Personal Independence Payments

Baroness Hollis of Heigham Excerpts

Tuesday 10th March 2015 Lords Chamber

[Lord Freud]

This is an area into which we have looked very closely, helped by the noble Countess. We have an audit system for all of these tests whereby we test that they are being conducted to the quality that we require.

[Baroness Hollis of Heigham (Lab)]

My Lords, of those people who are going from DLA to PIP, how many does the Minister expect will lose their Motability car? Will it be 50,000 or 100,000?

Universal Credit

Baroness Hollis of Heigham Excerpts

Monday 24th November 2014 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Hollis of Heigham (Lab)]

My Lords, I declare an interest as chair of a housing association. More than half of tenants affected by the bedroom tax are in arrears. We now learn that the Government propose to claw back those arrears by deducting a further 20% from those tenants’ benefits. For couples, this means a full £20 to £40 deduction a week from their benefit for living in homes that we allocated to them and from which they cannot move. The Government have created the debt and now seek to solve it by sending those tenants even deeper into debt. It is shocking, and many will never recover. Do the Government not understand that we are wrecking people’s lives?

[Lord Freud]

We conducted a painstaking process of testing how people respond to paying their housing rent directly. We found that there was a three-month adjustment process until people got familiar with it. We are now ensuring that we have the right systems to help people make that adjustment into the monthly payment situation.

Underoccupancy Charge: Carers

Baroness Hollis of Heigham Excerpts

Monday 10th November 2014 Lords Chamber

[Lord Freud]

This is precisely the kind of circumstance for which the discretionary housing payment is designed. It has not been found possible to have a general rule, and that is why this system, which has gone through the courts in quite some detail, has been found to supply support where necessary.

[Baroness Hollis of Heigham (Lab)]

My Lords, if, as the Minister suggests, disabled families with family carers are effectively covered by DHPs, why not simply exempt them? If he is wrong—which I suspect he is—why are we, quite knowingly, making lives that are already hard even harder, perhaps thus ensuring that the family carers will themselves become disabled?

[Lord Freud]

The courts have gone through this in some detail now and found that it is reasonable for the Secretary of State to take the view that it is not practicable to provide a further exemption for an imprecise class of persons, and that the flexibility of the DHP scheme can be relied upon to provide the additional help.

Work Capability Assessment

Baroness Hollis of Heigham Excerpts

Wednesday 5th November 2014 Lords Chamber

[Lord Freud]

Clearly, I am not able to respond on specific people going into specific places. The whole point of the assessments is to focus on functional capability or needs at the point of assessment.

[Baroness Hollis of Heigham (Lab)]

My Lords, 40% of people appeal against their assessment, some of them terminally ill. The DWP has added an extra stage to the appeals process, mandatory reconsideration by the department, but—and this is key—there is no time limit for staff to meet. Tiny numbers of appeals are being processed; the rest are being seriously delayed by six months or more. What is the Minister doing to speed up those appeals?

[Lord Freud]

The noble Baroness is quite right that the rate of appeals has fallen very steeply, by 92% in the latest quarter compared with a year earlier. It is too early to tell the definitive reasons for that. It may well be due to many of the changes that have gone through—75 recommendations have gone through—or to mandatory reconsideration so that we look at it early. However, when you look at the backlog of mandatory reconsiderations, you see that the pure numbers do not seem to be a huge influencing factor in this fall in appeals.

Housing: Underoccupancy Charge

Baroness Hollis of Heigham Excerpts

Tuesday 22nd July 2014 Lords Chamber

Asked by

[Baroness Hollis of Heigham]

To ask Her Majesty’s Government whether they have any plans to change their policy following the publication of their report Evaluation of the Removal of the Spare Room Subsidy: Interim Report.

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Department for Work and Pensions (Lord Freud) (Con)]

We inherited a housing benefit system with costs spiralling and took steps to bring expenditure under control. This remains our policy. The interim report establishes an early baseline. Since the field work was completed, the numbers affected by the policy have continued to fall month on month, reported levels of arrears experienced by English housing associations have fallen, and there is emerging evidence that many landlords are adapting their building plans in response to this policy.

