Welfare Reform Bill

My Lords, no one disputes that work is the main route out of poverty for most people. In recent years, much effort has been focused on the long-term unemployed, to get these hard cases—who may have experienced several generations of unemployment and have few, if any, role models of people in regular work from their own families—back into the job market and employability. Many of these people have multiple problems, from physical to mental health problems and addictions to drink and/or drugs. This was a reasonable thing to do when, to all intents and purposes, we were close to full employment. The question that really arises from the Bill, and was highlighted by the noble Baroness, Lady Thomas, a few moments ago, is what happens now, when jobs are not as plentiful and many people are unwillingly unemployed and, however much they may retrain, unable to find the work that they want? I have some rather alarming statistics from my own patch. The percentage of people claiming jobseeker’s allowance last year in the borough of Havant, including the Leigh Park Estate, was 2 per cent; this March it was 4 per cent. On the Isle of Wight it was 2.3 per cent; now it is 4.4 per cent. That colours my thinking on and approach to this Bill. I will raise a few generic questions and then some more specific ones before I conclude. Is a recession really the moment to introduce a stricter benefits regime, in which people have to work or train to continue to receive benefits, or "workfare" as some sardonically call it? Is the goal purely financial; that is, to reduce the cost of benefits and the rising public sector debt burden? Is it just for central government’s benefit? I hesitate to ask such a wry question, but it is an elephant in the room that needs to be given a certain capacity to roar in the gentler atmosphere of your Lordships’ debates. If the goal is not primarily financial, what are the chances of getting these people into work? Job centres are already full to overflowing with people who really want jobs. At the same time, they are empty of jobs to offer because of the recession. Then there is the perennial question, underlying all this, about whether a benefit is a condition or a right. A Bill is unlikely to resolve that. Is it reasonable, particularly at this moment in the recession, to use what appears, to at least some of us, to be punitive methods to incentivise people towards engagement and employment? I come now to some specific questions. There are concerns about the proposal to use private firms to provide employment services. It seems to some that it is taking a bit of a risk to use an organisation of such a character and level that a Government could not possibly do it. There are issues about the criteria that will be used to judge whether someone, particularly a person with disabilities, is regarded as fit and able to work and whether this judgment will be made by a qualified medical expert or a civil servant. Then there is the question of vulnerable households and the need to know their means and circumstances before their income is reduced below—or further below—poverty level. I have another specific question, which I know concerns many people, about joint birth registration. There is anxiety about men being allowed to put their names on a birth certificate without the mother’s consent in all situations, particularly in cases of alleged domestic violence. It is, on the surface, a well intentioned desire to be fair, but in practice it is, in my view, neither right nor just. I very much wanted to speak in this debate. At the moment, in my spectacular convalescence, midnight is a little late to go to bed. I hope noble Lords will not mind if I leave before the end. I conclude with two quotations. The Church of England’s response to this Bill is: ""We welcome and support the overall aim of the Welfare Reform Bill which is to help more people to find worthwhile employment and to reduce dependency on benefits"." However, there are questions and I hope that my questions and those raised by other noble Lords may lead to creative amendments. My second quotation comes from a lecture by the most reverend Primate the Archbishop of Canterbury, delivered in his native Wales in March: ""Our ethical seriousness is tested by how we behave towards those whose goodwill or influence is of no ‘use’ to us. Hence the frequently repeated claim that the moral depth of a society can be assessed by how it treats its children—or, one might add, its disabled, its elderly or its terminally ill. Ethical behaviour is behaviour that respects what is at risk in the life of another and works on behalf of the other’s need"."