THE House of Lords is doing the heavy legislative lifting at present. It is not that the Commons is idle (committee stage of the Local Government Finance Bill recently and debates on food poverty, youth unemployment, the EU and much besides).

But it is the Lords that is getting its teeth into the legislative programme.

The hottest issue is benefit reform, or more precisely the cap that the Government is proposing on the total level of benefits that a family should be entitled to receive.

The Government has proposed that the cap should be no more than £26,000 a year.

This cap is an untaxed benefit and is equivalent to the receipt of £35,000 a year in taxable earnings. My view is that this is a perfectly reasonable figure to set.

Why should it be that a family on benefits should earn well above average income when many hard-working people are struggling hard to get by on less? Why should we accept a system where for many it pays more to receive benefits than it does to go out and work?

The arguments put forward by some in the Lords (including several bishops) is that the cap will create homeless children and that child benefit should therefore be excluded from the cap calculation – something that would see some families claiming up to £50,000 a year in benefits. My view is that one of the worst things government and the welfare state can do is to discourage work and promote welfare dependency.

As the former Archbishop of Canterbury George Carey recently stated in a stern rebuke to the bishops: "The truth is that the welfare system has gone from the insurance-based safety-net that William Beveridge envisaged in 1942 (designed to tackle the 'Giant Evils' of 'Want, Disease, Ignorance, Squalor and Idleness') to an industry of gargantuan proportions which is fuelling those very vices and impoverishing us all. In the worst-case scenario it traps people into dependency and rewards fecklessness and irresponsibility."

I agree with much of what George Carey says. We spend over £165 billion a year on welfare – that's over 50 per cent more than we spend on the health service, or getting on for £5,000 per working person per year.

I HAVE written before about the Government's support for better broadband coverage in Devon. The importance is clear – the internet is an essential service and in rural areas connection speeds are often woefully lacking. Research I commissioned via the House of Commons Library shows that a third of my constituents have 'low' access rates compared with just 1.8 per cent of people in Hammersmith. The Government, urged on in the Commons by myself and others has provided £30m to support the roll-out of super-fast broadband (20mbps) across Devon and Somerset and this is backed up with £20 million from the two county councils.

I met recently with John Hart, leader of Devon County Council, to discuss how I can help my constituents and local businesses gain the maximum advantage from the funds available.

The answer is to make our voice heard. The council is very sensibly conducting a 'Demand Registration' project whereby local communities, businesses and individuals will have the opportunity to let the council know about the download speeds they are receiving.

So please visit www.connectingdevonandsomerset.co.uk and make your voice heard.