My Lords, the two Motions standing in my name on the Order Paper relate to two instruments to change housing benefit regulations. The instruments seek to cut the housing benefit bill by around £1 billion per year by 2015 by cutting what can be awarded under the local housing allowance arrangements from April through: first, the removal of the five-bedroom local housing allowance rate so that the maximum level is for four-bedroom properties; secondly, the introduction of absolute caps so that local housing allowance weekly rates cannot exceed £250 for a one-bedroom property, £290 for a two-bedroom property, £340 for a three-bedroom property and £400 for a four-bedroom property; and, thirdly, the removal of the £15 weekly housing benefit excess that some customers can receive under the local housing allowance arrangements. Fourthly, there is an additional measure, which we welcome, relating to an extra bedroom for those with care needs. However, the final-and, I argue, most damaging-measure on which I shall focus is the setting of local housing allowance rates at the 30th percentile of rents in each broad rental market area rather than at the median. The Government are increasing discretionary housing payment funding to local authorities by £130 million over four years to enable councils to try to mitigate some of the effects of these measures.

These instruments amount to little more than an attack on the poorer people of this country-those who have no choice but to rent and who are either low earners or on out-of-work benefits. Since the publication of the Government's impact assessment last summer, many organisations with expertise in housing, homelessness and poverty, such as Shelter, Crisis and the Residential Landlords Association, have raised serious concerns, shared by the Opposition, about these amendments to the housing benefit regulations.

The Government's changes to housing benefit were expertly summarised by the noble Lord, Lord Best, in his speech to this House on 2 December last year, when he said that,

"the intention is to reduce the housing benefit bill by some £2.25 billion per annum by the end of this Parliament. That is £2.25 billion a year that will not be paid through housing benefit to landlords. There are only two parties from whom this money can come; one is the landlord by accepting a lower rent, and the other is the tenants finding the balance from their own resources, including other benefits-since most are on benefits of different sorts, or pensions. Which of these two parties is most likely to take this very substantial £2-and-a-bit billion hit?".-[Hansard, 2/12/10; col. 1656.]

That is a good question, and half of that sum is to be found from the changes that we are debating today. The answer to the noble Lord's question comes in part from the Residential Landlords Association, the representative body of more than 9,200 private landlords. Its briefing on these regulations is clear. Its landlords panel survey found that 71 per cent of respondents would not lower rents. In fact, in light of the proposed changes, 46 per cent of landlords surveyed indicated that they would look to re-let properties away from local housing allowance tenants, reducing the level of private rental stock available to claimants and potentially forcing households into homelessness. Not only have the Government offered no evidence to support their assertion that rents will be lowered to meet lower housing benefit levels, but they cannot counter the evidence that points the other way. It is clear that the bulk of the savings from these measures will come from the pockets of the tenants.

The measures have serious implications for hundreds of thousands of honest, hard-working and vulnerable people. We should bear in mind the fact that 4.7 million people receive housing benefit in this country. Of those, 2 million are pensioners on pension credit guarantee, 500,000 are people on jobseeker's allowance and 700,000 are people in work in low-paying jobs. The Government's own impact assessment of the regulations as a whole predicted that almost 1 million families would be affected, with an average weekly income loss of £12 nationally, rising to £22 in London.

The intention of course, as Homeless Link points out, is to make life in receipt of benefit "uncomfortable", as a way of driving the jobless back into work. The popular rhetoric from the Government has been around the assertion that those claiming housing benefit are accessing accommodation that their working neighbours cannot. However, researchers at the University of Birmingham have found that this claim is out of step with reality. Housing benefit claimants receive a rent set at median market rates and so cannot live just anywhere. Furthermore, their findings suggest that, despite infrequent, extreme anomalies, 40 per cent of lower-income working families pay more in rent than they would receive in housing benefit.

In truth, the Government's posturing over extravagant benefits sends a clear message: that the rationale behind these ill conceived reforms is founded on the excesses of a relative few. Their application would be tantamount to collective punishment-penalising the many vulnerable people for the excesses of the very few. From data compiled by the Cambridge Centre for Housing and Planning Research at the University of Cambridge, it is estimated that these cuts will force many more claimants into severe poverty, with the weekly income of 84,000 households dropping below £100 per couple after housing costs. Incidentally, these households are home to more than 54,000 children.

On the local housing allowance cuts as a whole, the Social Security Advisory Committee, in its withering verdict on these regulations, stated that,

"these measures must impact disproportionately on those low-income households with the least financial resilience and the fewest options for managing their lives and their finances".

Critics unanimously agree that the change to a 30th percentile in LHA calculations, along with the caps on housing benefit, will result in a significant drop in income for hundreds of thousands of households. Of these, an estimated 269,000 will fall into what Shelter calls "serious difficulty". Unable to negotiate a reduction in rent, they will have just three options: hoping their landlord will forgo a proportion of the rent; moving into cheaper and probably overcrowded accommodation; or becoming homeless.

The removal of the five-bedroom rate will act as a disincentive for families to come together. Why would two single-parent families with, say, three children each come together when they would be better off apart? Many tenants will run up arrears, making them "at fault" for their eviction and perhaps not entitled to emergency accommodation. It is expected that half of those households in serious difficulty will have to move or become homeless. Some 72,000 of that number are families, equating to 129,000 children potentially made homeless.

