Jobseeker’s Allowance (Jobseeker Mandatory Activity) Pilot Regulations 2007

We are nothing if not versatile this afternoon. We have now turned our attention to the subject of jobseeker’s allowance. I thought that the true versatility of the Minister was going to be proven by answering our questions on his own, but he managed to speak long enough to get some back-up, which is probably no bad thing. Essentially, we are being asked to give the go-ahead to an extension of the pilot programme which we debated on 13 December 2005, and which for very good reasons trialled the effectiveness of an early mandatory intervention by targeting all JSA customers six months into their claim. This order extends that trial for a further year. That is all well and good, although it strikes me as more than a little odd not to have a break between the ending of one trial and the beginning of the next. Two years ago we were told that qualitative research, about which I remember the noble Lord, Lord Oakeshott, had quite a lot to say, would be conducted by Sheffield Hallam University, and would be available to us for study in March 2008—in other words, this time next year. It was hoped that that pilot, and the research into it, would inform the future conduct of JSA for some time to come. This could, I suppose, still happen, but the Minister should expand on what he has just said in his introduction about the initial findings of that pilot and justify this one. I say ““this one””, because the order we are debating today marks, as the Minister said in his helpful letter to me on12 March, for which I am grateful, a number of changes to the Government’s original thinking. First, it reinforces the principle of coercion by making any person who fails to participate in the jobseeker mandatory activity programme liable to lose one week’s benefit for each failure. That is the three-day course that the Minister has just mentioned. The horrible word ““conditionality”” is much in our minds at the moment, and this is something that has clearly been translated from the thinking on the Welfare Reform Bill. Only this morning the Minister and I established that in that Bill there is to be a minimum level beyond which sanctions will not bite. I stand to be corrected, but I cannot recall any mention of sanctions in the 2005 regulations. I hope the Minister can confirm that. The question is, therefore, does the same apply here as with ESA, or is the customer expected to live on his savings—or, at worst, thin air? Secondly, I am perhaps on rather stronger ground when I note that eligibility is now to commence when a person claims benefit, rather than when he receives it, so reflecting the original policy intention of the pilot. That poses another question: why was the original policy not followed? I hope the Minister can answer that one. Lastly, I have a more general point. Before the 2005 order came into effect, there was mandatory intervention after 18 months. That order reduced it to six months. Last week the Government published the Freud report, which is pretty firm that there should be intervention at only three months into a claim for JSA. What is the Minister’s take on that proposal? Indeed, when do the Government expect to come up with their response to the Freud report? Given that the report was prepared by civil servants, it must already be highly illustrative of the Government’s thinking. Again, I am not going to object to this order, but we are owed rather more about its background.