Welfare Reform Bill

I want to speak primarily to new clause 8, which stands in my name and which delves back into the arguments that we have been rehearsing for the past couple of hours on the balance between incentives and sanctions, particularly with respect to lone parents. Before I do so, however, I want to spend a few moments talking about two arguments that have emerged in the debate with which I fundamentally disagree and which need a response. The first relates to the comment with which the hon. Member for Rochdale (Paul Rowen) closed his speech—namely, that the Bill represents yesterday's agenda and that this is the wrong time for it. I fundamentally disagree with that. It is absolutely correct that we should have a new, or revised, agenda as a response to the recession. There is a desperate need to work with businesses to halt the flow of job losses, and to ensure that newly unemployed people are given a different kind of assistance to get back into work from that offered by Jobcentre Plus and other organisations. It is also essential, however, that we should not repeat the catastrophic mistakes that we made in the past, particularly in the 1980s. The recession at that time led to long-term unemployment, and the people involved were utterly abandoned. I say that with some knowledge because, in the early 1980s, I was working for an organisation that ran Manpower Services Commission employment programmes. They were an example of brutal workfare. They were deeply under-administered, and offered very little in the way of additional payment for those working on them and virtually no training. The fact that huge numbers of people could not even get on to those schemes shows how desperate the situation was. It is essential that, at every stage, we prevent those people who join the jobless queue from drifting into hopelessness for years and years, because we know that that is closely correlated with depression and with exactly the loss of skills and confidence required for job re-entry that the hon. Gentleman referred to. At this juncture, it is therefore critical that we put in place measures—about some of which I must enter caveats—to ensure that people who have been out of the labour market for some time have the means to reconnect and stay in touch with that market.