My Lords, I declare my interest as a vice-president of the LGA. I want to comment briefly on some of the administrative and practical implications that seem to be emerging from this policy. I support the amendment moved by the noble Lord, Lord Best, in relation to tapers. One of the consequences of having a taper is that the income figure needs to be precise in every respect. It is one thing to have a threshold that people have to get over, but you have to be clear as to how much in excess of that threshold people have to be for the taper to operate fairly. That seems to me to bring into question some fundamental issues. We had a bit more information from the Minister today—a couple more veils were drawn back from how this is going to work. However, there are still some fundamental matters that have not been worked through, or, if they have, they have not been disclosed to us.
The first issue is whether or not what we are talking about will always be an annual assessment of a person’s income. Certainly the thresholds have been proposed in terms of annual amounts, but is there any suggestion that these are going to be divvied up into quarterly or weekly amounts so that the assessment would change not only periodically but frequently? If the answer is no, and we are looking at an annual assessment, that can be done only on the basis of a preceding year because until you get to the end of a year it is impossible to know what the yearly income is, particularly when you have fluctuating contracts. My noble friend Lord Beecham touched upon the issue of those who are self-employed. In any particular year, a self-employed person’s income is often not determined finally until some time after the end of the year, not during it.
Secondly, we do not know what the final definition of “income” is going to be. We know that certain benefits are going to be excluded, such as DLA and child benefit, and that is to be welcomed. However, what about things like SSP, statutory maternity pay or carer’s allowance and a number of other matters? What is to be included? It seems to me that the Government by now ought to have worked that through in some detail.
As to whose income is to be taken into account, again touched upon by my noble friend Lord Beecham, as I understand it the proposal is that if you have joint tenants it can be the income of those joint tenants or the income of their spouses or civil partners, whichever are the highest two. But that comes back to the issue of the period for which you are going to assess, because until you get to the end of a year, you do not know necessarily which are the two highest incomes from
those four people. Somebody might get a year-end bonus on the last day of the tax year and that person could then become one of the two highest earners—what are you going to do then? Will the rent be recalculated on some basis? It does not make sense. These are fundamental issues about how this is going to work and I think we need greater clarity.