Welfare Reform Bill

This afternoon we have heard much about ballots and those Members of the Committee who have been here most of the time—I apologise to the Committee for not being able to include myself in their number—will appreciate that in the Bill a balance has to be struck and even an occasional participant like myself becomes quickly aware of that underlying all the debates on the Bill. That balance revolves around the fact that the longer an individual is out of work the more difficult it becomes for them to return to work. The Bill seeks to address that essential feature. In that context, we must be certain that any exclusions to the proposals in Clause 2—the progression-to-work group—on which we settle do not end up with a financial and psychological downside to the entire family. Those thoughts bring me to Amendment 74, in the name of my noble friend Lord Lucas. It seeks to exclude parents—I am not sure whether it is one or both—from the progression-to-work group on the basis that they are educating their children at home, perhaps because the latter are subject to school exclusion or have been bullied at school and have subsequently been withdrawn or simply because the parents believe that their children will be better educated if that education were conducted at home rather than in a conventional school setting. I have to confess that a department of state which I have had nothing to do with in my relatively short time in this House is the Department of Education and Science as it used to be called, or in the modern idiom the Department for Children, Schools and Families. My noble friend Lord Lucas should not feel unnerved by finding himself drifting, to quote his words, into this Bill and this Committee. As the noble Lord, Lord Northbourne, and the noble Baroness, Lady Thomas, have said, his interest is an important one for the Committee to consider. I support the view that parents should have the right to support and educate their children as they feel fit, subject of course to the necessary safeguards. However, as well as an education, I believe that a child will benefit from being exposed to an environment in which there are working adults in the family or at least adults progressing to work. Of course, that must be a judgment but I know where my opinion sits. While I would not deny the right of parents to educate their children as they want, it would be wrong for taxpayers to finance, admittedly at a fairly low level of income, the living of a family who chose to educate their children at home. The likely response of my noble friend to this matter is that by educating the children at home they are saving taxpayers’ money. In the short term that is undoubtedly correct but I ask my noble friend to think of the longer term as it applies to the children and to their parents after what may well be 11 years out of the workplace. How likely are those parents to get into work? Will taxpayers have to support them through the rest of their lives? What effect will that have on the children? How likely are they to end up in the world of work? No doubt the Minister will give us some statistics, if she has them, of the propensity of that. I shall await her response with interest.