Welfare Reform Bill

I support the amendment. My noble friend Lady Thomas is right that her "personally tailored" and subsequent amendments might sound the same in the context of the earlier debate, but they are fundamentally different. Clause 2 is a different place altogether from Clause 1. I said on the first day of Committee that it is difficult from looking at the Bill to get hold of the Government’s strategic policy regarding welfare reform. The way it is contrived makes it hard to understand what the big picture is. Clause 2(1) refers to a person who is entitled to income support. Imposing on them a requirement to undertake work-related activity is a huge change and runs against everything that we have ever understood about income support, means-tested benefits and issues of that kind. If this is a transitionary measure to a single working-age benefit, as set out in the Green Paper and again in the report that Professor Gregg has produced, then it is important that we understand that. However, I am not sure that it is; as I have said before, the Bill is a mess. I would understand it better—I would have a better handle on the journey that is being taken—if we could get a reassurance that in the long run we are aiming for a single working-age benefit. There are some politics around this. The current environment is pretty uncertain: we are facing a general election and we have had nine Secretaries of State leading the department since 1997, and I can list them. That is my pub trivia quiz question; I know them all in the order in which they served because I have watched them all come, stay for 15 months and go. I have nothing against the current Secretary of State, but I will be surprised if she gets more than 15 months. You need to think about that only for a moment when you look at the scale of the department and the importance of the services that it provides. I referred earlier to the answers to the staff attitude questions. I agree with the response to my question to the Minister—that the staff are all very high quality—but I find that they feel they are missing leadership from the department when I go around these Jobcentre Plus offices, which, I agree, are much improved. We are dealing with important amendments that seek to exempt people from the new system. I understand why we are doing that, because it may be necessary, but if we were able to have what would be almost a philosophical discussion about where we are trying to go with this, some of us would be more reassured. That is why the provision of "personalised tailored work" sought in the amendment and in the consequential amendments in the group is so important not just to Clause 2 but also to the general direction of travel. For example, carers should be taken out of the benefit system altogether. They should be put somewhere different and financed separately. It is amazingly confusing to the welfare-to-work agenda to try to deal with carers as well. Carers are on income support, but in Clause 7 we have to deal with abolition, which cannot be done yet because carers are entitled to it. We will come to the Government’s position on carers later, and it is important that we work out where that will leave us in terms of welfare-to-work and other areas of the department’s work. It is obviously being led by the Department of Health, so we will wait to see what that brings. Professor Gregg said in Recommendations 53 and 54 of his review that carers should be dealt with outside the benefit system. If that were the case, a lot of us would be reassured about the circumstances that some people are facing. I will not rehash the arguments over the question of re-ownership, because we dealt with it in Clause 1. It is an integral part of what claimants should expect as they come into the new system. The so-called "black box" flexibilities that are now available to great advantage in terms of the contracting-out details for suppliers such as the Wise Group mean that these organisations now have much more discretion when dealing with claimants. I have seen it work where people are invited to come in and are worked into progression-to-work groups with no job-seeking duties. If people were dealt with on the basis of where they are and not on what benefit they are on, the age of their children or what condition they might have, we would have set up a much better system in the long run. The Government say that there is no tool to do that but I do not believe it. The Dutch have been doing it for some years with great skill, and we have expertise building up in the department that would enable us to do it as well. Distance from the labour market is the only test that matters. If people knew that they had co-ownership of the journey to get back into work, they would be a lot more confident about getting into the system in the first place. That is my general position. The Government are missing a trick because of the confusion about whether this is an end in itself or part of a journey to a completely different place with a single working-age benefit. We need to be clear about that because we are not clear at the moment. Personalisation is important and so access to personal advisers is important. It should be much more of an on-demand service at some stages of the journey back into work than it is now. We should stop talking about sanctions because people do not understand what they mean. Professor Gregg talks about fines, but what do we mean by that? Are we fining people for not complying? Financial penalties are a last resort. They are dire and, when applied, can have one of two effects. People wake up and realise that they are doing something wrong, often because they did not understand that they were doing so. If they leave work without due cause, they do not realise that it has a benefit penalty attached to it, so we need to get better at communicating. Alternatively, financial penalties for people who are acting in good faith are disastrous. The Gregg review talks about the urgent need for a review of the whole sanctions, financial penalties and fines apparatus. It is not working at the moment, and I have no reason to believe that, if it is not doing so now and there are no plans to change it, it is going to get any better. We need to understand that in terms of the personalised support being introduced in the Bill. My plea is that the Government need to be much clearer. We should remember that this Government may not implement this legislation; my noble friend Lady Thomas might be the future Secretary of State for Work and Pensions and introduce provisions that one might not expect. We have to bear that in mind, I submit.