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Housing Benefit

No. The hon. Gentleman, possibly with my help, might be confused. We have already had lengthy debates on CPI as a measure of inflation for uprating benefits, and our judgment is that it is the most appropriate measure of inflation. What I am talking about here is what we do to the LHA rates in 2013. We will put a break on them rising faster than inflation for two years, and at that point we will look at the impact. That is all I am saying. We are putting in place a mechanism that will cause a pause in that remorseless rise, and I have heard almost nothing in this debate about how we will tackle the growth, apart from building more houses, which is vital—in the past year, we have had the lowest rate of private house building on record, or certainly for a very long time. The argument appears to be, ““Lie back and take it,”” but that is not the action of a responsible Government. My hon. Friend the Member for Cardiff Central raised the issue of broad rental market areas, which is relevant in the CPI context. If LHA rates are to be subject to CPI, ideally the broad rental market areas should not move around because the base figure subject to CPI would not be clear. The broad rental market areas must be frozen at the point at which one goes to CPI, and the question is what they would be at that point. My hon. Friends the Members for Cardiff Central and for Cambridge (Dr Huppert) have properly highlighted the problems with the city of Cambridge and the wider area of Cambridgeshire, and although there have been changes to the BRMAs around that area, the idea is that they will be fixed in 2013. My hon. Friend the Member for Cardiff Central mentioned co-terminosity with local authorities, in relation to Wales, and that is one of the options being considered. It is an option that has a number of attractions. In London, it would mean that the BRMAs were smaller, and the affordability figures would therefore be within a tighter geographic area. We would be unlikely to make significant changes this side of 2013, partly because every time the rules are redrawn, another set of gainers and another set of losers are created. So, we would rather do that at the point of moving to CPI in 2013. Local authority boundaries are not without their own problems. Many of my Liberal Democrat colleagues represent seats in Cornwall. Cornwall is now a unitary authority and the whole of Cornwall would be one BRMA—I think that BRMAs can be smaller than that. My colleague who represents Land's End, my hon. Friend the Member for St Ives (Andrew George), and my hon. Friend the Member for North Cornwall (Dan Rogerson) might have views about the interchangability of their two areas. There is no simple solution, but we are certainly looking at local authority boundaries in response to the points that my hon. Friend the Member for Cardiff Central has raised. Universal credit has been mentioned, and it was asked whether housing benefit would go in at a flat rate. The details of that will be discussed more in the Welfare Reform Bill Committee, but my certain understanding is that the intention is not simply to have a ““so much for housing”” number in the universal credit. I think that the approach will be much more tailored, but I am sure it will be discussed much more fully in the Committee. On the under-occupation rules, it was asked whether people would be moving from three-bedroom houses to one-bedroom flats. The data show that about three quarters of the under-occupation in the social rented sector is by only one bedroom, so the move from three bedrooms to one bedroom would represent perhaps a quarter of the change. The impact might not be quite as great as I think the hon. Member for Westminster North suggested, but we have just published some more data on that.