Welfare Reform Bill

My Lords, perhaps I may make a short intervention and concur with my noble friend. However, I take a different view of the criticism. This clause is completely unnecessary. I am puzzled as to why Ministers have allowed a department to bring this potential cancellation of a benefit in the indeterminate future without any more justification than anything I have heard to date. Income support is a fundamental benefit. I was around when the then Mr Norman Fowler, now the distinguished noble Lord, Lord Fowler, spent 18 months arguing in the run-up to producing a Green Paper to get the Social Security Act 1986, which introduced income support, on the statute book. It was an absolutely textbook example of what public consultation should be. The fact that I was totally opposed to everything that was being done at the time is incidental to my argument. However, whatever view you took, you could not possibly be in any doubt about what was happening when we moved from supplementary benefit to income support. We have a back-to-work White Paper in gestation, which is about to be published. In my experience, a White Paper normally leads to a Bill being published shortly thereafter, based on the contents of the White Paper. And here we go: although we do not know when, we might abolish income support. It is a dangerous precedent for this House to accept willy-nilly from the department, at the hands of Ministers, benefits of this significance being abolished on an affirmative order and then have the additional difficulty of putting all these welcome assurances. Assurances go some way to dealing with the incoming fire from people who are certainly disconcerted by any such prospect of this benefit being abolished. The whole thing is an otiose contrivance. It sets a very bad parliamentary precedent. If Ministers start bringing forward benefits that they might think about abolishing in the future, we will continue to reject the clauses that purport to do any such thing. Income support is part of the new Labour Government’s policy about work for those who can and the vast majority of this Bill is about that. Equally important is that it is supposed to underscore support for those who cannot work, and income support does that. It will continue to do that for hundreds of thousands, or at least thousands, of our citizens into the indeterminate future and certainly long past the next election. Yet the House is being asked to abolish a benefit on an affirmative order at some future point. It is bad practice and wholly wrong, and it is not making good use of Parliament. I think the House should reject it. I can see no purpose whatever for the clause because it is just causing trouble. I welcome the assurances we have had because they will alleviate some of the anxiety, but this is rank bad practice.