Jobseeker’s Allowance (Work for your Benefit Pilot Scheme) Regulations 2010

My Lords, I thank the Minister for introducing these regulations, which we welcome. The merits and pitfalls of a Work for your Benefit scheme were closely scrutinised in this House when the Welfare Reform Act 2009 went through. Indeed, we spent many days on this matter assessing the potential unintended consequences it could have on the most vulnerable recipients of benefits. At the end of that process, we had a much clearer idea of the detail of who this scheme is intended to help, what safeguards there are to stop it requiring impossible steps and the help it would provide to those participating. That help is desperately required. There are still 1.5 million people claiming jobseeker’s allowance, and even worse, a record 8,160,000 economically inactive people. The Government like to come up with all sorts of productive activities that a person no longer claiming unemployment might be doing, but with employment levels at the lowest they have been for 16 years, it is clear that those people are not getting back into work, and with the already hugely oversubscribed higher education sector facing £1 billion of cuts over the next three years, I doubt very much that all those economically inactive people are improving their chances via further education. This scheme provides another stage at the end of the Flexible New Deal and provides another route for a recipient for whom the system has already been proven to have failed. With fewer than one in four people in 2009 leaving Labour's New Deal to find a job, we welcome this scheme as a route to engaging a recipient with workplace activity. As such, I could wish that the Government had found a way to roll out this scheme on a faster timetable than is currently their intention. As noble Lords know, consultation on these proposals was carried out nearly two years ago, and yet the vast majority of those who will benefit from this scheme will not have this option available to them for more than four years. The Explanatory Memorandum makes it clear that interim evidence will not be published until the summer of 2011 and that the full evaluation will not come out until late 2013 or, possibly, early 2014. Of course, it is valuable to discover how well Work for your Benefit will perform in this country, but the considerable time that the Government have insisted on before we have the answer means that the Government—whoever that might be—will be flying blind on how this element of their programme fits in with other elements for many years to come. Quite apart from the Government’s guarantee, which the Minister mentioned a short while ago, I am thinking, in particular, of the "invest to save" approach on the Government’s model and the work programme on a future Conservative Government’s model. In each case, we are looking at programmes in which providers are incentivised to individualise their offering to clients and to work with them for an extended period. The issue I have a concern with is that this entirely separate pilot will not give us information on what is likely to be the real world post-2013. Participants in these pilots will not have experienced the "invest to save"/work programme approach, so the findings may not tell us all that much about what happens in a future world. I would be most grateful for the Minister’s views on how the Government’s programmes in this area might interrelate.