New Clause 11
Welfare Reform Bill
12:30 pm
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.