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Mr. Heald: The Bill will help.

Mr. McLeish: We think that the Bill might help if it is significantly strengthened.

The other telling feature about the private sector is that, apart from expenditure, the number claiming rent allowance has doubled from 1 million to 2 million since 1988-89, but at the same time the number of claims from public sector tenants has gone down by 0.2 million.

Mr. Stern: I am listening to the hon. Gentleman's web of fantasy with great interest. Has he not noticed that, in the same period, the number of private sector tenants has gone up? One would therefore expect the number of private sector claims to go up.

Mr. McLeish: Forgive me, I am not trying to be discourteous, but that was a very obvious intervention, and the point raised by the hon. Gentleman has been recognised. The point at issue is the volume of expenditure. Of course it has not gone up three times, and it is the refuge of the despairing to suggest that that constitutes a sensible intervention.

It is no coincidence that the massive rise has taken place since 1989, and the taxpayer has just been brought in to sweep up enormous increases caused by some adjustments to rent. Over the past decade, £86.5 billion has been spent on housing benefit. If the Government want to be tough on fraud, they should seriously consider controlling expenditure. Expert opinion suggests that expenditure on housing benefit is out of control and that

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the ministerial team do not have a clue about how to rein in that expenditure. They are cracking down on fraud, but not on expenditure. That smacks of double standards.

Mr. Lilley: The hon. Gentleman suggests that fraud is partly due to the deregulation of rents. Does he propose to introduce rent regulation to control housing benefit expenditure? Is that Labour's policy?

Mr. McLeish: My mind takes me back to an intervention by the Prime Minister on my right hon. Friend the Leader of the Opposition. There is no suggestion that we will touch rent regulation. It is ridiculous to suggest that that is part of the thrust of Labour's policy. The Government preach the virtues of cutting expenditure, but they have administered an £86.5 billion bonanza without any regard for taxpayers. The Government find it difficult to cope with that central problem.

As my hon. Friend the Member for Peckham (Ms Harman) said, local councils have told the Government that they need more powers, but they have not been given them. The Select Committee on Social Security proposed a raft of measures, but only now have the Government incorporated a few of them in the Bill. The Audit Commission, in its 1993 report, suggested that more must be done. That view was restated in its 1994 and 1995 updates, and in its report published last week. Unlike the Government, the Audit Commission welcomes the encouraging response from local authorities, but it says that

"much more remains to be done to put in place the most effective arrangements for preventing and detecting fraud and corruption."

There is consensus on the views that Labour has pushed this evening.

In her speech, my hon. Friend outlined the measures that Labour wants to take. I do not want to delay the House by going over them again, but I stress the issue of a landlord offence. The Government are being tested on their commitment to take housing benefit fraud seriously. Every Conservative Member who speaks wants an attack on claimants who defraud, and that is right, but the test for the Government is what they are going to do about landlords. The Bill deals with new offences, so why do we not have a clear and--to use a phrase much vaunted by the Government--unequivocal attempt to define landlord fraud? That does not involve loose change; it is massive fraud--organised gangsterism. What is happening is criminal. I hope that in Committee the Government will lessen their constraints and take seriously the need to hit landlords hard.

The other issue that I want to deal with is that of uptake and entitlement. I have exchanged correspondence with the Secretary of State for Social Security--my hon. Friend referred to that earlier. I shall set the parameters of that issue. Currently, 1.6 million pensioners claim income support. That is a scandal. To add insult to injury, nearly 1 million other pensioners are poor enough to claim income support but do not. That is modern Britain in 1996. The legacy of 17 years of Toryism is that 25 per cent. of our pensioners live on or below the officially recognised poverty level.

I shall pick my words carefully. Does that fact not touch the hearts--if they have hearts--of Conservative Members? That is a scandal, and the insult was reinforced

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today by the Government, who dismissed my hon. Friend's submission that we should consider ways of data matching to improve take-up. We appreciate that if we data matched every Government source--if that were technically possible--it would not provide the answer. A crisis faces Britain's elderly, but the Government refuse to do anything about it. The House will be viewed with disfavour if the Minister does not say that he will want to reconsider the matter in Committee.

