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

I start by thanking the noble Lord, Lord Skelmersdale, for reminding me about my questions about the evaluation process. I am glad to say that he remembers them in slightly more detail than I do, and that was very helpful of him. I was planning to ask generally how that process was going. There is a problem with continually rolling out pilots without any ability for us in this House or the public outside to evaluate the results. Perhaps the Minister could remind me what the cost of the pilots was last year and what the estimate is for this year. I certainly hope that the timetable for the independent, or relatively independent, evaluation does not slip in any way. We are now sufficiently far into the process that the Minister could give us a little more information now, or perhaps promise to write to us, about the department’s initial assessment. Just to roll it forward for another year, when we are a year away from the assessment, is taking a little too much on trust. We support the principle of these pilots, but I wonder if the Minister could also give me an estimate, if he has one, of how widespread he thinks the effect of this new sanction of the loss of one week’s benefit for each failure is likely to be. Is there any conclusion that one can draw from how the interview process and the co-operation, or lack of it, has been going so far? We are being asked to take quite a bit on trust on a programme whose aims and broad thrust we all support. We want to be sure that the resources are there to support it, and we want more of a feeling of how it is going now, rather than waiting until 2008.