Welfare Reform Bill

We return to the fray this afternoon with a somewhat depleted team on this side of the Committee. There are currently only two of us here; we felt that we perhaps had an unfair advantage yesterday. I apologise on behalf of my noble friend Lord Addington, who is speaking in the Olympics debate but will join us shortly. Like the noble Lord, Lord Skelmersdale, we do not object in principle to involving either the voluntary or private sectors in this way. We are possibly even more sceptical than the Conservatives about how it will work in practice, however, and possibly more concerned to see effective safeguards. The parallels with the National Health Service are quite strong, where the Government have had an ideological drive to privatise, and that is no doubt the background to these proposals. We clearly see the cheap, easy and quick-win operations and procedures of the private sector there and the parallels with the more difficult problems and people, particularly those with mental health difficulties, as the noble Baroness, Lady Meacher, so movingly described last night, being left to the state. We will be scrutinising this closely and we want a great deal of reassurance from the Minister that that position will not arise out of the Bill. We have already talked a good deal about commercial confidentiality in the Committee. Will the Minister give us the strongest assurance he can that, when these arrangements have been set up and Parliament properly wants to scrutinise how they are working in a year or two’s time, the Government will not hide behind this commercial confidentiality mantra? To be honest, when we have probed it in other areas, it has often proved to be just a cover to avoid embarrassment for the department; the commercial companies have often said that they have no objection to revealing that information. I do not propose to rehearse the detailed questions of the noble Lord, Lord Skelmersdale, which seemed very proper. I look forward to the Minister’s reply.