Welfare Reform Bill

The noble Baroness, Lady Thomas, has made her case for a claimants’ charter. I was glad that she noted the importance of a claimant’s duties as well as their rights. Charters serve to provide a framework against which providers and clients are able to transact their business and can strengthen the relationship of both. Duties as well as rights are important, as my noble friend Lord Skelmersdale pointed out in the debate on sanctions. It is a sort of two-way street. The concept of welfare needs to change so that the idea of money for nothing is abandoned. My noble friend mentioned this a short time ago when he said that committing a benefit offence needed to be punished with a benefit sanction. It seems to those of us on these Benches that especially, although not exclusively, at times like this when public finances are stretched to the limit—if I can use that understatement—every last million must be spent wisely. That is why we support the progression-to-work principle. It targets welfare spending in a constructive way and helps people into the workplace. We have made clear that the state must also honour its obligations. We proposed, for example, repaying wrongly confiscated benefits in a lump sum to right the wrong. So I am at one with the noble Baroness when we consider welfare schemes as having reciprocal obligations. I am less certain that the charter is the right way to go about achieving the goal of reciprocity. Is there not a risk that once written down in one document the rights become immutable and inflexible? Would it not be better to tailor advice to individuals in their action plans so that they know what is expected of them, what they will receive and what they must do in return, rather than create a holy text of fixed rights? There must be a dynamic to any relationship between client and provider. I will be interested to hear what the Minister has to say in response to all this in the light of announcements made by the Government in the past few days. The Building Britain’s Future document—some unkind critics have dubbed it the Labour Party’s next manifesto rather than a national government plan—apparently promises among other things, under the eye-catching headline "Take a job or lose your benefit", the guarantee that young people will find a government-created job and, if they refuse it, will face having their benefit docked. That sounds rather like raising expectations. I hope that the Government are able to fulfil them. I wonder whether such a charter as envisaged by the noble Baroness would cope with the expectations raised by this Government in the light of an alarming report in the Telegraph this morning. It said that the Local Government Association estimates that in the first quarter of this year we are on course to have some 935,000 young people classified as NEETs, which is up from 810,000 in the same period last year. With a claimants’ charter in place, this Government might find themselves facing a very large number of complaints.