Guardian's Allowance Up-rating Order 2012

My Lords, once again these indexing procedures are being used as a stealth tax. As the noble Lord has actually admitted, the shift imposes a significant cost on the poorest families. He has described this as providing an incentive to work. When the economy is growing at 0 per cent a year, there are no extra jobs. What is the point of an incentive to work when there are no jobs for people to work in? In these circumstances, the overall effect is exacerbated by the number of technical changes and by a failure to uprate various thresholds even at the rate of the CPI. Will the Minister tell us the net benefit to the Treasury—that is, the net loss to the receivers of tax credits—of the changes that are made in these orders? The changes that derive from uprating less than the CPI, and various technical changes, represent one set of losses to the recipients of tax credits. Will he also tell us the overall impact on recipients of tax credits of using the CPI rather than the RPI? Those are the two components of the extra burden that the Government have decided to impose in increasing the incentive to work—while their policies are destroying jobs. Will the Minister also confirm that the shift from the RPI to the CPI is deemed by the Government to be a permanent aspect of future policies rather than a measure to deal simply with any fiscal difficulties that the Government are encountering? Will he tell us the Treasury's estimate of the reduction in tax credits by the time the universal credit is introduced? Finally, the Explanatory Memorandum contains the extraordinary statement: "““This instrument has no impact on business, charities or voluntary bodies””." Surely this cannot be the case. All charities and voluntary bodies that provide services—for example, to poor children, to the disabled or indeed to anyone struggling to get by—will be shocked by this pathetic excuse for failing to estimate the impact of the Government's actions. How can the Government justify the statement that there is no impact on the charitable or voluntary sector, which at its most obvious and trivial level is untrue?