Danny Alexander (Shadow Minister and Disability Spokesperson, Work & Pensions; Inverness, Nairn, Badenoch & Strathspey, Liberal Democrat)

I beg to move, That the Clause be read a Second time.

Again, I will try to be relatively brief but a few points need to be made here, and I hope that our debate will stimulate a further fleshing out from the Under-Secretary of the Government’s position on this important issue. This amendment would put into statute the regulation contained in section 91(1) of the Housing Benefit (General) Regulations 1987. Again, I am sure that I am only refreshing the Committee’s memory of this and I can see that the Under-Secretary is fully informed on this point already. The regulation requires local authorities to make payment on account of a rent allowance within 14 days of receipt, where an inability to make a decision on a case does not arise though a failure of a claimant to provide required information.

This duty exists in secondary legislation, which was the point the Under-Secretary made in response to the previous new clause that we debated. However, in relation to that, Shelter’s housing advice centres—and I am grateful to Shelter for this point in its briefing on new clause 11—report that the requirement is all too often ignored or, in some cases, treated as discretionary by local authorities. The idea here is that placing this obligation in the Bill will reiterate and underscore the vital importance of authorities making payments on account of a rent allowance.

The duty exists to avoid tenants falling into arrears at the outset of a tenancy and risking evictionand homelessness. Prompt payment is, obviously, particularly essential for private sector tenants—and evidence would bear this out—as their landlords are perhaps more likely to begin possession actions at an earlier stage than the relevant social landlord. It is also vital for ensuring that private sector landlords are willing to let to housing benefit claimants in the first place—an issue that I know we debated in one of our  previous sittings, when the hon. Member for Colne Valley made particular points about that issue. Along with benefit shortfalls, long delays in beginning payments are cited by landlords as one of the main reasons for not wishing to let to housing benefit—or, in future, local housing allowance—claimants, so proper adherence to this regulation could go a long way to improving the private rented sector’s image of housing benefit, and so improve the ability of tenants to access that sort of accommodation.

It is worth saying that failure to make a payment on account is not considered an official decision, so there is no right of review or appeal. The only recourse for a claimant is judicial review, or to complain to the local government ombudsman. Although either course of action might, in the long run, get a proper remedy, both might cause lengthy delay and further problems for the claimant. Indeed, judicial review is not usually a proportionate form of recourse; it requires legal aid, a solicitor and court time. Also, while the ombudsman does good and worthwhile work, often reaching the right decision in the end, complaining to the ombudsman is not a particularly effective remedy in cases with a sense of urgency, as we would all agree is the position with such cases.

I hope that in her response the Under-Secretary again underscores the importance of following through the regulation consistently. By putting it into statute, we could ensure that all local authorities properly adhered to it so that potential tenants, tenants, benefit claimants and private sector landlords have a sense of security and understanding that the system works in the way in which it is intended to work. I hope that the she responds positively and explains how the Government intend to remedy the problem.

John Penrose (Weston-Super-Mare, Conservative)

I support the new clause. The hon. Gentleman has made several important points, and some deserve to be fleshed out more for the Under-Secretary to deal with. She gave us examples of how the Government have been pursuing various local authorities so that they shorten the delay that inevitably is incurred from the start of an application until payments come through. The various examples of local authorities that she gave as an illustration were tremendously impressive.

However, Shelter is clear that there is still an enormous variety of performance in different parts of the country. In some cases, authorities are at the worst end of the spectrum, while their neighbouring authorities are at the best end. Landlords, tenants and all of us as taxpayers are entitled to expect continued improvement. Many of the figures that the Under-Secretary quoted were those that had shortened from a 90-plus day delay to a 30-something day delay. They were excellent, but the new clause would make it clear that a couple of weeks is what the man in the street and all of us are instinctively entitled to expect as the usual level of efficiency from our local authority when it deals with such an important issue.

Progress may have been made, but there is still a fair distance to go and an unacceptable wide variety of performance in respect of the average figures that have been quoted to us. Those variations create a number of  effects, such as hardship for tenants, examples of which we were given when discussing earlier clauses. The variety of performance also has a negative effect on landlords and on the supply of particular types of accommodation in the market. We have discussed the baleful effect of constrictions in supply in such matters and, thus, on tenants, which implies that a huge amount of work is still to be done.

