My Lords, it may not be part of our convention to challenge regulations in this way but we are not living in conventional times. We are faced with a determined attempt by the Government to undermine the welfare society with which we have lived since the end of the last war and to replace it with something called the big society-hence the attempt to change benefit provision without regard to what this will mean for many vulnerable people.

This is the case with housing benefit. Many people have been kept from desperate poverty and even homelessness by the existence of this benefit. Among them are many single parents, mostly women, and it is surely in our interests that such women should be able to bring up and support their children. Often they have poorly paid part-time jobs and some of the difficulties that such women and their families face have already been demonstrated to us very dramatically by one of the previous speakers in the debate.

I am a Londoner and I believe that London is a special case. The mayor may have been attacked for some of the statements he made-he was regarded as having over-reacted-but, on the other hand, he has a point. There are many areas of London, including the one in which I live, which have changed dramatically in the past 20 or 30 years. They have been developed and upgraded. I have lived there for 40 years, and it was relatively inexpensive when I moved there, but it no longer is. It is desperately overpriced. Rents are impossible, except for well-off people.

If the arrangement is that benefits in future should be related to the market rent, many people will be unable to afford the resulting rent without the appropriate benefit. Such people will have no alternative but to move. The mayor made that point strongly in his statement. It is true that people will be unable to go on living there if rent is related in some way to the market rate. That would be impossible. A number of speakers have already referred to what might happen in such circumstances and the social results of such an arrangement. People will have no alternative but to uproot and move to different places, where there may be overcrowding and other undesirable effects on their health and that of their families.

For those reasons, I hope that your Lordships will agree at least to support the Amendment tabled by the noble Lord, Lord Best. I certainly do and I hope that everybody else feels the same way.