Welfare Reform Bill

I have added my name to three of these amendments. I think that it is important to add them to the Bill because of what will happen when this law is implemented. Regulations are one thing, the law is another; it will be seen as something that you cannot avoid. I have every confidence in the Minister’s good intentions and if I thought that his clones would be running the employment advice service in jobcentres I would be quite happy. Unfortunately, I know that he will not be running it and that not everyone is as well-meaning and well-intentioned as he. We have to get real about what really happens to people with mental health issues, especially serious mental disorders, and about how and why they are treated as they are. People with serious disorders do not just have fluctuating conditions that mean that sometimes they can work and sometimes they cannot; they often also have difficulties in establishing good social relationships with the people they come into contact with on a daily basis. That includes, among others, the employment advisers and others at the centre. Barriers and anxieties quickly arise and the employment adviser will find it darned difficult to get people through these systems. We have to take account of the relatively chaotic lives and fearsomely obsessional behaviour of some of the people with serious mental health problems. They can get into habits that are extremely difficult to break. They can have a pattern of daily life that makes it difficult for them to stop and do something else and to establish a new pattern. They do not have conditions like the one that Sarah-Jane has. Sarah Jane, aged 35, is mentioned in the wonderful pack that the Minister provided. I am not sure whether noble Lords have read this pack yet as it arrived only today, but it contains some good descriptions. Sarah-Jane has "a mental health condition"—but it sounds a bit like a broken leg and is getting better now. It is just not like that. Noble Lords may ask why this matter is so important as regards this clause and clauses like it. It is because we must establish a specific responsibility in the law to help people who lead chaotic and difficult lives as a result of mental health problems, and to take this matter very seriously. I know that the Minister does; I just want to make sure that everybody else out there does too.