If, for whatever reason in the future, the performance of local authorities either collectively or individually goes backwards and gets worse, which, goodness knows, given the burden of history might sadly be the case, we need to have a way to protect tenants from negative performance. We also need to ensure that a sword of Damocles is hanging over local authorities so that they know they will not receive a cash flow benefit from acting slowly and not performing. The new clause is vital, partly because it would give tenants a degree of certainty and a reasonable length of time that they are entitled to expect before their money comes in. It would also mean that local authorities do not have an incentive to allow their performance to slide. In fact, they would have a disincentive.

Jeremy Hunt (Shadow Minister (the Disabled), Work & Pensions; South West Surrey, Conservative)

Does my hon. Friend agree that one of the factors that can make the process take much longer than it should is the complexity of the assessment process? My hon. Friend the Member for Daventry sensibly referred to the minimum constraints and the Government making swifter progress in the sharing of information. If there were much better sharing of information, and hence sharing of verified information that the local authority could trust when making its assessment of entitlement to housing benefit, we would then be able to speed up the process considerably and achieve the important two-week period.

John Penrose (Weston-Super-Mare, Conservative)

My hon. Friend is exactly right, and his is a good example of a wider issue. If one is going to shorten the times much further, it will not be enough to act like a football coach on the sidelines and just shout louder and ask people to work harder. That will not achieve a delay time of two weeks or less, because other things have to be done too. Among them is a series of efficiency measures, some of which are concerned with the exchange of verifiable information, as my hon. Friend says. In addition, and wherever possible, processes and indeed benefits themselves should be redesigned—as attempted by many measures in the Bill—to make the intrinsic process simpler and faster. My hon. Friend the Member for Bury St. Edmunds spoke about attempting to achieve greater simplicity. If that can be designed into the system, it inevitably makes it far easier for the people who are working to achieve such goals.

David Ruffley (Shadow Minister, Work & Pensions; Bury St Edmunds, Conservative)

I wonder whether my hon. Friend misspoke. He said that I wanted to achieve simplicity, but of course that is in relation to the benefits system, not in relation to any part of my professional life.

John Penrose (Weston-Super-Mare, Conservative)

I thank my hon. Friend for that correction.

The new clause is important because it would give a guarantee. From the tenant’s and the landlord’s points of view, and also from the point of view of the market, it is important to deliver greater supply of suitable accommodation.

Jeremy Hunt (Shadow Minister (the Disabled), Work & Pensions; South West Surrey, Conservative)

Does my hon. Friend agree that the difficulty in the process of obtaining housing benefit acts as a work disincentive—for example, people might feel that on taking paid employment they would lose housing benefit, which would be difficult to recover should they fall on hard times? The complexity and the difficulty in benefits application procedures are themselves the cause of the benefits trap. Addressing that would result in my hon. Friend’s arguments having much wider benefit in encouraging people to move, when possible, back into the world of work.

Jimmy Hood (Lanark & Hamilton East, Labour)

Order. I have been generous in allowing the hon. Gentleman to make two long interventions, but they should be shorter.

John Penrose (Weston-Super-Mare, Conservative)

Thank you, Mr. Hood.

I agree with much of what my hon. Friend said. The benefits of benefit simplification, rather than just straightforward simplification, go wider than mere cost reduction and shortened lead times. One such benefit is that it is unquestionably easier for people to access the benefits system. That is the case for housing benefit applications, and I am sure that there are other applications, which we will not consider today, that would nevertheless benefit from simplification. Simplification has greater benefits than just cost reduction and process efficiency. Behavioural benefits in how people react when they try to access the benefits system are a vital part of that. The Opposition support the new clause, and I hope that the Minister will respond to those points.

Kali Mountford (PPS (Rt Hon Des Browne, Secretary of State), Ministry of Defence; Colne Valley, Labour)

The Committee owes the hon. Member for Inverness, Nairn, Badenoch and Strathspey a debt of gratitude for the way in which he has concentrated on the new clauses. He rightly focused on the circumstances of individuals, their ability to pay rent on time, and the effect that that has on their lives. However, we should concentrate on ensuring that assessments are made quickly and are right first time, with a proper means for reassessment. That, I am afraid, takes us back a little to previous debates, in which I expressed the differing opinion that there may be a better way of getting the same effect.

The hon. Gentleman told the Committee that the measure can be implemented by regulation, but that he wants to see it in the Bill. However, I want a set of regulations that are thought through properly and work well together. I am making a bid for regulations that would fit alongside the provisions in the Bill and, in particular, that help to make decisions right first time and speedily.

