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Welfare Reform Bill

Many of the amendments in this group are technical and consequential, and I shall therefore not linger on them. I anticipate that there will be most interest in the proposals on renaming council tax benefit as council tax rebate and on uprating, so I shall dwell on those at slightly more length. There are six amendments that end provision for pilot schemes that impose a benefit sanction on people who breach a community order. They have been superseded by new measures and are no longer necessary. There is then a group containing four amendments in respect of the recommendations of the Delegated Powers and Regulatory Reform Committee, following a very useful report that I am sure all parts of the House welcomed. The amendments will put them into effect. Amendment 16 will resolve a technical issue in respect of disability living allowance and remove what is effectively a duplicate clause. Amendments 19 to 22 will resolve a further technical issue in payments on account and achieve better benefit alignment in respect of the use of the social fund. Our own internal scrutiny found that there was no need to include housing benefit in the scope of that measure. Amendments 23 and 52 deal with the uprating of benefits. That important change will enable us to meet our promise to pensioners to increase basic state pension from April by 2.5 per cent., which will be worth about £1 billion over the course of the year. The amendments will allow the Secretary of State to consider uprating certain social security benefits in April 2010, even if there is no increase in the general level of prices. The retail prices index has been traditionally used to determine an increase in the general level of prices.