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Welfare Reform Bill

My Lords, in the spirit of developing a system together, which we seem to have moved into, we can look at a greater amount of flexibility. Some things are not that expensive to do, but others are. Payment systems are not necessarily hugely difficult. I do not have my computer gurus sitting around me whispering how much things cost, but my feeling is that there are areas of flexibility here which we are going to explore in great detail in the next year or so in order to get this right. We can be flexible and make changes if we feel that things are not right. I turn now to the series of questions raised by the noble Baroness, Lady Hollis, on the relationship with housing benefit. I will try to deal with them one by one. The universal credit will be an itemised statement. It is being developed and at the moment comprises three layers. You will see the summary on the top sheet, so to speak, and a somewhat more elaborated thing when you hit the button for the next level, and then you see pages of the stuff at the third level, which we do not think a lot of people will go to. However, we give them the option to do that. The statement is simple; it itemises the intention. The structure that we have arrived at has been the subject of a lot of toing and froing with the customer insight people. A couple of weeks ago I sat on one side of a piece of glass watching how people were using the system. That is where we have ended up in that particular bit. I was asked whether this process be slowed down to the rate of the slowest element. Where you have some decided elements, the JSA rate and so on, we should be able to get that going straight away without tying it up. We will be able to separate out elements with new claims involving big new changes rather than the whole claim waiting for the last little bit of evidence on, say, housing to come through. We are looking at tackling this matter much more flexibly.