Welfare Reform Bill

My Lords, I thank the Minister for his response, and the speakers who contributed to the debate. I especially thank the noble Lord, Lord Newton of Braintree, who is not in his place at the moment. Perhaps other noble Lords could pass on to him that he would never incur my wrath—the Minister’s, yes, but never mine. The one thing that we have to take account of when we use words like ““trust”” and ““availability”” is that the debate is taking place within a much broader overall government policy. We have already mentioned in Committee that unemployment is at a 17-year high. There are already cuts to childcare. It is estimated that 32,000 people have already given up work because of the reduction in childcare allowance—at a cost of £50 million to the Exchequer, I gather, so the Treasury will not be very happy about that. Of course, it demonstrates yet again that if affordable childcare is not available, people do not go to work—fairly obvious, but there you are. Unfortunately the noble Baroness, Lady Grey-Thompson, is not in her place. I was a little worried after what the noble Earl said about being an untrained play scheme worker that maybe we were all untrained carers today for her daughter. At least with her mother here, I assume the child was in safe hands. As a grandparent, I very much appreciate the comments made about the contribution of grandparents. I am in the other position: with very new grandchildren, all the grandparents line up and vie to look after them. I am assured that this soon gets a bit too much and problems set in. Short-term care is much more easily set up than long-term grandparenting, unless the sort of help that my noble friend Lady Hollis mentioned is available. I will make a couple of comments. First, I thank the Minister very much not only for saying that he will look very carefully at the suggestions made by my noble friend Lady Hollis but for the commitments he gave about including current protections. However, he did not answer one of my comments about whether they will apply to couples. He mentioned lone parents but not couples.