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Baroness Maddock: My Lords, can the Minister tell the House what criteria the Government will use to
judge the success or otherwise of the 10 pathfinder areas? How will young people on single-room rent benefit fare in these areas?
Baroness Hollis of Heigham: My Lords, first, anyone who is on single-room rent benefit will not be worse off. A substantial number of such people will be better off. At present, approximately 15,000 tenants receive single-room rent benefit; that is, around 2 per cent of all private tenants. Approximately three-quarters face a shortfall because they are in more expensive accommodation than the rent benefit provides. That is not just because of the way that housing benefit is set by the local authorities but by the way it is administered by local rent officers. Often they appear to have different interpretations of eligibility for single-room rent benefit. The proposals should help that situation considerably. It is also the case that many will gain, as will all other private rented tenants.
Perhaps the noble Baroness would be kind enough to repeat her first question?
Baroness Maddock: My Lords, what criteria will the Government use to judge whether the 10 pathfinder areas are successful?
Baroness Hollis of Heigham: My Lords, normally this question is one asked by the noble Lord, Earl Russell. The 10 pathfinders will be independently assessed and evaluated by an independent research body. The tenders for the research assessment, whether that is to be done by a university body or whoever, are going out now. They will be properly assessed and reviewed and that information will be made available to us.
We are seeking to discover, first, whether this provision speeds up the claims for housing benefit; secondly, whether it reduces the claims for fraud; thirdly, whether it makes it easier for people to move into work and, finally, whether landlords and tenants as well as local authorities feel that as a result they are offering a better service to tenants.
Lord Best: My Lords, I warmly welcome the Statement and apologise for trying to ask a question too soon in the proceedings. The Rowntree Foundation has published a pile of reports about housing benefits. The Statement appears to answer nearly all of our long list of problems concerning what has been recently an abysmal benefit.
My question concerns the social housing sector and housing associations. I appreciate that the new measures will apply only to private landlords and that the new standard local housing allowance with its shopping incentive is appropriate only in relation to the private sector. Nevertheless, a number of features of the housing benefit system which are entirely wrong and a number of the complexities and bureaucratic delays built into it apply equally to the social housing sector and to housing associations.
I declare my interest as director of the Joseph Rowntree Housing Trust as well as of the foundation which produces the research reports. Our tenants remain disturbed by the way in which they have to wait interminably to receive their housing benefit. The
40-page document which, as has been explained, pensioners must complete to continue to receive the benefit they received in the previous year falls upon the tenants of social landlords and housing associations just as much as in the private sector. Will the pilot study and the wonderfully important measures that will proceed—I do not refer to standard local housing allowance—such as speed and simplicity apply also to housing associations?
Baroness Hollis of Heigham: My Lords, the noble Lord, Lord Best, is expert in housing matters. One warmly welcomes him to discussion on the Statement. He is right: we can reform housing benefit but unless the performance of local authorities—I refer not just to administering housing benefit for the private sector but for social rented housing apart from their own local authority housing—improves, the associations more generally and tenants in particular will continue to be at an extreme disadvantage.
The noble Lord will know, as well as I do the efforts being made to strengthen the administration, including simplification, of housing benefit in local authorities. For example, at present all housing benefit claims run for a maximum of only 60 weeks, and sometimes only 26 weeks. In future, as with income support and JSA, they will run continuously until there is a change of circumstance notified, although obviously there will be checks on that. People will not need to make repeat claims, which should reduce the workload for local authorities. When people move into work they will not have to complete a brand new form with all personal details, just the change of circumstance. Again, that will reduce the workload. There will be a rapid reclaim system if someone falls out of work within the first 12 weeks of starting work. Immediately he or she will receive the previous benefit, which will reduce the complexity and the amount of work involved.
In addition to that kind of strengthening of the administration, there is the performance standard fund of about £200 million, strengthening the IT packages of local authorities, and the performance improvement action teams. There are also the successful help teams which have made substantial improvements in about 20 local authorities. I was told of one example where a DWP help team, with the consent of the local authorities, worked on their backlogs and their processes as a result of which their outstanding claims dropped from 14,000 to 5,000 in the space of two-and-a-half months. Those are significant changes. They can bring national experience to bear on modest-sized authorities. On top of that, there are help funds for which local authorities bid. If at the end of all such incentives, encouragement, support systems and IT packages a local authority still fails to deliver, we can introduce directions, as we have with four local authorities, requiring them to abide by certain behaviours.
We are well aware, as the noble Lord, Lord Best, said, that unless a high value benefit is speedily but accurately delivered and claimed and reclaimed, all our efforts of welfare to work will flounder and many
people will continue to experience insecurity and a risk of homelessness. Much rides on getting housing benefit administration right.
Lord Brooke of Sutton Mandeville: My Lords, this is a trivial observation, but we appear to have time on our side. At first blush I cannot see any reference to a publication date in the document Building choice and responsibility: a radical agenda for Housing Benefit. I would not be so cynical as to follow my noble friend Lord Higgins in suggesting that that was intended to disguise the Secretary of State's reference to the system that has been inherited. I acknowledge that there is some internal evidence, but I believe that in the future scholars would find such a document more helpful if it contained a publication date.
Baroness Hollis of Heigham: My Lords, sorry.
Lord Greaves: My Lords, like most government documents nowadays it does not contain an index. Although this one is not as long as some, the point has been made from these Benches before and it will continue to be made.
Another point, which noble Lords may consider superficial, is one of potential confusion. On page 13 the paper refers to proposals that the Government are already carrying out and states:
- "Work is now under way to deal with the causes and consequences of low demand in nine of the worst-affected areas".
As seems likely, if one or two of the areas are the same, or they overlap, there will be great confusion. Can the Government find other trendy, spin-like titles for their new projects rather than giving them all the same title thus causing confusion?
Baroness Hollis of Heigham: My Lords, I cannot see why the noble Lord believes that we should find nice spin-words for the description of such socially worthy causes. Spare the thought.
We are talking about pathfinders or pilots. When in opposition I regularly used to criticise the government Front Bench for not trying things out first and for not learning from experience. We are trying to build in a learning loop so that we can try things out and see whether they work and so that decisions are informed by the best research. In practice all kinds of things may happen and consequently we need to evaluate, revise and adjust matters.
Perhaps one of the differences between a pathfinder and a pilot is that a pathfinder carries with it a greater expectation of rolling out the scheme nationally. Quite rightly, so far as I am aware, the Government in all their interventions in social policy, which are not just about raising rates and so on, try to build in a learning loop. Perhaps the noble Lord would like to send me a Roget's Thesaurus of alternative words to "pathfinder" and "pilot" and I shall ensure that that is drawn to the attention of the correct person.
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