Welfare Reform Bill

I beg to move, That the Bill be now read the Third time. I am conscious that we have only half an hour, so I will try to make some progress. A great deal has been debated, but I am happy to take a couple of interventions. I recognise that some others on the Back Benches would like to say something because they did not get in earlier, and I think we ought to leave them some time. The Bill allows us to start dealing once and for all with the welfare dependency we inherited. Just the other week we learned from the Office for National Statistics that there are now nearly twice as many households in the UK where no one has ever worked as there were in 1997, and today there are nearly 2 million children growing up in workless households—children with no positive role models who can teach them the benefits of work. This entrenched worklessness is the issue, and is the product of a broken welfare system that takes away up to 96p in every pound earned as people increase their hours in work. It is a system that shunts people from employment programme to employment programme, never looking at them as individuals but as collective groups. It is a system that provides disabled people with outdated and complex support that often fails them when they most need it. By the end of Labour's term in office, that system left us with income inequality at its highest level since records began, despite the billions Labour spent. The backdrop to this social breakdown was the inheritance of an economy that was absolutely on its knees when we came into government.