Clause 27
Welfare Reform Bill
9:45 pm
Anne McGuire (Parliamentary Under-Secretary (Disabled People), Department for Work and Pensions; Stirling, Labour)
I congratulate the hon. Member for Inverness, Nairn, Badenoch and Strathspey on something that appeared to be off the cuff. I am not being patronising; I thought that he made a good job of a proposal that we did not expect to reach this evening.
I reassure the hon. Gentleman that as set out in the draft regulations we do not propose to apply the local housing allowance approach to tenants currently excluded from it in the pathfinders including those in the social sector. For a customer to be entitled to housing benefit there must be an appropriate maximum housing benefit in his case. That is the basic condition of entitlement. As members of the Committee are aware, proposals for housing benefit were set out in the welfare reform Green Paper. Although our plans for rolling out local housing allowance to the private rented sector met with strong support across the sectors, many of those who responded to our Green Paper raised concerns, which the hon. Gentleman expressed tonight, about the introduction of a local housing allowance into the social sector. We have listened carefully to those concerns, and we stated in our response that we will not proceed with local housing allowance in that sector.
Draft regulation 13C, which has been circulated to the Committee, sets out the circumstances in which a local authority must calculate an appropriate maximum housing benefit using the LHA rules. It lists all the categories of customer to whom the local housing allowance is not to apply where circumstances in regulation 13C arise. For example, local housing allowance will not apply where a landlord is a registered social landlord, local authority or registered charity, where the rent is payable—I admire the hon. Gentleman’s memory—in respect of a pre-1989 tenancy agreement and includes a site charge or mooring charge for a mobile home, caravan or houseboat, or where rent under the tenancy is attributable to board and attendance.
I hope that I have given the hon. Gentleman the reassurance that he sought. I am delighted to offer reassurance to those who responded to the Green Paper consultation to raise concerns, and I ask him to consider withdrawing his amendment.