[Baroness Hollis of Heigham (Lab)]

My Lords, everything we feared about the bedroom tax has been confirmed by this research—everything. Two-thirds of affected families are disabled. As there are no small homes, only 4% have been able to downsize. They cannot move but as most cannot get discretionary housing payments, they cannot pay and stay either. So 60% are in arrears; one-third face eviction; meals are forgone; debts are mounting; grandparents are cutting back on grandchildren’s visits because they cannot afford to feed them; people cannot stay; people cannot move. Does the Minister agree and accept that the bedroom tax—the coalition bedroom tax—is profoundly wrong?

[Lord Freud]

This report was based on evidence from last autumn and we have had data since then that show that people are adapting. The numbers affected are falling and are now down 70,000 people; arrears have fallen in the past two quarters and rent collection remains for the Homes and Communities Agency for the social sector at 99%; homelessness numbers are reducing and are down 7% on the year. As for DHPs, we had a quarter of a million payments last year to people affected by this policy and we had £20 million returned to us unallocated. Finally, the Court of Appeal has upheld the Government’s position that DHPs are the proportionate remedy for looking after people with problems from this policy.

Poverty and Social Exclusion

Baroness Hollis of Heigham Excerpts

Thursday 17th July 2014 Lords Chamber

[Lord Freud]

The noble Earl is absolutely right to concentrate on this issue because this group has traditionally done disproportionately badly. We have taken steps to ensure that these young people are better off in terms of housing than youngsters who are not coming out of care. As regards the mental health issues, it is absolutely correct to concentrate on the fact that a large proportion of people develop long-term disabilities due to mental health issues. We are devoting a lot of energy to consideration of that area.

[Baroness Hollis of Heigham (Lab)]

My Lords, we have a bedroom tax because the Liberal Democrats voted for it—

[Baroness Jenkin of Kennington (Con)]

Does my noble friend agree that employment alleviates poverty, and does he welcome yesterday’s unemployment figures?

Universal Credit

Baroness Hollis of Heigham Excerpts

Wednesday 9th July 2014 Lords Chamber

[Lord Freud]

One thing I want to ensure is that I can get as much information to noble Lords as I possibly can. I am pleased to say that I have extended an invitation, which has been accepted, to arrange for a group of opposition Peers—as many as the noble Baroness would like to bring; well, not quite as many as that; we could not fit them all into Hammersmith; but enough to fill the room with a little standing room—to go through what is happening on the ground and the process.

One thing that I am keen to show the noble Baroness, which we saw this morning with a small group, is access to the work coaches to see how they work with clients in an entirely different way—in particular, to try to help the most vulnerable, whether it is looking at how they budget or various other things that they will need to do under universal credit.

[Baroness Hollis of Heigham (Lab)]

My Lords, Mr Duncan Smith insists that UC is on time, on track and on budget. I fear that it is not. None of the monitoring bodies—the Treasury, the Major Projects Authority, the NAO, the DWP Select Committee, the Public Accounts Committee, Sir Bob Kerslake—believes that. To paraphrase Sir Jeremy Heywood, the project remains well off-track. We want this to work. Will the Minister, whose integrity we entirely respect, give us the facts and the future plans rather than recycle the empty bluster of the Secretary of State?

[Lord Freud]

My Lords, this is a very large programme and the way we are doing it is quite responsive. What we have is a test and learn process. That is not just an empty phrase. It is a very large process, based on a live run-out of many tens of thousands of people, which feeds into how we build a fully digital interactive service that we are building at the same time. We will make changes to the process. That is what it is about. It would be silly to do all that work without being responsive. We learn lots of things. One of my jobs is to try to understand what we are finding out and then make those changes. There will be changes. Having said that, we announced a rollout process in December and we are, to my pleasure, managing to get it out to time with those plans. The next stages, which are towards the end of the year, are really important—moving on to families, bringing in childcare and going to that digital place. By the end of the year we will have a working test bed of how a fully interactive process will work. I am not saying it will not change after that, but I am saying that we are doing what we were planning to do.