These changes will affect households in rural as well as urban areas and particularly those with high rents, such as Oxford, Edinburgh and Brighton, but they will be felt most acutely in London. Here, house prices are more than double the average for England and Wales, and private rents carry a 50 per cent premium, leaving only the worst-maintained and overcrowded accommodation available to housing benefit claimants under these proposals. The same research from the University of Cambridge estimates that, within five years, almost the whole of inner London will be unaffordable to those in receipt of benefits. Poorer residents will move to more affordable housing at the periphery of the city. With demand for private rental stock so high here, there is little incentive for landlords to reduce the cost of renting, so LHA claimants currently living in boroughs such as Hammersmith and Fulham, Westminster, Islington or Camden, where it is expected that no affordable stock will exist, will be forced into moving or into homelessness.

London borough authorities expect that, with the caps in place, 82,000 families will face losing their homes in London. The Mayor of London described it as a "Kosovo-style ethnic cleansing". The poor will be pushed out of the capital; people in work will be pushed further away from their place of employment, their place of worship or the support networks of friends and family on which they rely. Children will suffer the upheaval of changing schools. It is all in the impact assessment. Information from London Councils shows that families will be moving into boroughs where there is already a shortage of early years school places. The children may not have anywhere to go to school.

Further still, individuals requiring specific educational facilities, care or assistance may not be able to access the types of service available to them in the borough in which they currently live. Those families will be moving into local authorities in such numbers that the existing public services there may well be unable to cope. I gather that boroughs such as Haringey and Newham are already looking at how to recruit more social workers to help them to cope. The Social Security Advisory Committee remarked:

"Enforced relocation to cheaper areas entails not simply upheaval, cost and stress to the households involved, but also the transfer of public service obligations and costs which the receiving areas are likely to be ill-equipped, unprepared and unresourced to handle".

It has been estimated by Shelter that some 35,000 households will approach their local authorities for advice and assistance on homelessness. Many of these will be families with dependent children and as such considered to be "priority need", to whom the local authority has a statutory duty to provide housing. Crisis believes that the likely result will be that single homeless people, who are already not a priority for housing, will become even less of a priority for assistance.

The estimated costs attendant on these housing dilemmas is not insignificant. It is estimated that £120 million will be required to satisfy temporary accommodation needs. Going even further, Homeless Link has identified the regulations' tipping point-the figure at which costs begin to outstrip any benefits or savings derived-as £1.77 billion, equivalent to 106,070 homeless people. That number represents just 28 per cent of the estimated households at severe risk of homelessness as a result of the proposed changes. The most pessimistic forecasts suggest that these amendments could cost the state in excess of £6 billion. These regulations are in danger of increasing the deficit, not reducing it. Far from supporting people into work, breaking the cycle of dependency or ending the benefits culture, the principal effect of these amendments looks to be the ghettoisation of the capital's disadvantaged-forcing families from their homes, forcing children into poverty and homelessness and overburdening already stretched public services, all at a potential cost of three times the estimated savings.

Your Lordships will be relieved to hear that I do not think that the Government should do nothing about the rising cost of housing benefit. The Minister will undoubtedly claim that these are unfortunate changes forced on him by the economic legacy left by the Government of which I was a member. I absolutely reject the notion that there is no alternative. There is an alternative economic policy, which starts with stimulating growth and then has prudent cuts following behind. I will not rehearse that argument now, but suffice it to say that he could do things differently with these measures.

The Government have got it half right. Within the package, the largest block of saving is made by abolishing the £15 excess. They should do that and go ahead with the payment for an extra room for carers. That package would save half a billion pounds per annum. However, they should suspend the other measures. The removal of the fifth bedroom saves them £15 million a year at most and carries the risk of costing much more than that in the cost of homelessness. Capping the rates generally should be dealt with through the wider cap that they are proposing on benefit income, which would retain much greater flexibility to deal with individual needs.

The move to reduce affordability from half of houses to rent to 30 per cent needs more debate, as it raises huge concerns, especially combined with the move to constrain local housing allowance increases to the CPI measure of inflation, which is proposed elsewhere. I therefore suggest that these should be tackled in the context of the forthcoming welfare reform Bill, which would allow time to address the large risk of homelessness from these measures with the associated social and financial costs that go with them. That would allow all Members of this House to amend and properly debate these measures.

I have sought to be constructive and there is one other thing that I will do to be constructive and helpful to the House tonight. I am clear that it is in order to move the Motions in my name, given that the Cunningham report of 2006 said:

"It is consistent both with the Lords' role in Parliament as a revising chamber, and with Parliament's role in relation to Delegated legislation, for the Lords to threaten to defeat an SI"- for example, in the exceptional circumstance of the Merits Committee drawing it to the special attention of the House. That is what has happened in this case, with the 15th report of the Merits Committee in December last year. However, I am mindful that there is an alternative Motion in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Best. That would not stop these damaging regulations but would send a very strong message to the Government from your Lordships' House. The Government should listen and act if the House supports the Motion in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Best, as I hope it will. Therefore, in keeping with the constructive nature of this Opposition, our respect for convention and our desire to be helpful to the House, I intend to withdraw my Motion at the end of the debate. In the mean time, I beg to move.