two cases that caused so much controversy in west London some months ago are the provenance of these policy changes, and nothing else. The pathfinder pilots preceding the introduction of the local housing allowance were planned for years and ran for two years in each of the extensive periods throughout the United Kingdom and, to my knowledge—although I stand to be corrected—not one of those pathfinder projects pointed to this as something that needed attention. I cannot believe, if this was the significant problem that it is now argued to be by the Government, that it would not have been picked up in that rigorous process of pathfinding. The pathfinder in Edinburgh was the closest one to me and I spent some time monitoring it. The responses were very positive, but they did not at any stage point to capping regulations, the like of which we are seeing now. If I were the Minister and was confronted by these difficult headlines—although I believe nothing that I read in the newspapers any more about social security; they never get it right, if they ever get anything right—I would have brought in the local authorities, the Rent Service people, even the health service and the department, and sat down and worked out exactly what long-term alternatives were available to the housing benefit local authority officers who took these decisions. My noble friend may be right; maybe they took the wrong decisions; maybe the expertise available and the level at which these decisions were taken leading to these reports were not right. If that is true, there are some very obvious lessons to learn from this. Even more fundamental than that, however, is that if we are not careful as a House we will end up with unintended consequences, which will result in family breakdown and households being split, two sets of accommodation having to be provided in some cases and overcrowding, with substandard environmental housing conditions. As my noble friend Lady Thomas said, these regulations would also result in child poverty. If Lisa Harper has made anything clear in her important contribution to the child poverty debate that has been going on—and positively, it must be said, until the recent past, at the hands of the Government—it is that families predisposed to poverty and hardship contiguously over periods of time are large families with workless households in the ethnic communities. In all three categories, children are subjected to not just low income but hardship and poverty on a longitudinal basis. I do not believe that the department knows how many children will be affected; the figures are 3,000, but they are tentative; this is nothing more firm than survey data. I do not think that that is a safe basis on which this House should allow the department to bring in these regulations if the figures are so flimsy. I do not think that it is safe to make these changes on the basis of survey data. I have three questions for the Minister. First, we know that there is to be a review of the local housing allowance regulations after a two-year period from the date of their introduction. Can we have an assurance from the Minister that these regulations will form the basis of a special chapter in that review and that a free-standing integral part of the review in two years’ time will be about how this has worked out, how many families it has affected and how many children within those families? After a two-year period, those figures should be nailed down and known. Secondly, we have assurances that the DWP and the Treasury are looking at work incentives as they affect these rents and the local housing allowances in future. I would want to be very careful about work incentives in relation to this client group and these regulations. I would certainly be very nervous about sanctioning people if they were the heads of households of the kinds of family groups that we are talking about here. I would like some assurance that there will be some open and transparent consultations on any DWP/Treasury review of work incentives for this client group in departmental coverage of the subject. Thirdly and finally, the SSAC itself asks, at paragraph 6.9 of its report—this is on page 19 of Command Paper 7571—for "further work" to be done on this area. That is the least that we can do and the least that I would accept if I were, like my noble friend, deciding whether to press this. The paucity of evidence and the scarcity of hard facts and stats on which this policy is based need to be further pursued. Further and better particulars need to be obtained before anybody can have confidence that this is no more than a London problem, which the Government have handled badly with a knee-jerk reaction that might, in the long run, be entirely counterproductive. This House should feel able to resist tabloid pressure from time to time. This is no rational response to the problem that the Government have identified, and this policy should be resisted.