Welfare Reform Bill

My Lords, before the noble Lord sits down, perhaps I may press him on the matter. He said that his amendment calls for an independent report. I reassured him that there will be an independent report. He said that there would be no document which pooled together all our reports. Some of those reports are independent; some are internally produced for management purposes—they will be a mixture. To require that they be fed into one independent report would in the case of some require an additional layer of work and resource which I respectfully suggest to him is not necessary. The noble Lord asked how we will know whether the process is successful in getting people into work and said that we must have an annual report to determine it. Some people’s journeys into work, and judging whether the process is successful, will not always be capable of being quantified and identified in a rigid annual cycle. That is why an independent review, to which the Government are committed, is a better way of addressing this matter than forcing a narrow annual report to be made. Particularly in the early period, such a report is unlikely to be able to judge with full effectiveness the journeys that some people are making into work, because they would not necessarily appear in employment statistics. I impress that on the noble Lord and ask him not to press his amendment.