Welfare Reform Bill

My Lords, first, I acknowledge the genuine concern that some noble Lords have about how this will work, particularly for people with mental health problems. I know that noble Lords table amendments with the very best of motives. I regret that I am not able to accept the amendment, but I hope that I can explain why. I understand the intention and we share the objective of wanting to make this work for all customers, especially those with mental health conditions. The work-focused health-related assessment is a tool to allow the personal adviser and the customer to understand what barriers a customer faces in returning to work. For most customers, it will cover a range of barriers, although, as we have said previously, the focus will be on the customer’s own perceptions of the barriers resulting from their disabling condition and on identifying any health-related barriers that could be addressed with appropriate interventions. The work-focused health-related assessment will not prescribe what a customer must do. It will provide advice to the personal adviser carrying out work-focused interviews about interventions that would help the customer, but it is certainly not an instruction or a prescription to go away and do a particular type of work-related activity. For instance, a work-focused health-related assessment will not say to someone that they must undertake any type of treatment, including cognitive behaviour therapy. The work-focused health-related assessment does not produce a tick list of things that a customer can do that will mean that they can return to work. Instead, the assessment provides information to our advisers, who can then treat customers as individuals. Each individual will have their own journey. We know that some with severe conditions will want to, and can, move into work quickly. For others, it is a longer journey, and our approach recognises that. It is entirely right that we offer support to customers to overcome their barriers. That was the groundbreaking innovation of Pathways to Work. The Pathways offer was, and continues to be, based on customers engaging with us in return for support to help them to move back into work. We know that Pathways has changed many, many lives for the better. That is reflected by double the job entries in Pathways areas compared to non-Pathways areas. It is also seen through the one-to-one research that has shown that the support on offer is welcomed by customers and has helped them to overcome their barriers, even when work has not been a realistic option for them. At the heart of that is the fact that we have required customers to engage and that there are sanctions for the very small minority who do not. I stress that the required engagement in Pathways, and initially when ESA is introduced, is to attend up to six work-focused interviews. We encourage any activity beyond that, but it is on a purely voluntary basis. The system that required nothing of customers and gave nothing in return failed. It failed in terms of the numbers on incapacity benefit and in the lack of support for the aspirations of our customers. We have said that we want to go further in the future with the new benefit. We want to offer more information to the customer and to the personal adviser through the work-focused health-related assessment, and we want customers to engage in mandatory work-related activity in time. However, we have also said that work-related activity will be made mandatory only when we have the resources to do that. To be explicit, those resources will be needed to expand the provision of help and support. We have also made it clear that we will build this offer of help and support on the evidence from Pathways, including those provider-led areas that will be rolled out over the next couple of years. When we require customers to engage with that support through mandatory work-related activity, we have been very deliberate to allow customers a wide choice of what they can do. The definition in Clause 12(7) makes it clear that anything that improves the customer’s chances of obtaining or retaining work will count as work-related activity. That is in line with our approach of treating customers as individuals.