Pensions Bill

Baroness Hollis of Heigham Excerpts

Tuesday 8th April 2014 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Hollis of Heigham (Lab)]

My Lords, first, I thank the Minister and his honourable friend in the other place, Steve Webb, for briefing me on their position before our amendment went to the Commons to be overturned. I appreciated their courtesy then in the same way that I appreciate the Minister’s generosity today. I also appreciate above all—that is what matters—their recognition—sort of, at any rate—that this issue is not going to go away. Obviously, my regret is that the Minister did not feel able to come back with an appropriate amendment in lieu, but of course I welcome the detailed review announced today.

What was the point of the original amendment? The state pension has been a national insurance pension built on men’s full-time working lives, where wives and widows largely derived their state pension entitlement through him. However, as family structures have changed, as motherhood has become divorced from marriage, as disabled people have lived into retirement, as mothers have joined the labour force, as grandparents in their 50s have become carers of even frailer parents in their 80s, so governments over the years have credited those in unwaged work—mainly women—into the NI system. Noble Lords—many of whom are here today—have helped enormously to make all that possible.

However, though the state pension has responded flexibly and appropriately to the changes in our demography, in my view it has failed to respond flexibly and appropriately to similarly profound changes in the labour market, such as the growth in self-employment, part-time work, agency work, zero-hours contracts, the 24/7 working world and the fact that nearly 40% of all people in the labour force no longer work a standard labour contract, on which our pensions are still largely based.

We have, alongside the US, probably the most flexible and deregulated labour market in the developed world—for good and for bad—but our pension structures have not caught up. Therefore, along with insecurity, uncertain income and hours, issues of sick pay, holiday pay and childcare needs—the dark side of the flexible labour market—almost always overlooked is, for some, the lack of pension entitlement. We who benefit from the labour market, including me, should ensure that appropriate safety nets are in place.

After all, if you are unemployed and on JSA, you are in the national insurance system and build a pension; if you are on disability benefit, you are in NI; if you are a carer of children or frail elderly relatives, you are in NI; if in future you are self-employed, you are in NI; and if you work 20 hours a week on the minimum wage in a single job, you are in NI and you build a pension. That is good. However, if you are in a non-standard work pattern, working 30 hours a week on the minimum wage but with two 15-hour jobs or three 10-hour jobs, you are excluded from national insurance.

If your earnings fluctuate across the year, when you can be sent home 10 minutes before your shift starts, you may not even know whether at year’s end you have crossed the LEL line and built your pension. If you strive to come off JSA, as we would wish, by patching together mini-jobs, which may be all that is available and with all the effort, travel costs and risk that that requires, you may get punished for it by losing the state pension that you would have got by simply staying on JSA. That is perverse. We are punishing people for doing what is right—those who are taking risks to do what is right—and public policy which does that must be wrong.

A woman may be cleaning offices early in the morning and late at night, as well as other offices late in the day, and doing domestic cleaning, travelling for hours by bus and building her working week. She may be working at a department store late on a Thursday evening and all day Saturday, alongside working in a laundrette during the week. A man may be doing three hours each weekday in a sandwich shop alongside some delivery work or part-time security work in Tesco. Multiple jobs are hard work.

Steve Webb in the other place was puzzled as to why such workers do not find jobs with longer hours. Disappointingly, he cannot have read the research. Students and pensioners may want those limited hours, but nearly half the workers in the MASS1 survey wanted longer hours and could not get them, sometimes because, I am afraid, employers want to dodge paying NI. Such workers need a second or even a third mini-job to make ends meet. They work 30 or 40 hours a week, fractured between several jobs. They may earn £11,000 or £12,000 a year and they may pay tax. We are quite happy to amalgamate their earnings for tax, through which they contribute to other people’s pensions, but we refuse to allow them to do it for NI, which would build their own state pension. This is so wrong.

We do not know precisely how many people are in this situation but my own best estimate—and it is only that—is that the figure is some 250,000 and growing. The obstacles over the decade in which we have been arguing this have basically been two. First, it is fiddly getting fractions of employers’ contributions from different companies. Secondly, there is an assumption, which I know the Minister does not share and which I am sure his right honourable friend does not share, that those with a couple of part-time jobs are mostly older women who can rely on their husbands and work for pin money; for them, the situation is short term and they do not matter. Well, they do. The changing world of work has made this a real issue.

