Welfare Reform Bill

This is a difficult argument. Giving people the same intensive support at the start of a claim that they get further down the track would probably treble the cost of Jobcentre Plus. I forget the exact figures, but about two thirds of claimants get a job within the first three months of unemployment. Most of them will get a job whatever the Government do, but the skill lies in identifying at the start of a claim those who will take a long time to find work. I use the word "skill", but it is obvious that ex-offenders, people with drug or alcohol abuse problems and repeat claimants will take a long time to find work. Lots of people could be identified much earlier, but the Bill proposes a facility to accelerate access to the additional help that comes after six months so that people can get it right from the start of their claim. It is the skill of Jobcentre Plus staff to identify those for whom that acceleration would be appropriate. Personal advisers have been around for only about 10 years, but they are the linchpins of the system—the system works only thanks to their numbers and quality. Jobcentre Plus does what it does better than any employment service organisation in the world. In Australia, for example, the employment service was effectively privatised but it cannot have been very good because it went bankrupt and went bust inside two years. Most people in this Chamber will never experience unemployment—although there might be a problem for some of us next year, but we will deal with that—so we do not have personal knowledge of how things have changed. Jobcentres now are vastly different from what they were 10, 15 or 20 years ago. The idea that people should be given support and help to get them back into work is only about 15 years old. Such things never used to happen. This will be the only compliment that I shall to pay to those on the Liberal Benches, but this year is the centenary of the Labour Exchanges Act 1909. The original labour exchanges that it introduced literally used to exchange labour for a job, but anyone in 1909 who suggested giving unemployed people a personal adviser would have been laughed out of court. We have moved on from that. I think that it was the hon. Member for Henley (John Howell) who spoke about the "welfare reform failure" of the past 10 years. My goodness! He should have seen what conditions were like in the previous 20 years. The things that have happened over the past 10 years—and the development of Jobcentre Plus is not the least of them—represent a massive step forward. People who sadly lose their job and experience unemployment are amazed at the quality of provision that they get.