I direct the Committee to our previous discussions on what rent officers do, how transparent their work is, and how well they work with other parts of local authorities and other agencies. I make a plea to my hon. Friend the Under-Secretary to think back to our discussions when she so kindly met me and the director CHAS Kirklees. We were thinking about improving the process so that decisions could be made speedily and more openly to ensure that information can be made available to everybody in the way in which, I think, the hon. Member for South-West Surrey indicated. If all the information is pulled together and open, and is  readily available at the beginning of a process when housing allowance is set for an area, it would do a great deal to help speed up the process.

I am not saying that I do not want that measure available to local authorities, but I would like time to be made available for proper consideration of regulations and orders in further Committees to ensure that those other measures are available and are considered together. I make a second plea to my hon. Friend that during further consideration of the Bill, perhaps when it goes to the other place, she has another look at the recommendations and perhaps comes back to the House, either on Report or Third Reading, with proposals.

Anne McGuire (Parliamentary Under-Secretary (Disabled People), Department for Work and Pensions; Stirling, Labour)

I thank hon. Members for their contributions. I am sure that the hon. Member for Inverness, Nairn, Badenoch and Stroganoff—sorry, it must be getting near lunch time; I meant to say Strathspey.

The hon. Gentleman probably expects me to say that the proposal is unnecessary because the power that he envisages is already in section 5(1)(r) of the Social Security Administration Act 1992, but having said that, he raises an interesting issue and one that is worthy of being aired in Committee.

The hon. Gentleman had the Committee’s support when he said that we want to protect tenants against accumulating rent arrears and, obviously, facing possible eviction even when they have fulfilled their side of the bargain by making an effective claim and providing the local authority with all the information that it needs to decide the claim. I think that that links in to some of the points made by my hon. Friend the Member for Colne Valley.

As I pointed out earlier, we have seen a dramatic improvement in the processing of housing benefits claims, as the hon. Member for Weston-super-Mare indicated. We recognise that a minority are still taking too long to process claims, which can lead to problems for the tenant. That is not what we want. Individuals should not be in the middle of a process that is designed to help them but, because of various failures, either bureaucratic or by individual professionals, instead leaves them with a liability to pay rent that they palpably cannot afford to do while they await their housing benefit claim.

As the hon. Gentleman clearly said, that is why we have the existing requirement for a payment on account when an authority is unable to decide a claim within 14 days, subject to the customer having provided all the necessary information. In some cases, the requirement would be more stringent than the one that he seeks because the date of the claim can precede that on which the claim was received. There is that nuance within the new clause.

As hon. Members have recognised, we are focusing our efforts on further improving authorities’ speed of decision making and the making of the first payment of housing benefit through inspections, quarterly monitoring and the setting of performance standards. We are dealing with 408 local authorities. Trying to get them to work to a set of standards where they have their own statutory responsibility for implementation has not always been easy.

We are also simplifying the housing benefit administration to speed up the processing times, for example through the local housing allowance. The hon. Gentleman’s proposal does not fit well into the increasing trend for housing benefit claims to be received by the Department for Work and Pensions. Around two thirds of housing benefit applications are currently made to the DWP initially. The local authorities do not become part of that process until later on. Increasingly, our intention is for both Jobcentre Plus and the Pension Service to offer customers a one-stop shop for benefits where claims to all benefits and information are provided and, in most cases, verified by a single process. The aim is to make the process more straightforward so that people do not have to go from one Department to a local authority and perhaps carry information back to another Department.

Increasingly claims for information will be gathered by the Department and then forwarded to the local authority. That is the point that my hon. Friend the Member for Colne Valley was highlighting. We want a process that is efficient and effective, that gathers the right information at the right time and gives the correct decision at the right time. That is what important to the individual claimant. While I am on the subject of my hon. Friend’s contribution, yes we want the housing benefit process to be as open as possible, consistent with protecting the independence of the rent officers. That came up in the discussion with my hon. Friend and her constituency organisations.

Because we are now gathering the information in the Department more and more through Jobcentre Plus and then forwarding it to the local authority, we recognise that local authorities need to wait for the information. But the pay-off for the local authorities and the individual is that, in many cases, most of the information will be fit for purpose. In other words and harking back to what my hon. Friend said, the local authority will have the information to make a decision on the claim at that first point. That is obviously something that we would all support.

