Welfare Reform Bill

Some of my comments will not be appreciated but I thank the Minister for his response. Clearly, I have not received the same response as did my noble friend Lady Lister. I will take it back and think about it. She does not know when she is ahead. However, I am afraid that I have to express some regret. A lot of us have done a lot of work in preparing for the Bill although I am sure that we have done much less than the Minister. I blame my noble friend Lady Sherlock in that when I asked her what I should do she advised me to read everything that was said in the Commons. I thank her for that. What I found again and again were promises from Ministers in the other House that by the time the Bill reached Committee stage there the relevant information would be available. Again and again I am afraid I read that our friends in the other place found that that was not the case. They nevertheless were given absolute assurances that the relevant information would be available before the Bill reached Committee stage in this place. To have something published today concerning a debate that is taking place today is simply not good enough. We cannot work that way; ““before”” ought to mean before. Anything that is relevant to what we are talking about should be with us in time to enable us to read it and think about it. I welcome the remarks about our being involved in the debates about how this process is going to work. I think that those remarks were probably genuine. However, that means that we have to have the relevant information available, especially as we are trying to discuss the Bill without a wonderful array of staff to help us. I also regret the remarks about ESA, maternity allowance and earnings. The women who will be getting this who have been in work may simply not qualify for a statutory payment because they have changed employers. However, they could well have been working full time before that. In that sense it is not a benefit but something that they earned and are entitled to. Therefore, to treat it as unearned income—as if a sugar daddy had given it to them—would not be the right approach. It has been earned, albeit in a different way. Similarly, the Minister did not respond to the question of whether ESA affected the self-employed. They are another group of people who have paid contributions into a system. If they then discover that what they get when they are possibly very seriously ill with cancer is seen not as something that they have earned but something from a very kindly Government, that will not be the right way to ensure that people see the system as enabling them to get something for what they have put in, which is what many of us want. I am sorry about that and I hope that, even if the Minister does not respond orally now, he will think about those groups of people, and in particular about women whose circumstances may have changed and who may have moved to a better job. On the whole it is young women who get pregnant. They may be moving up in a career and may have moved to a different employer and therefore may not qualify. I have two further brief points. We are obviously delighted about any monitoring and assessment. If there is to be no formal review, I will have to accept that that is the best way of doing it. Nevertheless, it would be very nice if the Minister or his successor will bring those reports to the House, where they can be debated in the same way as we are able to now. Finally, I accept that the Minister may not want to set a target rate for a taper. He said that perhaps 65 per cent was too high but that a future Government could perhaps do something about it. I look forward to sitting next to my noble friend Lord McKenzie when he is the Minister in a future Government—