My Lords, I intervene briefly from these Benches to add my support to Amendment 109 in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Best. When I intervened at Second Reading, I mentioned that I wanted to return to this issue in Committee. Subsequent to that, the noble Lord, Lord Kirkwood, chaired a meeting on the Committee Corridor of a number of organisations which would be directly affected, and they made some very moving presentations about the implications for them if the Bill went through without further amendment. Subsequently, I added my name to the letter referred to by the noble Lord, Lord Best, to the Times, expressing the hope that the Government would smile on this amendment or give the necessary comfort in some other way.
As others have said, the last thing my noble friend wants to do is to precipitate the closure of valuable schemes run by voluntary organisations providing support
to vulnerable groups. Indeed, that is why there is a whole clause in the Bill entitled “Exceptions”, and subsection (5) gives powers to the Secretary of State to do basically what he wants to. The exemptions that have been trailed so far by the Government are welcome, but I agree with others that they may not go quite far enough, and I wonder if we can just nudge the Government a little further to give a greater degree of comfort to those running these projects.
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I am slightly worried about the waiver route. I am worried about the impact on staff, on residents and on funders if an organisation has to declare publicly that it will face financial hardship and therefore needs to go for help. I think that it is much better to put these organisations on a sounder financial basis from the word go, rather than expect them to go through that route.
As the noble Lord has just said, the funding of these projects has always been more complicated than mainstream housing because they need a variety of funding sources. I remember, when I was Housing Minister in, I think, 1985, putting an Act on the statute book that introduced something called the hostel deficit grant. Noble Lords may remember that—it lasted, I think, four years and then was subsumed by the less memorable transitional special needs management allowance, which I think eventually morphed into Supporting People. However, one of the bricks that has supported the structure has always been housing benefit, and the last thing that these organisations want is an erosion of that fundamental support at a time when they are struggling to tick all the other boxes to get the other funding that they need.
I wonder whether my noble friend, between now and Report, would agree to meet representatives of some of the organisations involved to see whether we can reach some accommodation that, within the structure of the exemption clause, gives them the comfort that they need and avoids the process, which is currently envisaged, of asking for waivers. I know that my noble friend’s heart is in the right place, and I hope that she will be able to give me and others who have spoken in this debate the assurances that we want that she will do what is necessary to prevent these projects from going under.