Welfare Reform Bill

My Lords, my noble friend gives some very good examples of how easy it might be to make mistakes, particularly when the universal credit is quite low. I remind noble Lords that on 24 October the noble Lord, Lord Boswell, told us how easy it is to make mistakes. When he applied for his retirement pension, he got it wrong. Was he being negligent? No. It was an example of how easy it is to fill in a form wrongly. It is not necessarily negligence. Apart from that little reminder of how any noble Lord could easily make a mistake, I also wanted to pick up a point made by my noble friend Lady Drake about the expectation that 80 per cent of claimants will be claiming online. Recently a piece of research, Increasing Digital Channel Use Amongst Digitally Excluded Jobcentre Plus Claimants, found that one group of those claimants were what the authors call the ““uninterested””. The researchers said that this group will, "““require persuasion or compulsion before they will use digital services, possibly with the threat of a benefit sanction for non-use””." I would be very grateful if the Minister could assure the Committee that there is absolutely no intention to sanction people for not using online procedures. Some people have a mental block against using computers and we do not want yet another sanction in the system. I know that it was researchers who said this, and not the department, but if he could give us that assurance now, that would be very helpful.