Welfare Reform Bill

I beg forgiveness from the Minister and the noble Lord, Lord Skelmersdale, for missing the earlier exchanges on this important amendment. However, having listened carefully to the Minister’s reply, would he think further about two issues of concern in this area? The first is the extent to which we can assure ourselves that the capacity exists for personal advisers in the marketplace generally. From my previous incarnation in the other place, I know that Ministers were honest enough to acknowledge at that stage, which was some time ago, that there was a risk that when work was needed to start, the number of people available to perform that crucial role was not then in place. Can the Minister reassure me that the contractors that we are talking about in this amendment will have access to a big enough body of professionally trained people? That is an important part and we have to be there by ““A-day””; so maybe the answer is ““not yet, but we are on track””. I would settle for that assurance—it is an essential part of this process. More generally, given my experience of working with companies in the field, it will be difficult for a level playing field to be created for social enterprises generally and collective third-sector organisations. I would really love—and I tried to persuade some of my colleagues and friends in the third sector at the CPAG annual meeting last summer—them to band together to make a bid for one of these important contracts to see the quality that they could bring to it. There are conflicts between their advisory role, and their independence must be protected, but I would love to see a group of them getting together, because the clients and customers would, perhaps unfairly, feel much more reassured about being in a context where Citizens Advice was built into the provision of the services. The reason why that will be jolly hard is that the big companies—who, I must say, discharge their functions in a professional way and I have nothing against them—have resources behind them that are simply not available for not-for-profit enterprises. The Wise Group, of which I am a director, is one of those. It lives from year to year on budgets that have to be carefully adjusted on almost a monthly basis, because the money is not there to provide the cushion and the buffer for investment and training. The companies that that organisation will be competing against for these contracts will be dealing in bulk, will have economies of scale, will have very deep pockets indeed and if it is left simply to the marketplace, it will be very difficult for innovative, creative, and genuinely interested new groups of people to try to enter this important area without large resources behind them. When I ask them what the Government need to do to put that right, they say they need development grants of capital, involving some shareholding in the company; I do not know whether that would work as it would be difficult for the Government to start buying interests in social enterprises. However, there must be some mechanism. I would feel much more comfortable about this amendment if I was given some assurance that these problems were properly appreciated and that everything that could be done was being done to try to make this easier for social enterprises involving third-sector charitable organisations, which have a wealth of experience in these matters already. It is lying there on the shelf—if they cannot get access to that, it would be a great shame.