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Welfare Reform Bill

My Lords, I am grateful for the support that the amendment has received from the noble Lord, Lord Freud, and his colleagues. There is no titanic struggle within government. We are all of one mind on this—as ever—and work in a joined-up way. The noble Lord, Lord Kirkwood, said that it was not efficacious in every way, but that he does support it. He is absolutely right that, in itself, it is not all that we need to do. We have heard powerful arguments about take-up campaigns, so I will not use the time of the House to run through them. The aim is to enable people to make one claim with one phone call for council tax benefit and housing benefit. There will be home visits, and we have provisions in the Bill to use data to reach people more effectively. Those efforts must continue. Let me make clear what I intend to do at Third Reading. The amendment that I proposed to bring forward has regard to the recommendation of the Delegated Powers Committee. At present, the power in the amendment will be subject to the affirmative procedure on first use, and negative procedure on second use, if there should be one. The Delegated Powers Committee recommended that the procedure should be affirmative throughout, and we will accept that recommendation. I did not propose—and would not wish to mislead my noble friend Lady Turner or the noble Countess, Lady Mar, by suggesting—that we would do anything further at Third Reading. I will stress one point that we may revisit when discussing the next amendment of my noble friend Lady Turner. The option of simply putting a name change in the Bill does not have the immediate effect of changing council tax benefit to council tax rebate. Any such provision would need to be subject to commencement provisions. Under the Bill, those provisions are commenced when the Secretary of State judges that it is appropriate to do so. Moreover, the Secretary of State would commence them under a commencement order, which is not a parliamentary process and would not be subject to the affirmative procedure. The fact that an alternative name is written in the Bill does not mean that things would happen straightaway—the procedure would have to be introduced in a commencement order by the Secretary of State. That is a parallel situation to introducing and using the power that we have in the amendment. The powers that we have in the Bill around commencement orders would enable transitional provisions to be brought forward, and would enable adjustments to secondary legislation, but they would not enable adjustments to primary legislation. There is a raft of secondary and primary legislation containing the term "council tax benefit". Perhaps here I am pre-empting the debate that we will have later. The amendment would not be sufficient to enable us to do everything to introduce the change that we all want. It says nothing about how expeditiously the change could be made. There is probably a lot of legislation for which the Secretary of State has not commenced provisions. There is no compulsion on the Secretary of State to take this route. Therefore, I honestly do not believe that it is as effective a route as the one that we have outlined in these provisions. I believe that these measures give the Royal British Legion what it wants—and, indeed, what we all want—in a way that is, with great respect, more effective than the amendment that we are about to debate. Perhaps we will come back to that shortly. I am grateful for the support for this amendment and believe that we have a shared view of what we want to achieve. Amendment 62 agreed. Amendment 63 Moved by