Welfare Reform Bill

My Lords, I am grateful to the Minister. I was grateful to him when I heard of the original undertaking to carry out independent monitoring for the first two years. The Minister now announces that this is to cover the first five years. I rather wonder whether my amendment had anything to do with that. Whether it did or not, I am delighted that the results will be published and placed in the Library. The Minister announced a whole range of ““assessments””—dare I call them that?—which were to be made of the process during that five years. The trouble is that the results will come out rather piecemeal. There will be no document which puts them together appropriately as they come out and there will be no single booklet that we can read. If we are particularly assiduous in looking at these things, we will know what has happened—what has gone right and what has gone wrong. We may even know what remedies are to be proposed. However, what we will not know, at least if I correctly understood what the Minister said, is how many people the ESA has been successful in getting into work, thereby achieving their and our ambition; and we will not know how the trend in applications for the benefit is going, because, clearly, over a period, even in the first five years, one would expect a considerable drop in the number of applications for the benefit. Indeed, we have already seen a drop in the past year for which we have had figures. Perhaps it is a flash in the pan—one does not know. Therefore, even though I accept at face value what the Minister said, his response is not satisfactory. I wish to press the amendment—