Queen’s Speech

My Lords, as the new welfare reform Bill is, we assume, to be published shortly and is one of the Government’s flagship Bills, I make no apology for returning to this matter today after yesterday's Statement. We on these Benches have supported the principle of those receiving working-age benefits being given as much help as possible to find work, with sanctions being imposed only as a last resort. However, it has been difficult to discern exactly the Government’s overriding aim with the policy. Is it that unemployed people should no longer get benefits for doing nothing and will otherwise be financially penalised, or is it that people must be given more help than at present to find a job, with the penalties affecting only the few who are genuinely work-shy and refuse to co-operate? The emphasis seems to be different depending on the audience. I suppose that Ministers want to satisfy the red-tops’ need for a tough headline such as ““Time's up for those who sponge off the taxpayer””, while sounding as reasonable as possible about extra help for jobseekers to their own supporters. Why does this matter? One reason is that those of us who raise concerns about the policy are considered to be anti-reform, but I hope that the Minister will accept that that is far from the case. There must be proper debate and scrutiny of the detail of how the policy will work, particularly in the stormy weather into which the country is heading, where jobs will be much scarcer and unemployment is rising fast. There may be many people may find themselves visiting Jobcentre Plus offices against all their expectations who may not have been factored into the DWP calculations. They will almost certainly include young people in their 20s or 30s who still have student debts to pay off, who are heavily mortgaged and who thought that they were in secure jobs but who are made redundant against all expectations. They are highly educated young people with good degrees. In the past, they would have found another job relatively easily, but in the present climate it may be much harder. It is not just young, highly educated people who will be hit but also professional people in their 40s and 50s who thought that they were in settled careers. I listen to my noble friend Lord Oakeshott of Seagrove Bay when he tells me that this recession will be much worse than that in the 1980s and will be more of a white- collar, southern recession. The recessions of both the 1980s and, much earlier, the 1930s were much worse in the old manufacturing regions. Now, the proportion of public sector jobs is much higher away from the south-east, so poorer regions are less vulnerable. I was interested to read in the Daily Telegraph on Tuesday about the Government setting aside more than £100 million for universities and further education colleges to target unemployed professionals and offer them retraining or careers advice. Will the Minister tell us how this will work? How will those people be targeted? Will Jobcentre Plus offices have all the relevant details? Will the Minister also tell us whether he considers that the number of extra staff in Jobcentre Plus offices around the country will be anywhere near enough to cope not just with, let us say, lone mothers looking for work for the first time but the range of the newly unemployed in all their diversity? Research by the Liberal Democrats shows that Jobcentre Plus is already failing to cope with an increase in the number of applications. Between June and September, the number of outstanding applications for jobseeker’s allowance was 44 per cent up on the same period last year. It did not help that Jobcentre Plus reduced its staff by 16,450 between 2004 and 2008. Do the Government think that the extra staff being taken on and trained for the increase in unemployment in the coming months will be adequate? While I am on the subject of extra demand for services, I must mention the Winchester Citizens Advice Bureau, which says that, for Winchester, an area of high employment, its advice queries for employment issues have rocketed. It says that many individuals who have never been out of work are no longer able to find ongoing activity and that advisers are therefore seeing more clients in the middle-income bracket. It says also that many small businesses which over recent years have not had to dismiss staff now have to do so without realising that the law has changed and they have to follow a careful process. Although there is not a mortgage crisis in the city, the CAB is talking to the city council about mortgage rescue schemes and will work in partnership with it. Where would the country be without our citizens advice bureaux? I turn to the flexible new deal under which those unemployed for more than a year will be referred to private or third-sector contractors to find a job. One might be forgiven for thinking that the scheme was already under way, but as it is not due to start until next October, there should be time for the Government to take on board some of the comments made by those studying the policy in detail, such as the Social Market Foundation and the Social Security Advisory Committee. The latter makes the key point that how the Government proceed in this area will determine what they achieve. The problem of cherry-picking the easiest clients to help was raised yesterday, but it was not mentioned that those furthest from the jobs market will be expensive to help. Private contractors involved in back-to-work support will need a lot of investment to ramp up their operation to help those furthest from the jobs market. I would be interested to hear how the Government will ensure that the capital is available, given the reluctance of banks to lend at the moment. Changing the subject now to that of the benefits system in general, we on these Benches are not the first to ask for the DWP and HMRC to work together to tackle the way that benefits and tax credits operate. The new in and out of work processes for housing benefit and council tax benefit, which are to be phased in from December this year, are welcome and might pave the way for more joint working. The Minister will not be surprised to hear me ask about the progress of the knotty problem of service users and expenses, and whether the DWP is working with BERR to help to solve the problem; allowing disabled people to participate in helping to design services without losing their benefits if they accept expenses. While on the subject of benefits, the incapacity benefit system is now a nightmare of complexity because of the slightly different permitted work rules for incapacity benefit and the new employment and support allowance rules. Even many Jobcentre Plus staff do not appear to know the difference. Could not the rules for those benefits be aligned so that everyone knows where they are? The changes in welfare benefits have been quite hard to follow in the past couple of years because of the way that policies are announced, then perhaps re-announced with a start date, then legislated on, with maybe the real start date enshrined eventually in a statutory instrument. Are we still expecting incapacity benefit claimants to be migrated on to ESA in April 2010, or will that process happen sooner? Will proper evaluations be carried out before this happens? My last question about benefits concerns the effect of housing benefit on employment prospects. I note from the White Paper that the internal housing benefit review being conducted by the DWP and the Treasury is to be extended by an external consultation next year. When will the results of that review be published? The impact of housing benefits in places where rent is high, such as London, cannot be underestimated, and for many people affects the question of whether it always pays to work. This has been a most interesting debate and I am pleased to have taken part in it. So many matters raised by other noble Lords link into each other although they often seem so disparate. I look forward to hearing the Minister's reply.