Kali Mountford (PPS (Rt Hon Des Browne, Secretary of State), Ministry of Defence; Colne Valley, Labour)

I know that when we had our discussions with CHAS Kirklees, the Under-Secretary seemed surprised that some local authorities are a bit more restrictive in sharing information than she expected. Is she willing to look again at advice notes, guidance or regulations that might free up some of that information to make it the efficient method that she seeks?

Anne McGuire (Parliamentary Under-Secretary (Disabled People), Department for Work and Pensions; Stirling, Labour)

My hon. Friend reflects the discussion that we had with CHAS, and the answer is yes. Consistent with protecting the independence of the assessment process so that rent officers are not unduly influenced either by the local authority, stakeholders or the private sector landlords, we want to see as much engagement as possible. I am happy to reiterate the commitment that I gave to her in private.

Danny Alexander (Shadow Minister and Disability Spokesperson, Work & Pensions; Inverness, Nairn, Badenoch & Strathspey, Liberal Democrat)

I am grateful to the Under-Secretary for describing the administrative improvements. I appreciate that a lot of hard of  work is going into that and improvements are being made, not least through the one-stop shop approach. In cases where the benefit information is collected and processed by the DWP, Jobcentre Plus or the Pension Service and then forwarded to the local authority, does the 14-day rule also apply to the DWP and its agencies in the collection and processing of this information or does the clock start only when that information reaches the local authority? In terms of allowing for the interim payment of rent on account in the way that the regulations currently describe, that is an important point.

Anne McGuire (Parliamentary Under-Secretary (Disabled People), Department for Work and Pensions; Stirling, Labour)

It is an important point and I hope to give the hon. Gentleman a definitive response to it during the debate. I put on record that more than80 per cent. of claims are dealt with within 14 days from the date of the claim when all the information has been provided by the customer. Every effort is made to ensure that the customer gives the information necessary, and some of the time scales reflect the fact that sometimes customers are not forthcoming with that information. The blame for delay in the process does not always fall on the local authority or the Department for Work and Pensions. As we said during the debates on the housing benefit clauses, we are determined to ensure that local authorities who have statutory responsibility for the operation of our housing benefit policy improve their game, as many have done.

The hon. Member for Inverness, Nairn, Badenoch and Strathspey asked when the 14-day clock starts ticking. It starts from the date of the claim, which can be at the time when the claim is received by the DWP. I hope that that reassures him. A quick decision depends very much on the co-operation of the individual making the claim in responding to the request for information.

Our wider policies and approach on performance improvement, coupled with existing safeguards on the 14-day interim payment, are of greater benefit to customers than introducing more pre-decision requirements. To be frank, they could distract authorities from the main priority: getting decisions on claims made accurately and on time, a matter that was highlighted by my hon. Friend the Member for Colne Valley and by Opposition Members.

With those points of clarification, I hope that the hon. Gentleman will consider withdrawing his new clause. Once again, I thank him for raising an important issue, which allowed us to reflect on the improvements that need to be made to the process. I am sure that the officers of the 408 local authorities are hanging on our every word on this matter.

Danny Alexander (Shadow Minister and Disability Spokesperson, Work & Pensions; Inverness, Nairn, Badenoch & Strathspey, Liberal Democrat)

I am grateful to the Under-Secretary for her response, which rightly emphasised the ongoing efforts to improve the speed of administration. I recently took part in a conference on working age benefits with the Minister for Employment and Welfare Reform, who said that, in relation to working age benefits, even a two-week processing time was too long and asked why benefit claimants should have to wait two weeks for decisions that in the private sector would be made in a matter of days. I am not sure that it was a target, but it may have  been a long-term aspiration and if that is the context of the Government’s overall thinking on the issue, it is to be welcomed.

The reasoning behind the new clause relates to the cases of a minority of claimants in which the Minister’s aspirations were not met. I appreciate the points made by the hon. Member for Colne Valley and the Under-Secretary’s remarks, with one proviso: I hope that she will use the full power of her ministerial office to remind local authorities of their obligations under the existing regulations. My point was less about the rectitude and value of current regulations and more about their non-observance by many local authorities. Perhaps the Under-Secretary or the Secretary of State could issue a stern reminder to local authorities oftheir obligations under the regulations. With that imprecation, I beg to ask leave to withdraw the motion.