Real-time information allows HMRC to track them—that is now straightforward. The new state pension—and I am so pleased about this—brings 4 million self-employed people into national insurance without an employer’s contribution, so that is not necessary. In addition, there are in any case millions of unemployed people on benefits or earning above the LEL of £5,700 but below the point at which they pay NI at £7,500 and who are credited into NI for free, yet because someone is earning £12,000 from three £4,000 jobs, they are outlawed and get nothing. We should be supporting their work effort and applauding their effort to patch together a wage under difficult circumstances, not undermining it.

Neither is this some short-lived rite of passage. What little survey material we have suggests that 40% of people in zero-hour contracts have been with the same employer for five years or more and 20% for 10 years or more, to the detriment perhaps of their future state pension. We know, for example, that many low-paid people cycle between employment, self-employment and no employment, but we do not fail to support the self-employed because their self-employment may last only a few years and theoretically there is time to build a full NI record. These non-standard work patterns are not some temporary phenomena but a fundamental shift in the nature of employment where demand for labour and services will ebb and flow by the hour, the day, the week, the season. With a Pensions Bill before us, we could do something about it and bring the state pension into line with this new working world.

The House agreed. On 24 February it supported this entirely permissive amendment. The Minister in the Commons who overturned it made three points: it was technically defective; we did not know the real stats—the Minister used that argument today—and universal credit would sort it; and, therefore, it was premature to act. I agree with the Minister on most of that, but not on the last point. The amendment is probably technically deficient. I have had many technically deficient amendments run against me. If the House and Government agreed, it was my responsibility, with consent, to bring back an amendment that in the words of the honourable Steve Webb could “normally be tidied up”. He simply chose not to.

Secondly, I agree with the Minister that we do not know what the facts or stats are. We have no definitive figures. Research on the topic is limited and they use different data bases. Of the primary pieces of research, one samples employers and one samples employees. One looks at only zero-hour contracts and the other at short-term contracts as well. They have different wage bands and different hour bands. The reason is that they were researching the work conditions behind zero-hour contracts, not the question of pension entitlement to NI. I am afraid that those questions did not arise. We can only make informed assumptions about the number of those at risk who will be covered by UC.

I am delighted that today the Minister has committed himself to decent research on the subject over and beyond what we already know. A full review of the existing literature, as I am sure the Minister knows, will take him precisely 10 hours. What I do not know, and what the chartered institute or MASS1 could tell us, is whether their data can be cut in different ways to answer some of the unknowns or whether we need fresh survey material that focuses specifically on the NI and pension entitlement issue. If we do need fresh survey research material, is the Minister in a position today to give us the guarantee that he will use departmental resources to find out what else we may need to know?

However, none of these considerations need stop the Government following through on the amendment, in my view. Why? How? We could, for example, treat such workers in pension terms like the 4 million self-employed, coming into NI for the first time, leaving open the status of their employment. Or we could encourage voluntary NICs, but the employee will not know until retirement how many years she has missed, and by then voluntary NIC rules do not allow her to make good the missing years from 25 years earlier. Aren’t we clever? We could treat her like those on JSA, in that by working more than 20 or 30 hours a week, she was indeed meeting work conditionality and was credited in. We could reconsider the LEL—lowering it perhaps, as Steve Webb suggested, to bring in more mini-jobs or, as the IFS has proposed, raising the primary threshold, perhaps to the tax threshold with which it was previously bracketed. That comes at a cost.

We need departmental resources to determine how best to proceed, but it is not rocket science. We could do it quite easily with political will. We need to do it because the new state pension—this is also different—is financially more generous but it has scrapped the married woman’s pension and scrapped the widow’s derived pension. The widow or the wife can have absolutely nothing. Universal credit is a household test and the husband’s income may float them off it. If she were doing too many jobs that took her above the LEL, and was not allowed to bring them together, she could fail to get a pension through her own work; she could fail to get a pension through her husband’s national insurance; and she could fail to get a pension through UC. Unless we tackle this issue she will get no pension at all for those years in which she ran together many jobs. No state pension at all—none.

