My Lords, I rise to speak to my Amendment 76 and to Amendment 73, which I support. I set out my concerns about pay to stay in the debate on the previous grouping, so on this occasion I will
keep my remarks fairly short. I support everything that the noble Lord, Lord Best, said about the taper, so I shall focus particularly on the threshold.
For the reasons that I have already spoken about, these proposals catch not just households on high incomes but those on average incomes. They may be in the higher group in relation to social rented properties but, as households, they cannot in any sense be described as high income in relation to the population as a whole. This is a crucial point. It is not about high-income households in any meaningful sense, so to have any kind of fairness in the system, we need to raise the thresholds from those proposed and keep the taper low. It is not a matter of either/or; both are necessary.
My amendment proposes increasing the thresholds that have just been announced by the Minister by some £9,000. That would make them £40,000 outside London and £50,000 inside London, and the amendment would put those thresholds in the Bill. That was one of the options referred to in the Government’s own impact assessment, so it must have been under consideration. It is in fact lower than the previously proposed threshold of £60,000 agreed by the coalition Government. I think that there is a case for the threshold to be at least £60,000 in London, as proposed by the noble Baroness, Lady Bakewell, but, in the spirit of trying to reach a compromise, I have aimed to meet the Government half way on this—hence the recommended thresholds in the amendment.
The effects of raising the thresholds would be twofold. First, it would substantially reduce the number of people caught up in these proposals. There is a clustering of people around the £30,000 to £40,000 income level, so raising the thresholds would reduce the numbers to perhaps as low as 50,000 compared with 350,000. Secondly, it would start at the income level of people, and households in particular, in the top 20% of incomes, not in the top 50%, as is currently proposed, so it would affect people on genuinely high incomes compared with what is proposed now. I think that by any reasonable reckoning having the thresholds at the levels that I propose would be a fairer starting point, and a taper of 10p in the pound would be much fairer. Taking on board these amendments would go a long way to making what I think is a very poor piece of legislation a little fairer and a little more workable.