Welfare Reform Bill

I shall speak also to Amendments 75B and 76A. Over the past two weeks, thanks to the Minister’s responses to the multitudinous questions asked by Members of this Committee, we have discovered quite a lot about the proposed system for moving people on JSA closer to the workplace. Most of your Lordships’ concerns have centred, although not exclusively, on the transfer of single parents from income support when their children are less than seven years old. As I have understood the proposals up to now, when the child is only one year old, the parent is summoned to interview. I had not appreciated until last Thursday that it could be a group interview and not a one-to-one with a personal adviser. Will those group interviews, illustrated by part of the letter that I read out when moving Amendment 57 in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Meacher, be the normal way of interviewing those single parents in the first instance? How this initial interview is conducted is of vital importance to the future conduct of the relationship between Jobcentre Plus and the single mother, not least because the individual circumstances of one parent in the group will differ from another. Does the Minister agree that a group interview simply cannot achieve that? Having said that, I am grateful to the Minister’s advisers’ rapid response to my moving of the amendment proposed by the noble Baroness, Lady Meacher, last week. The response explains that a group information session is not a work-focused interview. A one-to-one work-focused interview will usually follow a group information session and it is the only mandatory aspect. However, the customer can decline the offer of a group information session without having to give a reason. In such instances a separate one-to-one work-focused interview will be arranged, usually in the jobcentre. I hope that that is well understood. It certainly was not by the person whose letter I partly read out. Therefore, it is a failure of information between Jobcentre Plus and the people who are called in the first instance to these group interviews. Secondly, unless and until an individualised action plan—incidentally, I heard the Minister talking about "individualised" several times, so I have hope for the amendment that I moved on that subject some while ago—is agreed with the parent, which is not until the child is three years old, the only requirement on the parent is to turn up on a regular basis to the one-to-one interviews. At one point we heard that this is to be every three months. The illustrative examples—Panglossian, as the noble Baroness, Lady Thomas, called them—tend to confirm that. In the circumstances, three months seems to be rather a short period. If she—it is usually she—fails to go to the interview without good cause on the day and at the time it is to happen, she risks losing part of her benefit. If she persists she loses more and more and ultimately can lose it altogether for six months. This group of amendments, therefore, is to discover why the Government have decided that interviews at an age when the parent is still in constant care of the child are deemed so necessary. The point is particularly valid as the parent does not have to do anything except turn up for interviews. In view of that, what is the benefit of these repeated interviews? Paragraph 260 of the notes on clauses implies that the reason for these repeated interviews is that they are the condition on which benefits continue to be paid. Are these interviews really the only way that these conditions can be met? It strikes me as a very time-consuming and expensive way of going about it. If the Minister is about to say that that is the system established under the Jobseekers Act 1995 and the Government do not want to change it, perhaps I may gently remind him that we are dealing with a completely new set of affairs which was not even an idea in the mind of God when the 1995 Act was being drafted. What we need to look at is the effect of these provisions on today’s clientele—in this case, single parents. Amendment 75B is intended to probe why paragraph 267, which lists the relevant benefits to which new Section 11B refers, includes incapacity benefit but not employment and support allowance, which is slowly replacing it. Incidentally, it would be helpful if the Minister would tell us when it is now intended that migration from income support to ESA should begin. New claimants have of course been on it for some months now. Amendment 76A, which I am afraid was an afterthought, refers to paragraph 23(3) of Schedule 1. Notes on clauses say that this "is intended" to amend the provision which allows people to continue to receive JSA temporarily without being available for work, having entered into a jobseeker’s agreement or being available for work. This intention is clearly needed when you migrate single parents with very young children from income support to JSA. I assume that it is also foreshadowing one of the groups which is to remain on income support and which will be transferred much later—those involved in court proceedings lasting longer than eight weeks. Clearly, the intention is good, but the question arises about whether it is met by new paragraph 8 of existing Schedule 1 to the Jobseekers Act 1995, which refers only to regulations being made which may—not shall—prescribe circumstances when a person does not need to fill the normal actively seeking work conditions and so on. That is particularly important when we consider Amendment 80, which concerns those groups that will remain on income support for a period after the Bill is enacted, which are many more than those involved in the court proceedings I was talking about just now. I beg to move.