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Welfare Reform Bill

My Lords, for the sake of completeness, I shall make this all-party. The campaign that the Royal British Legion has run has been exemplary; but it is good at that. It is plugged into the local community and it does exemplary work. It has had success, and I am pleased for it that that is the case. I, too, pay tribute to the noble Baroness for taking the initiative and tabling her amendment. I am happy to take the assurances that the Minister has made from the Dispatch Box about timing, delegated powers and all those matters. We need to be careful about the fact that this is not going to be as efficacious as some of us would like. It will help, and it is worth doing, which is why I am in favour of it, but it is not a substitute for take-up campaigns. The department must not think that, because it is renaming the benefit, suddenly people are going to run into the arms of the local authority and start making claims afresh without further campaigns at a national and a local level. That work goes on from time to time, and my experience is that the department tackles these things in waves. Sometimes a campaign is being run over a period of time and you can check its effectiveness. I urge the Minister to go back to the department and say that what would make this a real success would be that around the rebranding—I do not mean that to sound diminutive of this change because I think it is worth having—there should be a sustained and concerted national and regional set of campaigns that say, "We are changing the name and we hope that will reduce the stigma". Council tax is going to become much more of a burden on low-income households over the next three to five years. In our innermost hearts we all know this. Any Government of whichever stripe—or the department or the local authorities that are in charge of this—should take the opportunity of the change to run a sustained campaign of public take-up, irrespective of what the benefit is called: otherwise, in the next three to five years, council tax will become a real burden for many low-income families.