Welfare Reform Bill

My Lords, like others, I thank the Minister and his Bill team for being so accessible and helpful; I genuinely congratulate them. When we can get the material in hardcover rather than on email, I shall be even more enthusiastic and enduring in singing the Minister’s praises, which I am sure we all want to do. I want to make two points, both of them triggered by the remarks of the noble Lord, Lord Kirkwood, and my noble friend Lord McKenzie, which I thought were spot on. First, the main thing is to talk about language. The noble Baroness, Lady Campbell, is exactly right. Until recently, when we introduced a Bill like this it would not have been a welfare reform Bill, it would have been a social security Bill. The gap between social security and welfare is precisely the gap between entitlement and stigma. We forget, when using words like ““welfare reform””, what is the structure of who pays and who gains in our welfare state. We all know that a very substantial part of ““benefit expenditure”” is actually a redistribution of resources through people’s lifetimes, particularly from the working years to retirement. Our pension work falls into that. A second key group of redistribution is what we would call the category benefits. They go to children and to disabled people. There are more methods of redistribution than merely from rich to poor. Instead, they go from those without children to those with children; they go from those who are in good health to those in poor health. That is something that all civilised societies would sign up to. Only the third category of benefits, those which are means tested, reflect a straightforward redistribution from rich to poor. They have been allowed to dominate and cloud the language and to stereotype claimants in ways that portray them as dependent on handouts and the good will of others. We should return instead to the more appropriate, all-inclusive language of social security. Apart from the very lucky few, who are probably white millionaires, male and in very good health indeed, all the rest of us will need recourse to the welfare state, to the social security state. We should all hold that firmly in mind and refuse to engage, wherever it is spoken, in language that seeks to make distinctions between the deserving and the undeserving poor—or, as the Victorians would have said, God’s poor, poor devils and the devil’s poor. The second point I want to make, which follows that, is the point made rightly by the noble Lord, Lord Kirkwood. I strongly support the principles and much of the structure of the Bill, although, like others, I have real concerns about what I regard as the pressure points. In dealing with the Bill, we must not only be concerned with the question of language, but we must encourage the Minister to respond to those adjustments we need to make, particularly where the language of the amendments run by the Minister, or his replies, may suggest what I call the econometric model of the Treasury, which is that people have to be pained or punished into work, because the only stimulus that they will respond to is an economic one. What many of us said in our Second Reading speeches, and what I hope we will all remember, is that when we ask people to move from being on benefit to coming into work, whether they have a disability, whether they have been a lone parent, whether they have struggled for a long time with being chronically unemployed because of the demography and the economic structure of their region, the issue for them is not just about whether they are better off; it is primarily about risk. Unless people understand—and I fear that too often the Treasury does not—the issue of risk and the abatement of risk that needs to go on, we are not going to make a success of the Bill. I think that the Minister understands this perfectly well. I think and I hope that he will accept arguments and that where, in future amendments, we seek to abate risk as well as reward work, he will understand that this is in order to make a philosophy that so many of us sign up to work today.