Welfare Reform Bill

I am not quite as quick as some Members of the Committee at finding bits of Bills, I have to confess, but the schedule says: ""Regulations may make provision for or in connection with imposing on a person who … is subject to a requirement imposed under paragraph 2, and … fails to comply with it"—" which we all know about— ""without it being shown, within a prescribed period, that the person had good cause for the failure … a requirement to take part in one or more relevant tests for the purpose of ascertaining whether there is or has been any drug in the person’s body"." That does not say that the jobcentre is going to do this, but perhaps this is not the time to go into an argument on a specific. I am sure that the Minister will be able to settle it anyway. However, the noble Baroness has a point. I was saying that the method that the Government have chosen is to put responsibility into the hands of Jobcentre Plus staff. They will be moved to the front line of rescuing drug addicts from the depredations of dependency and will be responsible for setting them on the path back to work. That sounds like a tall order. The noble Baroness, Lady Meacher, and the rest of the Committee are quite right to raise these concerns with the Minister. We come back to the vexed question of training. Jobcentre Plus staff are to be expected to recognise symptoms, diagnose addiction and prescribe the right course of action to take. Indeed, they will need to do more than that. They will need to be able to identify a person’s "propensity", as the Bill says, to misuse drugs. How will they do that? The noble Baroness, Lady Meacher, referred to the suggestion that was provided in another place by Ann McKechin when this clause was debated there. She said that staff will be "provided with guidance". Wow. Gosh. How impressive. That is very interesting. Perhaps the Minister might be able to expand on what sort of guidance will be offered. Will it be on top of the three days of training provided to staff to equip them for everything else, or will it be written guidance with a checklist that staff may use to cross off the symptoms that they see and therefore enable them to make a diagnosis? A neo-Atos, perhaps. In either case, or should there be a different suggestion, will that be adequate? That is the basis of the problem that the Committee faces. I know from my experience as a Minister in Northern Ireland that jobcentre staff are a committed lot and have exposure to and experience of dealing with what one might call the full range of the human condition. I do not doubt that many, if not the majority, have plenty of personal experience of dealing with claimants who have problems with drugs. I am not, therefore, suggesting in my innocence that jobcentre staff do not know what they are doing. However, I fear that too many responsibilities are being placed on the shoulders of too few people. The issue of training is therefore crucial. We have not heard a detailed enough plan from the Government to provide it. I will be very interested in joining in any meeting that members of the Committee have with the Minister and/or officials to discuss exactly what training is being designed and whether it is practical—or perhaps I should say practicable.