Let me make one final point. Of course I welcome the review and I am delighted that the Minister has spelled it out today. However, we are perhaps making heavy weather of what might be quite a modest change in crediting rules. Yet—I hope the House will forgive me for saying this—we have just had a Budget where, as far as I know, without any research, consultation, briefing or preparation but simply by fiat of the Chancellor, we have turned the annuity market upside down, affecting up to 400,000 people a year, with unknown, possibly disastrous, effects on retirement income, housing and social care.

Why are we bothered? Why is this House bothered with the private sector parts of the Pensions Bill? I really do not know. We have all, including the Minister, wasted countless hours on it. I do not in the least accuse him of bad faith on this because he may well have been in the position—I do not know—that the rest of us were in. However, we have certainly had enough departmental time to have this issue sorted. None the less, I welcome the review and the Minister’s generosity in outlining it today.

Housing Benefit (Transitional Provisions) (Amendment) Regulations 2014

Baroness Hollis of Heigham Excerpts

Thursday 3rd April 2014 Lords Chamber

[Lord Low of Dalston (CB)]

My Lords, I realise that time is at a premium so I shall be brief and say just a few words. I remember very clearly, as will other noble Lords, the words of Lord Newton of Braintree who, to the great sadness of all, is no longer with us. In his intervention on Report during debates on what is now the Welfare Reform Act, he warned his colleagues in the Government that this would not last five minutes. Once people started realising what was happening and getting on to their MPs in droves, the Government would be forced to scrap it. It has not worked out quite like that but the bedroom tax is visibly unravelling before one’s eyes. It is not saving any money or freeing up any accommodation. My advice to the Minister would be to recognise when he is beaten. He has not a friend in the House. When you are in a hole the only sensible advice is to stop digging. I advise the Minister to recognise realities and run up the white flag.

[Baroness Hollis of Heigham (Lab)]

My Lords, in her powerful speech, my noble friend Lady Sherlock has explained our opposition to this statutory instrument. It brings more people into the bedroom tax which should be abolished. She has had support from all around the House today. The tax is disastrous. A previous Tory Government introduced and repealed the poll tax in the same Parliament. As the noble Lord, Lord Low, said, this Government should have the courage and decency to do the same.

You do, of course, need sanctions in social security to ensure, for example, that compliance with JSA work search is not voluntary. However, the bedroom tax—for the first time ever—falls on the innocent, disabled and vulnerable. They are punished when they have done no wrong: they simply occupy the house that the council allocated them. The Government have now said to them: move or pay. Most tenants can do neither. As my noble friend Lord Beecham said, tenants who want to move will be waiting three to four years. Arrears mount; single people or couples on the waiting list who want smaller accommodation will never get it; pensioners wanting to downsize cannot. As for overcrowding, outside London six times more families are underoccupying than overcrowding Just helping pensioners to move would sort it, with grace and consent. The bedroom tax destroys sound housing policy.

Will the Government, nonetheless, make their savings? No, because benefit cuts have been shunted on to tenants to become irrecoverable arrears. In Norwich, which has spent every penny of its DHPs, 60% of tenants affected by the bedroom tax are now in average arrears of £300 and mounting. Nationally, around two-thirds of affected tenants are in arrears. DHPs are utterly insufficient, short-term, and a postcode lottery, yet that is the policy on which the Minister, sadly, relies. Carers UK says that 75% of tenants trying to pay were cutting back on food, heating, medical supplies and mobility. The fragile economy of tenants collapses, as they turn to food banks, payday loans and loan sharks, with debts from which I doubt many will ever recover. The Government’s notional savings become tenants’ irreversible, irrevocable debts and, in the process, we destroy lives.

Fifteen per cent of affected tenants, nearly half of those in arrears, have already received eviction warning notices. What happens then? Do we evict tenants into the private sector—private landlords do not want them and it costs more—or into bed-and-breakfast accommodation which costs even more, or what? Should they be rough sleeping? What about children and disabled people? Through no fault of their own, there are people who cannot pay their rent because the Government have cut their benefit.

