Welfare Reform Bill

My Lords, I congratulate the noble Baroness, Lady Thomas, and the noble Lord, Lord Kirkwood, on opening up this area for debate. I will try to spell out the approach of these Benches to the amendment. If you visit a contractor of Welfare to Work on the ground, they will show you a wedge of paper that they have to assemble—with all the ticks in the right boxes—to be paid for finding someone a job. It is clear that we are paying large sums of money for paperwork, rather than for provision that will change people’s lives. That is what happens when we insert protections, requirements and necessary procedures. They have to be complied with; the fact that they have been completed has to be recorded; and then they have to be checked. Let me declare my hand: I hope that in this country we will soon have extensive programmes to help people with disabilities back into the workplace, and that we will have a national system which ensures that substantial sums are spent to help the very hardest-to-help back into sustained economic activity. That system will and must be based largely on payment by results. The key will be to ensure that the incentives are aligned in such a way that absolutely the right interventions are applied to get people back into the workplace. I have no doubt that many of the people involved in this effort will be highly trained, and the most successful providers seem to be moving up the quality chain in terms of personnel. There may well be a range of initiatives available; I am thinking, for instance, of the creation of an institute that will raise standards and capability in this rapidly growing industry. However, if we impose top-down training standards on those providers, we will distort the pure focus on successful work placement in favour of another paper chase. We would like to see money spent on interventions, not on filling out paper forms. While these amendments are clearly tabled with the best of intentions, I am afraid that they may prove counterproductive.