My Lords, it is always a pleasure to follow the noble Baroness, Lady Wilkins. Her personal experience and powerful testimony are always of benefit to the House. We are very pleased to listen to what she had to say. However, I do not agree with the last point she made because, politically, it is absolutely apposite that the noble Lord, Lord Knight, took the decision that he did to leave a Division for now. That was the right thing to do and the debate benefited from it. It certainly makes it easier for people like me, who agree with a lot of the analysis and share a lot of the concern, to keep the pressure on the Minister for Welfare Reform. I am also grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Best, who admirably set the scene. Given the expert that he is, we would expect nothing else.

The politics of this are not hard to discern. Those of us who have been around long enough to remember the introduction of housing benefit in 1988 can see the Treasury's fingerprints all over these cuts which have been on Treasury shelves since the income support system was changed in the welfare reform Act of 1986. Given the speed with which certainly the initial tranche of changes were introduced, some of which are reflected in the statutory instruments we are discussing, they could have been given no other thought than the Treasury insisting that DWP Ministers had to find changes.

As I keep saying, the noble Lord, Lord Freud, is a national treasure given that he is the architect of the universal credit, the principle of which I absolutely support. However, he had to pay a price for that. I well understand the concessions that have to be made between departments. Therefore, I do not blame my noble friend for what we are facing. However, the noble Lord, Lord Knight, was right to refer to the £15 excess. That was very welcome because if there is a feeling across the House that constructive measures can and should be taken to limit some of the damage referred to in many eloquent speeches this evening, that strengthens my noble friend's hand in making representations to the department. In any case, this game does not finish this evening; it will be a long journey. Iterations of these cuts will be introduced over a period of years. Therefore, we have a little time to look at what is going on. We are not, to quote a phrase, lashed to the mast; at least, I would not like to think that we are.

If the Motion moved by the noble Lord, Lord Best, is accepted, and as long as the Minister for Welfare Reform is prepared to say that it is not just restricted to the regulations, which are only the start of a long journey which will make considerable changes, some of which will get considerably more acute come 2013, the House will have done a valuable piece of work. The Minister must also understand that he has to respond with a sense of responsibility, from an adult point of view, by being very firm about his assurances about what will be reviewed and reported, and how, when and why. We need to know what we are being asked to support.

The point was made eloquently by the noble Baroness, Lady Hollis, but I have always felt that housing policy driven by housing benefit is completely crackers. It has all got out of kilter. We all need to step back to consider some of the excellent work done by John Hills in his excellent report, Ends and Means, and the Kate Barker recommendations of 2004-all a bit long in the tooth now, but the direction of travel necessary in the long term is all there. That work can be built on in future.

The private rented sector is not a place for long-term, low-income households' housing needs to be met. It is a device that should be for another segment of our society altogether. We have let it get out of control in a way that is difficult to justify. Like colleagues, I find it difficult to be sure that the savings set out in these plans will be realised as they are expected to be without unintended consequences. It is not just the June 2010 Budget proposals or the spending review proposals-as, again, the noble Baroness, Lady Hollis, said, it is the universal credit changes, which are profound.

The House can be reassured that it will get a chance to come back to some of these issues. I give an undertaking to the noble Lord, Lord Knight, that if we do not get a proper review or if we get a proper review but a red traffic light on the basis of the red, amber and green system of risk assessment on some of these issues, I will happily consider joining him in the Lobby if the Government do not measure up to the requirements, which are felt on all sides to be necessary, before we can go home this evening satisfied that we have done our job properly.

I conclude by mentioning four-well, four and a half-things that I want in the review. The first has been discussed earlier. I want to know exactly what proportion of the market the Government expect to be accessible to people who are on local housing allowance. I do not believe that the proportion of 30 per cent will hold. Once it is indexed to CPI, there is no real expectation that across the country LHA clients will be able to access 30 per cent of the market. That is my view in London and other areas.

The Government need to explain what proportion of the private rented sector they eventually expect the changes to make available to the client group. I think that the market will fragment. I think that the pressure coming into the private rented sector is likely to segment into a binary system where people who are unable to get on to the first rung of the owner-occupation ladder will be in a much more advantageous place. There are many more of them. The evidence that went into the DWP Select Committee report indicates that there is enough pressure there to keep rents rising and that demand will increase. There is a real risk that the sector will split. That will be made worse after 2013.

Secondly, on housing and homelessness, we need to make sure that the homelessness assessment that we are making in this review is not limited merely to statutory cases; it must include non-priority cases as well. I have to say that as a Scot because there is a long-standing commitment by the Scottish Government to abolish priority cases from 2012. Therefore, there is a devolution dimension to some of this, and it risks undermining the devolution settlement if we do not get a proper review that accommodates not just Scotland but Northern Ireland as well. I know that the Minister is sensitive to that because he has had some correspondence on it, but it is a very important point.

Thirdly, with regard to the statutory definition of homelessness, we need some assurances about temporary accommodation and the knock-on effect that the housing benefit changes we are making will have on some of the local authority arrangements for setting up placement agreements on long-term leasing. If we do not do that, it will be very difficult to predict the chances of local authorities being able to manage their caseloads. All that will get worse when the single room rent and the under-occupation rule changes come in in 2013 for the whole of the social rented sector. That will be a dangerous moment for which we must make appropriate provision.

My fourth point is that the long-term costs of migration have to be monitored. We have had evidence of the consequences of migration and displacement, and any review that is worth its salt or worth having at all must take that into consideration-even if it only begins to look at the methodology of assessing the effects of migration and displacement-before we can be confident that we know what we are doing.

My half point concerns non-dependant deductions. It is completely impossible to justify a 27 per cent increase in non-dependant deductions for the next three years with no system for determining why that figure is chosen. As far as I understand it, the Government are saying, "Oh well, it hasn't changed since 2001". Even if you took CPI, RPI or any combination and compounded the figures, you might get a 30 per cent increase over that period in terms of the impact on non-dependant charges. However, it is not acceptable to invent something called an "index of eligible rents", to fix it at 27 per cent and impose it over a three-year period. This is not part of these regulations; it is part of the operating benefit, which is why the Government do not need to justify it either to the SSAC or to anyone else. It is completely indefensible and I cannot understand why the non-dependant charges are being changed in this way.

The House owes a debt of gratitude to all those who have provided briefings-in particular, the Social Security Advisory Committee. Sir Richard Tilt is a wise man. He has a difficult job but he provides evidence in which I have confidence. That, together with the Shelter report and the work of the Select Committee, demonstrates to me beyond peradventure that there is work to be done here. Risks are being run and, unless we carry out a serious review, obtaining evidence in which we can be confident, we will be selling this very vulnerable client group short in the future, and I do not want that to happen.