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Housing Benefit

Let me begin, quite properly, by congratulating the Select Committee on its thorough and detailed report and by thanking members of the Committee and other hon. Members for their contributions to the debate. Members of the Committee and other hon. Members who have spoken have a lot of expertise on the benefits system in general and on housing and housing benefit in particular, and we have all benefited from that expertise today. It would have been nice if the Government response to the Committee had been available slightly earlier than the day before the debate, but it was in the hands of the Committee yesterday, ahead of the debate, as I was keen for it to be. Rather than my standing up here and giving the Government response and then everyone going away and deciding what they thought about it, the Government response was already in the hands of the Committee and, as we have seen, members of the Committee have been able to read it, form a view and give further feedback, which has enabled us to have a useful dialogue this afternoon as part of the conversation. From that point of view, this has already been a worthwhile afternoon and a valuable process. I thank the Chair of the Select Committee, the hon. Member for Aberdeen South (Dame Anne Begg), for acknowledging some of the important steps forward that have been made since the Committee's report was tabled. There was some suggestion that we had paid no attention to it, but in her opening remarks, the hon. Lady graciously flagged two particular areas in which there has been significant progress since the Committee's report was produced. One was on research into the impact of the changes. The other, which was the subject of several paragraphs of recommendations from the Committee, was on the previously proposed 10% cut in housing benefit after a year on jobseeker's allowance. It is tempting to say that Government responses to Select Committee reports should be judged by action, not words. If a Select Committee recommends a specific change in policy, and a change in policy subsequently takes place, it is a little ungenerous of members of the Committee to say, ““Ah, yes, but the wording of the response was not good enough,”” or something similar, especially if it were done at significant cost to the Exchequer. The hon. Member for Aberdeen South, of course, was characteristically gracious. It may help if I update hon. Members on where we are on monitoring the impact of the changes. The Committee issued a press release to accompany the report three days before Christmas—it is good to see that they were working right up to the deadline. In it, the hon. Member for Aberdeen South said that"““it is too early to determine if this will happen in reality, which is why it is hard to say exactly what the impact of these changes will be.””" There is an element of uncertainty, which is why we always intended to commission research and to monitor the impact of the changes. Discussions with their lordships prompted a fuller discussion of the form that it would take. The research that we undertake will be independent. It will include comprehensive primary research on the effect of the changes on different types of households in a range of areas. The debate has shown that the impact of housing benefit in Blackpool is different from that in Cambridge or central London. We accept that, which is why the research will cover the whole of England, Scotland and Wales. It will be done over the next two years, due to a factor that was given insufficient attention in our debate. With a nine-month transition period, and with no change happening until the anniversary of claims, some people will not be affected by the change until December 2012. That is the roll-out period, which is significant. Rather than there being a day when everyone's housing benefit is reassessed, with everyone competing for the same properties, new tenancies will be dealt with under the new rules, which is precisely the point of the exercise. We did not want people to be locked into new tenancies at above the new limit, day after day and month after month, only for us to say, ““Oh, no, we've cut the limits, so the decision that you made three months ago is not valid.”” Instead, from April new tenancies will come under the new rules, so people starting new tenancies will face the constraints that anyone else will face, as we discussed earlier, rather than having a more generous system. It is right to make new tenancies under the new rules and to give existing households more time to adjust.