Welfare Reform Bill

That is an important point. I believe that the Liberal Democrat-controlled council in Aberdeen has used individual budgets for that very reason. That should not be done with this policy, which is not about changing people's entitlement but about how they get their money and making sure that they can control it. If people are happy with the service that they are getting from the state, that is absolutely fine. However, the power should be with them so that if they are not happy, they can get the service changed or get the money themselves and use it as they can. After all, they—and not anybody else—are the experts on their own lives. The Bill takes the powers to do that on a national basis. We will test it with trail-blazing public authorities, because it is a ground-breaking piece of legislation and we need to know exactly how it will work in practice. It introduces a fundamental change, and it will ensure that disabled people have the power to achieve what they want to in life in the same way as everybody else. Thirdly, the Bill will give more control to people by helping them back into work. A decade ago, there was too little support for people to get back into work and too little expectation that they take it up. We started to put that right through the new deal and by merging the Benefits Agency and the Employment Service into Jobcentre Plus. We helped lone parents back into work, and we introduced pathways to work—the first time that people on incapacity benefit have had any help to get back into health and back into work.