THE BRITISH government yesterday availed of a rarely used parliamentary rule to overcome opposition in the House of Lords on legislation that will cap benefits at £26,000-a-year per family.
During a frequently bitter debate in the Commons, the government won a succession of votes to overturn changes made last week by the House of Lords.
Making sure that the Lords can no longer defy its wishes, the Tory/Liberal Democrat coalition then announced it was invoking the financial privilege rule, which bars peers from imposing extra costs on the treasury by changing legislation on its own initiative.
Liberal Democrat backbenchers, unhappy with the legislation, were bought off with a series of last-minute concessions from work and pensions secretary Iain Duncan Smith, who offered transitional arrangements to ease hardship.
A £130 million fund will be created to help families now having to move out of flats and homes in London, and other higher-priced cities, because of the loss of hundreds of pounds of housing benefit each week.
Meanwhile, the decision to overrule the House of Lords call that cancer patients should be exempted from changes to some welfare benefits was sharply criticised last night by Ciarán Devane, head of the Macmillan Cancer Support.
“We are bitterly disappointed on behalf of the thousands of cancer patients that the government has today failed to protect. They will now be forced to bear the brunt of the economic crisis,” he said .
Despite mass opposition from “the Lords, the public, their own supporters”, the government, he said, has pushed “through an unfair proposal” that will cost thousands of cancer patients up £94 a week from April.
Despite taunts from prime minister David Cameron earlier, who alleged that Labour could not decide its attitude to the welfare cap, Labour consistently supported the changes put forward by the House of Lords.
Labour wants a regional benefits cap, with higher payments for those living in London – but it has consistently avoided clarifying whether it believed the cap for London should be set at £26,000 and thus lower elsewhere, or the other way around.
Democratic Unionist MPs support the welfare cap, but they voiced understanding with the Lords’ attempts to make exceptions for the weakest.
