Welfare Reform Bill

My Lords, with leave of the House, perhaps I may speak in this gap. I am sorry I was not present earlier. I understand that the list was curtailed and a number of noble Lords did not speak. As I was in the Library, I was unaware of that. It is reassuring to hear that the Government do not wish to create a welfare state that punishes people. I hope that sentiment underlies this Bill as it travels through the House. It is right that steps should be taken to assist people back into work and I respect the Government’s concern about the effects of long-term unemployment. Sigmund Freud said that there are two elements essential to a fulfilled life: work and love. While the Government may have problems legislating for love, Governments can do things about work—or, at least, they can help people to acquire the skills needed for work. People’s lives are blighted when there is long-term unemployment, especially where that is intergenerational. If no one in a household has known work for many years, the habits and rhythms of work are outside a whole family’s experience. The inevitability of depression and other mental illnesses, of alcoholism and drug dependency, of poor health and school performance, of the inability to establish sound social relations—or the sheer inability to structure life out of chaos—and the drift into crime, which I see so often in the courts, is utterly wretched and so damaging for us all. That is not life as it should be lived in a decent society. The solution to such problems lies in an amalgam of responses; I want to echo those who pointed out that this Bill was conceived before the full nature of the recession was understood. Many people who are losing their jobs will flood the labour market, anxious to secure new employment. They will be singularly more suitable for the prospective employer than many others who have intransigent problems, so I really hope that we invest in training. I should like to consider particularly the issue of women. First, I pay tribute to the noble Baroness, Lady Hollis, who provided us with a master class on why the new arrangements in the Bill will not work for single parents, who will remain trapped in a requirement to work that will bring no reward. It must be easy to design a fair, graduated system to allow a lone parent to build up her involvement in the world of work, as her children become older and she gains self-esteem. There are, however, two other matters relating to the single parent that concern me, particularly where she has experienced domestic violence. First, when the United States Government enacted welfare reform proposals in 1996, they specifically took the needs of women who had experienced violence into account by creating what was called a family violence option. It allowed individual states, ""to create provisions in their welfare plans to respond to the needs of victims of domestic violence with special programs and alternative services and to excuse them from the standard work or other requirements, as necessary"." I fear that the discretion given to those who work within the Jobcentre Plus scheme to grant an additional month’s exclusion from the requirement to search for work will not be enough. Can the Minister consider whether that could not be extended? Research conducted in 2008 by Gingerbread and Family Action has shown just how hard it is for women who leave a situation of domestic violence; often, they have traumatised children and are having to reconstruct their lives, having lost their self-esteem. They are going to need more than a month’s good grace. I hope, then, that this Government will introduce some specific exclusion from the requirement to seek work for those who have been forced to leave home due to domestic violence. It should be of at least three months, and I hope that the Minister will commit to it. Secondly, I am concerned about the joint registration of births because, while it is right to be enthusiastic about the idea that fathers should be on the birth certificate and take responsibility for their children, that can also be a real source of trauma to the mother in a situation with domestic violence—especially when there is a requirement to have registration immediately after birth. That is not the best time to put such stress on the shoulders of a battered woman. We are asking the Government to consider this: in the limited number of cases where a father seeks to put his name on a birth certificate and the mother raises the concern of harm to herself, or to her child, if the unmarried father really wants his name there, the burden should fall on him to pursue that application for parental responsibility via the family court, where there should be the opportunity for proper scrutiny. Those are the two matters that I raise in the brief moments allowed to me in the gap. I hope that the Government will take them seriously, for they have a very good record on dealing with the issue of domestic violence—and Ministers in this House have played an important role in reform. What we need, however, is a read-across into other ministries, and I hope that the Government will amend the Bill to meet these concerns.