Welfare Reform Bill

I am grateful to all noble Lords, including the Minister, who have spoken in this exploratory debate. I said "including the Minister", because she started off by applauding the amendment and then knocked it flat on three grounds. Such is politics. I was grateful to the noble Baroness, Lady Thomas, who pointed out that far too few employers understand the needs of people, even when they want minor changes to activities in the workplace. Pace the noble Baroness, Lady Hollis, these may be physical changes—a slight adaptation to a piece of machinery, or whatever—or more psychological changes, such as working practices. The noble Baroness, Lady Thomas, spoke in particular of bipolar disorder and schizophrenia sufferers. I referred on the first or second day in Committee—my memory fails me—to a correspondent who had a compulsive hand-washing bipolar effect. I am very conscious of that, and I am sure that we will go back to it. Incidentally, I have a feeling that I gave that letter to the Minister, and have not yet had a response to it, but I suppose that it is in the pipeline somewhere. Clearly, the system must help people to find work. That is what the entire Bill is about. In a nutshell, it is about helping people to help themselves to end up in employment. The noble Lord, Lord Ramsbotham, an adviser to the Sainsbury group, talked about the opposite of joined-up government, and I could not agree with him more. It just so happens that, as he mentioned, we have three, if not four, Bills going through at the same time. However, it can often be over a matter of several years. Individual noble Lords with particular interests have to look at each particular one to try and get some sort of similarity across the board, which the Government seem totally incapable of doing for themselves. That is a great shame. He was talking about what happened on the ground and joined-up local policies, although he did not quite put it like that. The situations can be quite different. As I am sure he will admit, it is very much a postcode lottery. However, he is right to mention an ideal situation in a particular part of the country. The noble Baroness, Lady Meacher, made much the same sort of point. As I said, the Minister talked about it being a laudable amendment, and then said that everyone should be assessed and that the matter was already covered. Yes, if I had stopped at "assessment" in the fourth line and left out the rest, she would have had no complaint whatsoever. The thing that really worries her is the rear end of subsection (1) in the proposed new clause, which states that, ""this assessment must be carried out before the claimant may be compelled to undertake any compulsory work-related activity"." On reflection, she is right; that is not the moment when the assessment is needed. However, an assessment is needed when the individuals we are talking about are close to the workplace, because they do not carry a potential pot of money—the dowry of the noble Baroness, Lady Hollis—with them when they apply for jobs. That is the real basis of the amendment. I take the points of all noble Lords who have spoken. I will certainly come back to the matter again in a different formulation once I have taken advice on what it would be. It is clear that there is something rotten in the state of Denmark. With those words, I beg leave to withdraw the amendment. Amendment 94 withdrawn.