Welfare Reform Bill

I, too, would like to thank my hon. Friend the Member for Glasgow, North-West (John Robertson) for tabling new clauses 4 and 10. I pay tribute to the hon. Member for Bournemouth, West (Sir John Butterfill). I remember him inviting me to the first lobby in Westminster Hall and his being somewhat surprised that, as the Minister, I actually turned up. We got through that together. He has been tenacious in pursing the issue, as have many of my colleagues, in all parts of the House. Like the hon. Member for Northavon (Steve Webb), I was somewhat flummoxed, surprised and disappointed by the comments of the official Opposition this evening. The equivocation was unnecessary. They have to learn to make the leap from principle to reality. It would not have cost them anything to make that leap this evening. The case for widening the definition of mobility to refer to those who have no sight has been unanswerable. The exclusion of those who are totally blind from the higher rate of DLA was an anomaly that, as my hon. Friend the Member for Glasgow, North-West said, was not sustainable. I hope that the painstaking work undertaken by RNIB and DWP officials will pay dividends this evening. Like others, I want to pay a special tribute to the RNIB, which has headed the campaign. Its campaign was measured and relevant and was sustained over a long period. I should never have been surprised at some of the inventive ways in which the RNIB encouraged us to understand its exact case. Those of us who were at the Labour party conference in Scotland last week went through a maze. Perhaps the Liberal party had already gone through that maze.