Despite escaping one major ambush, Lord Freud cannot have been looking forward to Amendment 59, moved by the Bishop of Ripon and Leeds. A short amendment;

Clause 94, page 63, line 25, after “benefits” insert “with the exclusion of child benefit”

it addressed issues of child poverty, as the Bishop noted,

The Government’s assessment of the impact of the cap is that some 67,000 households will be affected. The Minister spoke of that earlier as not a massive number. It is pretty massive for those involved, but the fact that it is not massive in the overall terms of Welfare Reform Bill means that it ought to be possible for us to pass the amendment without seeing ourselves as fatally damaging the Bill itself. Those 67,000 families will lose on average £83 a week. Analysis from the Children’s Society shows that those households contain around 220,000 children. Three-quarters of those affected by the cap are children, yet Clause 94 says nothing about children at all.

From the Liberal Democrat benches, Baroness Tyler of Enfield, in whose name the Amendment also was, asked a key question;

Is it fair that children born into small families with earnings in excess of £80,000 a year receive child benefit while those born into larger families with a benefit income of £26,000 a year do not?

and pointed out a fundamental contradiction in the Government’s proposal;

It is about families feeling, rightly or wrongly, that they will have to split up because if they created two households instead of one, parents would then be entitled to £26,000 a year in benefits. That cannot be right. Experts in the field have said that there is a substantial couples penalty built into the cap that is completely at odds with my own view, and that of the Government, of the need to support strong and stable families.

Lord Greaves, returned to the House after a period of ill-health, was quick to draw attention to another attack on the principle of universal child benefit;

Child benefit, as my noble friend and others have said, has always been a non-means-tested benefit that goes as of right to families with children. It has always been paid on a per capita, per child, basis. That is a fundamental principle. The first child gets more nowadays, then each child after that gets the same, in order to assist the work of bringing up that child. To abolish child benefit, which is what is actually being done in this Bill, for people who are at the benefit cap and who are getting other benefits that take them up and beyond that cap, as is highly likely, is a fundamental attack on the whole principle of child benefit.

Lord Kirkwood of Kirkhope, with five rebellions on the Bill under his belt already, picked up on the same point;

This amendment is the best form of mitigation because it protects a universal benefit that people earning just shy of £80,000 a year will qualify for until we look at that. The Government say that they are on the case. Those people will get that benefit, while people subject to the housing cap in future may not. I do not see the equity in that situation and it would not be safe for us to run with the clause if unamended.”

It required a bravura performance from the Minister to persuade enough Liberal Democrats and crossbenchers to save the day or, alternatively, a sizeable concession. None was forthcoming. In summing up, the Bishop of Ripon and Leeds spoke for many in the chamber when he said;

I do not think we have heard any real response to the basic point that the Bill means that a childless couple has the same cap as a couple with a number of children. It does not seem logical to say that we have to put a lot more pressure on families with children than on those who do not have any.

It was enough to win the day, with as reported yesterday, twenty-six Liberal Democrats voting against the Government, four of them (Ashdown of Norton-sub-Hamdon, Benjamin, Redesdale and Tyler of Enfield) doing so for the first time in this Parliament.

This represents the biggest Liberal Democrat rebellion in this Parliament so far, and with so many having voted against one or other element of the Bill already, it may not be the last this week, with Day 6 of the Report Stage due tomorrow.