Welfare Reform Bill

I thank the noble Lord, Lord McKenzie of Luton, for his support and the Minister for his helpful reply. Clearly, he has a great depth of knowledge of this area and I am grateful to learn from him this afternoon. I have a couple of brief points to raise. I also have an aside which is that his black-box approach sounds very familiar, in terms of the young offender programme for National Grid and Transco, to which I referred. It was developed for National Grid and Transco by Dr Mary Harris, who is an astrophysicist by background. Her approach was very much testing and incrementally trying things out until she got a method that seemed to work very well for young people. Maybe there is some read-across there to what is being discussed this afternoon. The Select Committee for the Department for Work and Pensions looked at the work programme, and although it welcomed it, it had this to say: "““However, there is a risk that creaming and parking may still take place under this model””—" the work programme model— "““since it remains open to providers to continue to focus on the easier to help participants within each customer group””." Perhaps the Minister could write to me, or say now to the Committee, whether he is aware of that particular problem and what needs to be done within each of the tranches. The second issue that I would like to raise with the Minister—and I would like to think more about this—is where he talks about attending being a fundamental requirement. One just has to attend if one is going to get anywhere through this process. I can imagine for some young people that even attending would be a big step to take. I do not want to push it too far, but if you have someone coming out of the criminal justice system who is very oppositional and who has complete distrust for authority of any kind, you might need to woo them a little bit before you can even get them in a meeting—but it would be well worth while wooing them in terms of the outcomes at the end. That is the first point; I will go back and think about the second.