Welfare Reform Bill

For the reasons that my hon. Friend the Member for Regent's Park and Kensington, North suggested. There may well be significant barriers, in terms of child care provision, for someone with a child considerably older than three, six or seven, and the personalised and tailored support package will take full account of that. All we are saying is that those lone parent obligations start at the earlier age. If the barriers still prevail, the sanctions and direction will not be implemented. In that sense, age is a red herring. In the context of all that we are trying to do to reduce child poverty, it must be right that the lone parent obligations prevail. A child in a household where no adult is working has a 63 per cent. risk of living in poverty. That is much higher than the 29 per cent. risk of poverty for children in households where at least one adult is in work. This is not about compelling lone parents into jobs that are not appropriate. Like every aspect of the welfare reform agenda, the Bill's provisions are about helping people back into work as quickly as possible, or giving them help, support and activity to enable them to stay as close to the labour market as possible. I recognise that I have not touched on every amendment, and there is one more that I shall deal with, but it would detain the House too long if I went through every amendment. I will take back the detailed points made by my hon. Friend the Member for Bradford, North about clauses 4 and 11. I shall examine them closely to see if they are as he describes them, but I do not think they are. We say clearly, as we have done for the period of the present economic downturn, that all that Jobcentre Plus does is in the right direction. It is a network staffed by professional people doing a very good job at all times, increasingly in more difficult circumstances. As I have described it before, it is a learning organisation; it learns from the 30-year employee who presents for the first time, as we heard, and from those from professions and sectors who have not presented before. We are told that we are privatising parts of the Jobcentre Plus organisation, but we are not. Contracting out—delegating out those contracts—is not the same as privatisation. Those contracts are going to the voluntary sector and the private sector to get them to carry out specific parts of the operation, to cover the journey of people who are long-term unemployed—areas in which they can develop expertise while Jobcentre Plus does what it does best on the front line, helping people from day one all the way through and retaining overarching supervision of the pathways developed under flexible new deal. Some of the descriptions of what Jobcentre Plus does verged on travesty.