Welfare Reform Bill

It is a pleasure to follow my hon. Friend the Member for Glasgow, South-West (Mr. Davidson). He will not be surprised to hear that I do not agree with everything he said, but as so often, he highlighted some of the central issues in the debate, as well as some of the groups that are in most in need of support by the Government at this time. The Secretary of State said in his opening remarks that the Bill was about transparency. As with other pieces of welfare legislation, one problem is that many of the steps that will be taken are not actually built into the Bill; we often find that they come later by way of regulation. One of the risks with such enabling legislation is that Governments of a different political persuasion will also be able to bring in regulations through the same mechanism at a later date, which Parliament would not be willing to vote for now. The Bill is of great significance to my constituency and, I believe, many other constituencies like it. I represent an area that has not really recovered from 18 years of Tory rule, as we have some of the highest levels of unemployment in Scotland. Over the 20 years of Tory power, we saw large industry after industry closed. There used to be an ICI plant in my constituency that employed 17,000 people in the 1980s, yet by Easter this year only 200 will be working there. There used to be steelworks employing thousands of people in my constituency and that of my hon. Friend the Member for Ayr, Carrick and Cumnock (Sandra Osborne). When I was at school, 10,000 people worked at the Killick pit in south Ayrshire: those jobs have gone and in their place we have had only small industries and service sector employment. Despite significant increases in employment in my area since 1997—more than 25 per cent. more people are in employment now than they were then; even since 2003, more than 1,000 more jobs are available in my constituency, despite some quite worrying employment figures over the course of last week—we face the difficulty that employability and skills are a major problem. The proposals that hon. Members have spoken about today are absolutely vital in constituencies such as mine. I have to say that the sentiments and words used by so many hon. Members about the kind of support they believe should be provided to those who need to get back to work are exactly the sort of initiatives that we need. Many such initiatives have borne real fruit over the last 10 years. When my constituents go into their Jobcentre Plus office, they tell me that the experience they receive and feel is not such a positive one—and I find it difficult to believe that it will be much different in other parts of the country. It is a difficult time for them, not necessarily through any fault of Jobcentre Plus staff, as they do not necessarily have the resources they need to provide the personalised assistance that so many Members have spoken about. We have to incorporate that aspect into our debate and be real about the situation we face and the kind of people we are dealing with. It was interesting to note that some of the comments made by my hon. Friend the Member for Glasgow, South-West took us back to debates that some of us hoped had been left behind many decades ago—the concept of the deserving poor, for example. The whole idea of the welfare state and the benefits system was that it should provide a safety net, and it has done that. I do not accept the notion that the safety net has simply been a trap for people. I believe that it has been a liberation for millions of people, particularly women who, for the first time ever, have been given financial independence. We should emphasise that regularly, and not allow the welfare state to be talked down. Because time is short, I shall confine myself to three aspects of the Bill. The first is the ““working for your benefits”” scheme, which is linked to the general question of whether the purpose of benefits is to provide an absolute minimum to ensure that people do not live in squalor and poverty. I think it important for us to restate our belief that that is essential, that it is not acceptable for us to throw people on to the scrap heap even if they have not behaved in a particularly deserving or responsible way, and that it is unacceptable for society as a whole not to take collective responsibility for every member of society. Some of the concerns about the language in certain parts of the Bill, and about regulations that may result from it, relate to when sanctions will be used. Particular concern has been expressed about those with responsibility for young children. I consider it unacceptable for sanctions to be imposed on the parents of younger children who are unable to carry out the work-related activity proposed in the Bill. The only effect would be an increase in poverty among both women and children. Given the huge amount of work that the Government have done in trying to meet our child poverty targets, that would be a step backwards. The fact is that not every member of society is as able to cope as others. Society contains many vulnerable people with chaotic lives, and we need a benefits system on which they can rely. Another issue that has been raised is that of lone parents. There are 1.9 million single parents in the country, but they cannot all be lumped together. They are very different types of people who just happen to be single parents, and they should all be treated equally and fairly. Society owes it to them to support them in the work they are doing in bringing up children. I shall raise only one more issue, given the shortage of time: the privatisation of the public sector and the welfare state and, in particular, the externalisation of providers of the social fund, which is an emergency provision used by many people in great difficulty. We ought to question whether it is appropriate for loans of that nature to the poorest members of society to be handled by companies seeking to profit from such work. There is a risk that, given the nature of those companies, they will go about the process, particularly the process of recovering the moneys, in a very heavy-handed manner. There is real concern about that proposal, and I ask Ministers to consider it again over the coming weeks. Those who work in Jobcentre Plus have had a huge amount of training and are well aware of the needs of the most vulnerable people, and I believe that to take their work away from them and put it in the hands of private contractors would be to take a huge risk.