Welfare Reform Bill

My Lords, this is obviously a very sensitive issue, and I want to start by saying that we are determined that the benefit system should support in a sensitive, fair and appropriate way people who are diagnosed with cancer and coping with it. I shall try to go through the argumentation here in as simple a way as I can. First, we know that cancer and cancer treatment affects individuals very differently. That was one thing that the Macmillan evidence demonstrated. It shows that some people can continue working straight through their treatment, are capable of doing so and want to do so. On that evidence, we believe that automatically putting everyone undergoing certain cancer treatments into the support group is not the right way forward. Clearly, there is the example that the noble Baroness raised, the one in the Sunday Times, of Jenni Murray, who had a bad reaction, and one can only sympathise with that. Everyone in this Chamber will have friends or relatives who have gone through this experience and had a bad reaction. It is always painful. We are all thinking exactly the same thing; we are all thinking of someone we know who has gone through hell on this process. But when you talk to the experts, you get examples of someone—let us take a man—who has had testicular cancer and has recovered well from curative surgery and is now being treated with radiotherapy without any significant side effects. On this ruling, he would be automatically placed in the support group. That is a kind of counter-example, which half of us should be so lucky to have.