My Lords, I support the amendment of the noble Lord, Lord Best. I will also speak to Amendment 81A, which I supported, and 81B, which I put forward and lead on. These amendments go to the fundamental question for local authorities of whether the costs they will incur will be properly recognised within the arrangements. As has been well put by the noble Lord, Lord Best, in some instances the costs may make the whole policy not worth putting in. In fact, we may find—depending on the outcome of all this—that the costs will raise a question about the whole policy. However, at the very least, in different housing markets it most certainly will raise questions. Therefore, it is absolutely right to say that in circumstances where it clearly does not make sense to implement the policy in terms of costs and benefits, there is provision to not proceed with it.
The other two amendments seek to be very clear that administrative costs will be covered. I speak specifically to Amendment 81B. Within the draft Bill, it says the Minister “may provide for deductions” to cover costs. In other words, it is a permissive choice for Ministers whether or not they make these deductions. It seems inconsistent with the intent of Government and therefore the amendment does something very simple, which is to change the “may” to a “must”, to put it beyond doubt that, as this is a government policy which local authorities are being asked to implement, they must properly provide for the costs of implementing that policy.
This is the key. First, in order to access the information about incomes, the net has to be cast wide—effectively ask all tenants to secure information about less than 10% of the tenants. That is the first point. Secondly, if
this is operated in a fair way there will be complexity. There is no doubt about that. The noble Baroness, Lady Hollis, very precisely pointed to one of the issues of fairness: if people’s income changes, in the interest of administrative simplicity you might say, “We won’t change the rent”, but that would be extraordinarily unfair if people have lost jobs or changed roles and their income has changed significantly.
As we know, in the labour market that we work in, people can see their incomes as householders change very rapidly indeed—from one week to the next, as I said earlier. Therefore, you have complexity. You have complexity about the different benefits within the system, about the makeup of families, and about how you assess who the higher earners are within those families. With that complexity comes cost. It is an absolutely logical consequence of seeking to introduce a fair system.