We are not looking for a total, instant solution, but we are looking for a bit of sympathy--a change from the mean-minded approach shown by Conservative Members today. We want the Government to say that 1 million pensioners--10 per cent. of the pensioner population--will have the chance of a better deal. They will have that chance if we use the same processes to detect those who are not receiving benefits to which they are entitled as we use to detect fraud. Ministers should be warned that the issue will not go away; too many people are involved. That is why I think that they should reconsider, following the rather curt responses that have been made to members of all political parties today. Let us proceed with the Committee and reach a consensus on helping people as well as a consensus on detecting fraud.

Information technology gives us an intermediate opportunity to reinforce welfare benefit take-up campaigns by using such technology within Government, however undeveloped it may be in the DSS at present. I sincerely hope that my overtures will receive a positive response. We would like to assist: 1 million pensioners living on their own simply need help, and I hope that the Government will reconsider.

We have not touched on the need to prevent fraud, which is as important as detecting it. I made a point earlier about front-line decisions, some of which need to be improved. They are often surrounded by confusion and inefficiency. We talk of managing the waste in the system, because fraud is basically about waste. I hope that Ministers will go away and think more clearly about the measures that they will table in Committee to strengthen the relevant part of the Bill. Prevention and detection should go together, as should the issues of expenditure and fraud. We need a more comprehensive approach to both those issues.

Parts of the Bill, to which my hon. Friends have referred, give cause for concern. Clause 14 has been mentioned, in connection with the recovery of benefit. A host of submissions have been made by the Disability Alliance and others about that problem. I emphasise the importance of disability living allowance, disability working allowance and attendance allowance, about which there are clearly huge suspicions. In Committee, the Government must ensure that they are not well founded.

The Government have actually extended the welfare state. We have an "out-of-work benefits culture" and an "in-work welfare culture" which they have developed and intensified--and we now have workfare, which constitutes neither work nor welfare. It seems that, no matter where they are, the Government want to hit people with welfare. The sad aspect is that, while other parties are talking about a more progressive approach, the Government have extended the welfare state, not in terms of a more positive role in regard to the breadth of its

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activity or links with the labour market, but in terms of the massive number of people who now depend on welfare and the huge attendant cost to the public purse.

We need to move on. The Committee will give us an opportunity to look positively at the problems that we have identified, and we hope that the Government will reconsider some of their initial attitudes. Let us get down to work: if the Government respond, so will Labour.

9.38 pm

The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Social Security (Mr. Oliver Heald): We have had a lively and informed debate, with excellent contributions from my hon. Friends the Members for Westbury (Mr. Faber), for Colchester, North (Mr. Jenkin), for Bristol, North-West (Mr. Stern), for Ribble Valley (Mr. Evans)--I thank my hon. Friend for his kind comments about my visit to Preston--and for Blackpool, North (Mr. Elletson). We also heard thought-provoking speeches from the hon. Members for Birkenhead (Mr. Field), for Rochdale (Ms Lynne) and for Stratford-on-Avon (Mr. Howarth)--and, of course, from those on the Opposition Front Bench.

I begin by paying tribute to the work of the Select Committee. There is no doubt that the Select Committee has done a marvellous job in considering the evidence and the issues surrounding fraud. Just as the Committee paid tribute to the work of my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for Social Security, it is only right to return the courtesy.

The Bill's provisions dealing with disclosure, and with housing benefit fraud particularly, will make a major contribution to cracking down on benefit fraud by individuals, organised gangs and landlords. Picking up on a point that was made towards the end of his speech by the hon. Member for Fife, Central (Mr. McLeish), who I welcome to his new responsibilities and to the debate, clause 11 contains the tough new offence of dishonestly making a representation to obtain benefit.

The clause applies equally to a landlord as it does to a tenant. What is more, it imposes a new penalty with a maximum of seven years, so this new offence is not one sided, but provides the ammunition, as it were, for the courts to pass the proper sentence in the appropriate case. Landlords are not, therefore, ignored in the Bill--far from it.

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