Welfare Reform Bill

I start what I am afraid will be fairly protracted proceedings in Grand Committee with an amendment that I confess is deliberately somewhat loosely drafted. I wish to use the opportunities afforded by debating the Bill in Grand Committee to allow your Lordships to have a wide-ranging discussion on the issue. The Minister has no doubt been briefed by his department that one reason to reject this amendment is because it is, in the favoured term of parliamentary draftsmen, "technically deficient". He should not worry overly about that. When we return to this part of the Bill on Report, I will likely have tabled slightly altered amendments. That, of course, depends very much on how he replies to my questioning. The real targets of this exclusionary amendment are Clauses 1 and 2. I seek to exclude single parents with children under school age from requirements to take part in "work for your benefit" schemes and work-related activity. I hope that I may count on a certain amount of support from other noble Lords across the Committee—I know that I have it from outside groups such as Gingerbread, which has been able to provide me with plenty of real-life stories, and Z2K. My amendment would place a clear ne plus ultra line on the creeping revision of the relevant age of one’s children for welfare purposes. Until last year, it was possible for a single parent to remain on income support until the youngest child reached the age of 16. However, in June 2007, the Government announced that they were moving lone parents from income support to jobseeker’s allowance in stages. That process began last year, when the age limit for single parents to remain on income support was reduced to the youngest child reaching the age of 12. The process of transferring lone parents from income support to jobseeker’s allowance is proceeding apace. The age of children at which lone parents are transferred to jobseeker’s allowance will fall to seven in October 2010. Lone parents with children under the age of seven will not be expected to move from income support to jobseeker’s allowance, as is the case for lone parents of children over the age of seven. However, under the Government’s plans, they will be expected to fulfil the requirements set out in Clause 1. My understanding from the compendious Peers’ information pack, for which I am grateful, is that the Government propose that lone parents are to be part of the progression-to-work group from the time that their youngest child is aged one year. The Government have set out how they see that group in their discussion paper on the implementation of the Gregg review. According to their response to that review, lone parents with children aged between one and two years will be: ""Required to attend Work Focused Interviews and agree an action plan. They are not mandated to undertake any activities recorded on the action plan"." Paragraphs 103, 107 and 108 of the Peers’ information pack, however, say something that is rather different and, to me, confusing. Paragraph 103 makes it clear that there will be no conditionality applied to lone parents with children under one year old. The fact that this paragraph precedes the other two that I have mentioned must mean that there is a requirement to attend an initial interview in the child’s first year of life. Indeed, paragraph 107 cements this conclusion by stating: ""It is intended that those groups"—" that is, the preparation-for-work groups— ""would include lone parents with children under 1"." But there is an anomaly here. Paragraph 108, which covers paragraph 3 of Schedule 1, says that: ""In the pathfinder areas groups such as lone parents who have a child under 1 will no longer be required to undergo work focused interviews"." What exactly is the proposal? Is the child to be under one, under two or under three? Whichever, I find it hard to accept that any of those is an appropriate age. What effect do the Government believe that that will have on the subsequent development of the child? I return to the Bill. The intention is that when the youngest child reaches the age of three, lone parents will be: ""Required to follow the full progression to Work regime based around Work Focused interviews, action plans, work related activity and the backstop of adviser direction"." I presume that that means that lone parents with children over three will be subject to the regime of sanctions for failing to comply with the requirements in the Bill. Am I wrong in that presumption? Will it be over two or over one, even? My amendment would substitute the age of three with school age as the point at which the proposed regime and all its requirements would begin. I expect that that would translate to five years of age in the large majority of cases. That age was not plucked out of the air; it was specified in the Government’s July 2008 Green Paper as the appropriate age at which requirements could begin to be made on lone parents. The Green Paper envisaged piloting a requirement for lone parents whose youngest child was five or six to attend relevant skills training where that would address the skills gaps identified as a barrier to starting work. As I said, the amendment is designed to stimulate a debate on the appropriate age of a child for placing certain conditions on his parent. When we come to Report, I intend to return to the issue, and it is likely that I will draft an amendment then to reflect the age of five more precisely. The question at the heart of this is what approach we should be striking towards those lone parents with young children. We can all agree that it is desirable—indeed, necessary—to guide the unemployed back into work. However, where very young children are involved there will be a cost in terms of the bond developed, especially as we are talking about the bond between often—perhaps invariably—young mothers and their infants being disrupted or prevented. If we who are legislating on these matters are prepared to legislate for sanctions to be imposed on those who do not comply with the requirements we set out for them, we must be careful not to do more harm than good. The Conservative Party believes that it is inappropriate to allow advisers the power to direct parents of pre-school and young children to take part in any activity the adviser feels will move them towards work. I understand that recent research for the Department for Work and Pensions looked over three years at the experiences of working single parents who had moved into paid employment voluntarily. That resulted in DWP research report 536, Work and Well-being Over Time: Lone Mothers and Their Children. Those single parents and their children believed that, as the report says, ""lone mothers could and should work but that this was a personal choice which depended on individual circumstances and mothers should not be compelled to work"." As well as being necessarily paternalistic, by directing people back to work we should also be realistic. If parents feel that they are required to do something that compromises the welfare of their child, they are more likely to resist those requirements. I note that the noble Lord, Lord Northbourne, has amendments later on in the Marshalled List. Perhaps it is pertinent to mention now his question on 21 May—it was, ""does the Minister agree that the quality of the relationship and attachment between a mother and her child in the first few years of that child’s life is crucial in the way in which the child develops?"." In response, the noble Baroness, Lady Thornton, replying on behalf of the Government, said, ""the noble Lord is absolutely correct. I pay tribute to the huge amount of work that he has done in your Lordships' House to support parents and parenthood. He is absolutely right: we"—" the Government— ""recognise the importance of supporting parents in the early years of a child’s life".—[Official Report, 21/5/09; col. 1428.]" That is a government view that I, and I hope all of us, commend, but I am far from certain that it fits comfortably with the threat of placing sanctions on parents who feel that they are being wrenched away from their very young children. The burdens on parents of young children are already great without the threat of sanctions. The Zacchaeus 2000 Trust has raised the worry of the mental strain becoming too much and of young mothers developing mental health problems which, to say the least, will not go any way to alleviating the poverty of welfare-dependent families. I should not need to repeat this as I feel that we have made it abundantly clear at so many stages, but I reiterate the support of my party for the principles in the Bill. By tabling an exclusionary clause in my first amendment, I am not undermining any of those principles: I am establishing a clear principle in support of single parents—one that will help their children, help them to find work at an appropriate time and ultimately reduce poverty. I beg to move.