Instead, do we allow rent arrears to grow and in the process threaten the very viability of housing associations, as the noble Lord, Lord Taylor, said? We have offered the Minister three possible strategies to help because every defence of the bedroom tax is false. The first option is that the bedroom tax should not apply to disabled people, as the Work and Pensions Committee said only yesterday. Two-thirds of affected tenants are disabled. One may ask why. Adaptions, at a cost of £6,500 a property, become wasted. As regards space, the CAB has said that for disabled people that extra room for carers or equipment is,

“a lifeline as vital as a guide dog or a wheelchair”.

Finally, disabled people need the support of neighbours, as my noble friend Lady Lister said. We talk about social or community care and at the same time the Government seek to pluck disabled people out of the very communities that provide that social care.

The second option is that it should apply only to those who refuse an acceptable alternative offer. Following the remarks made by the noble Lord, Lord Taylor, I should like to know what the position of the Lib Dems is. Will they continue to support the bedroom tax in Parliament while campaigning on the doorstep simultaneously for its repeal? The third option is that the Government could treat social tenants like private tenants and apply the bedroom tax only to new tenancies. Any of those options would help.

We will go further. The Labour Party is pledged to repeal the legislation. It is the most wretched piece of social security legislation that I have known in 25 years in this House. But by then, in the summer of 2015 after the election, we will have seen hundreds of thousands of social tenants—our fellow citizens, most of them disabled and many with children—punished for occupying a house that was allocated to them. They would have been doing no wrong but are unable to pay or to move. They may be deep in debt and fearing, or perhaps experiencing, the loss of their home. How can we do this to them? It is grotesque.

[Lord German (LD)]

My Lords, I am the first to recognise a political device when it comes my way. Indeed, this is a political device to secure a wider debate on the spare room subsidy on the back of regulations which have already been made and have come into effect. I do not dispute the need for political devices or regret the use of political devices but it is clear that that is what is being used. I think I should start by clearly laying on the line our policy as Liberal Democrats. What was said at our conference and what we have heard today from noble Lords is the preamble. But two things are being called for: the first is a review and the second is to do with housebuilding.

More crucially than anything else, we want to see the effect that this policy is having in this country. As I understand it—my noble friend can tell me—the review of the policy is due to publish its initial findings soon. I always hesitate when the word “soon” is used but I know that my noble friend loves the word, so perhaps he will indicate whether it will be before the end of this Session, before the Summer Recess or whatever. It would be useful to know when we can have that information.

One would expect that a Labour Party that has designed its policy to abolish the whole thing—we could have a debate about that—will want to assert that a huge amount needs to be put right. But we need facts that stand up to such an assertion and to know exactly where we are. We need to know whether things need to be changed as a result of that independent review, which was put in place by the Welfare Reform Act. That is the position of my party.

Perhaps I may dwell on the issue of correcting secondary legislation, which is what the Motion is about. The unexpected consequences of legislation of the past must have affected all Governments. I could assert that an opposition party present today will at some time have had to use corrective secondary legislation for something which has appeared after primary legislation has been put in place. Perhaps my noble friend can tell me whether I am right or wrong.

There are problems with the 1996 legislation. Perhaps my noble friend can tell us whether it was designed for social sector tenants. The impact that we are talking about is with regard to social sector tenants but my understanding is that that original legislation was put in place particularly for private sector housing and as a protection for private sector tenants. Perhaps my noble friend can advise us whether something that was designed for a different purpose is producing unexpected and unintended consequences.

My second point concerns what is happening in local authorities. Although I do not have as many years of experience in local government as the noble Lord, Lord Beecham, I did spend quite a considerable amount of time in local government. I cannot recall whether I spent more or less time than my noble friend Lord Tope. I certainly remember that we had the use of electronic equipment in the mid-1990s when I was a city councillor. How many local authorities are having to resort to paper trails in order to find out the number of people affected by the 1996 legislation? Do some local authorities have up-to-date information? When there are assertions that between 3,000 and 40,000 people are affected, somewhere there must be reasoning behind those assertions. Do we expect to find the correct solutions and answers soon? Will we be able to find out very soon how many people are affected?

