Housing Benefit (Abolition of the Family Premium and Date of Claim Amendment) Regulations 2015 — House of Lords, 2016-02-03
Topic: Housing
David Freud (Conservative, Centre-right): My Lords, I ask noble Lords to forgive me for not keeping up with the exact floating role of the noble Lord, Lord McKenzie, as he moves forward and back on the Benches. I thank all noble Lords for their contributions which, as one would expect, covered a number of issues I start with the family premium, which will align housing benefit with universal credit, which does not have this process. As noble Lords will be well aware, it applies to new cases only. It will therefore not affect people in receipt of family premium on 30 April this year. They will continue to receive the family premium until they are no longer responsible for any children or young people under 20 or make a new claim for housing benefit. To avoid people dying at the stake for the sake of these premiums, I remind noble Lords of their very complicated history which started in 1988. With the reform of tax credits, they were removed from income support but not from housing benefit. I know there is a lot of historical nostalgia for bits of the benefit system, but this one reminds me more of an appendix than of anything else: it had a purpose at one time, but it is pretty odd to remember what it was and it can cause you problems, as I am discovering On the linking rules, where claimants are in receipt of housing benefit and subsequently move house into a different local authority, they are required to make a new claim for housing benefit. That has always been the case and the policy does not seek to change it. If the claimants were in receipt of the family premium before their move and they move after 30 April, they will no longer receive the family premium in their new housing benefit claim from their new local authority. That responds to the question from the noble Baroness, Lady Sherlock. I know that the noble Baroness likes to stretch out the period for which this will last, but universal credit will be coming in for new cases reasonably soon. It is simply not feasible to introduce linking rules for these cases because that really would introduce a level of complexity and cost I regret that I cannot answer the precise question from the noble Lord, Lord McKenzie, on the administration costs saved. When you go through the sums of how you reach that family premium amount and then do the taper with it, and you have to do that differently through every local authority, I have to believe that it genuinely saves some money. However, I cannot put any amount on that On the point about work incentives made by the noble Baroness, Lady Sherlock, the loss of family premium would be one factor among many others, including the financial gain and development prospects that would come from entering work. It is important to mention the likely behavioural change that could result from this policy, as the potential reduction in benefit may make claimants more likely to find work or increase their hours. Indeed, you see evidence of that in some of our welfare reforms already I turn to the issue of backdating, which noble Lords touched on. This change introduces equality for working-age claimants by aligning housing benefit rules with those in universal credit. Under current rules, as noble Lords have pointed out, the working-age housing benefit claimants may have their claim treated as made from a date up to six months before they actually make the claim. The backdating period will apply from the date of claim and is not dependent on the time that it takes to process claims. Our rationale is that the one month provides a reasonable period to seek assistance or to get claimant affairs in order for those who can demonstrate good reason as to why they did not claim more promptly. While claimants still receive legacy benefits before migration to UC, there is sense in preparing them for the transition to UC by, so far as practicable, equalising how they are treated. The other factor that is useful when we look at this is that our administrative data show that more than two-thirds of backdating claims for housing benefit are awarded for one month or less The noble Lords, Lord Kirkwood and Lord Low, asked why we rejected the three-month recommendation —although, interestingly, the numbers between the one-month figure and the three-month figure are actually not very great. We are aiming to change behaviours. If people want to claim benefits, one month allows sufficient time for them to register a claim in the first instance. It does not matter if it is a more complicated process, because the processing and getting the detail does not change the date of entitlement, which is established on the initial claim To respond to the noble Lord, Lord McKenzie, who as usual has excruciating detail at his fingertips, I confirm—and I am impressed that he has looked at this—that where a claim for housing benefit is linked to a claim for one of the legacy income-related benefits that applies the three-month backdating rule, entitlement to housing benefit will be linked back for the full three months if it is made within one month of the award for legacy benefit. So he got that spot on. On the point from the noble Lords, Lord Kirkwood and Lord Low, we do not anticipate pressures on the homelessness front. I am slightly influenced by the fact that every time we make such a change we are warned about that but so far it has not come through.