Stephen Lloyd said:

“This is a slow motion car crash. One and a half million people are in private rented accommodation and in receipt of housing benefit. Private landlords are not in a position, financially, to be as forgiving as councils and housing associations. With the delays in payment we have already seen, many vulnerable people will lose their homes. And many landlords will simply stop taking on Universal Credit tenants, so where are these hundreds of thousands of people supposed to live?

However, the Paris-based thinktank also said the economy would see a “significant boost” if there was another referendum leading to Brexit being reversed.

The increase is thought to reflect both a genuine rise in hate crime around the time of the EU referendum and ongoing improvements in crime recording by the police.

Rising food prices made a large contribution to the change, with an increase of 0.8% between August and September 2017, compared to a 0.4% fall last year.

The Liberal Democrats have always advocated democratic reform of the House of the Lords. But the brutal truth is that this Government simply has no appetite for the fundamental reform which the House of Lords desperately needs.