Will my noble friend reassure the House that local authorities are being reimbursed for the extra work that they are having to do to trawl through the paper trails where those records have not been kept electronically or have been lost? Now that the loophole is closed, I understand that there is now an issue relating to discretionary housing payments paid to people who were subjected to the extra charge between March 2013 and March 2014. People who were awarded DHP were awarded it on the basis that they needed it at that time. Can my noble friend reassure me that there will be no question of people having to repay it and that that discretionary housing payment remains in place?

Today, the noble Lord, Lord Touhig, gave an example of a case, which has been publicised, in Torfaen, the borough in which I live. I note that the Government made additional money available for discretionary housing payments to all 386 local authorities in this land and that only about 80 applied for money. In Wales, only Cardiff, Caerphilly and Conwy—it is very easy to remember them as the three “C”s—applied for discretionary housing payments and Torfaen did not. One can only assume therefore that local authorities which say that they do not need any more discretionary housing payment have enough to make available to people who have a need. I have a number of questions to ask those who support the case, which I read about in my local newspaper. Did those involved go to the local authority? Did the local authority turn them down for extra support, given that local authorities have enough money as they did not need to apply to the Government for additional money?

The second issue my party is concerned about is that of new homes. One of the problems that might come about as a result of this policy is the distortion as local authorities and housing associations decide to build more single-bedroom units. Can my noble friend give me any indication of what is happening in the housebuilding sector, not just in England but also in Wales? We could have a direct comparison with the record on housebuilding of the Conservative and Liberal Democrat coalition and a Labour Government. On that matter, can my noble friend tell me whether the Government’s target for building 170,000 new homes in England by the end of this Parliament in 2015 is still on track? Is it being matched in Wales by the Labour Government on the number of houses that they will be building as well?

Finally, I would like to ask my noble friend a question about the overall budget for housing benefit. The Labour Party, the Liberal Democrats and the Conservatives have all said that we have to try to contain the overall budget. In fact, in the other place all three parties voted in favour of the retention of that hold on the overall budget. Will the changes that have come about as a result of amendments to the secondary legislation affect the original estimates of expenditure on housing benefit, and how much, if at all, will this put up the bill for housing benefit in this coming year?

I have asked my noble friend a variety of questions. I would be grateful if he could tell us when “soon” means in terms of the first stage of the review of this policy.

Housing: Inherited Social Housing Tenancies

Baroness Hollis of Heigham Excerpts

Monday 24th March 2014 Lords Chamber

[Lord Freud]

My noble friend draws the comparison between the amount of capacity that we have in this country and the demand for it. The number of people on the waiting list is 1.8 million, with the figure for overcrowding running at 250,000 on some estimates and 400,000 on others.

When this Government took office, we were left with the lowest level of peacetime housebuilding that this country had seen since the 1920s. Since then we have delivered nearly 400,000 new homes and put in very substantial investment. There is £11.5 billion public investment to boost housing supply over the four years of the spending review, and this is meant to lever in more private investment. The volume of housebuilding is now picking up. The starts in the quarter to December were up 20% compared with the same period last year.

[Baroness Hollis of Heigham (Lab)]

My Lords, every stat I have heard from the Government is either misleading or wrong. The bedroom tax will not help the waiting list because they too want smaller accommodation. It will not much help overcrowding as most families who are overcrowded do not live in the places where there are underoccupied houses. It will not make government savings. As we see, the GHP figures keep going up but the savings stay the same—false. Had the Government followed their own precedent of 1996 of transitional protection for the private rented sector, or had they followed what we did in 2008 by protecting existing tenants in the private rented sector, we would not have the calamity, misery and distress facing so many vulnerable and disabled people in this country. It is shameful.

[Lord Freud]

My Lords, the figures show that there is a reasonable balance around the county; there is not one place with overcrowding and another with waiting lists. We are staying with the estimate of roughly £500 million a year in savings. On transitional protection, we have given even more notice on the changes coming through than we gave on the LHA changes at the emergency Budget of 2010.