Welfare Reform Bill

Irresistibly, in view of what my noble friend Lord Fowler has said, I find it necessary to make what I hope will be a brief intervention. This is a rather grandiose claim but I am going to make it: probably I alone, but certainly I and my noble friend together, have more experience of social security and its reform than any other people in history, let alone currently present in your Lordships’ House. We had our difficulties and our rows with the Treasury and, as my noble friend has just said, we would have given our eye teeth to have been able to bring forward this proposal for a universal credit, which is a huge achievement by the Secretary of State and the Minister on our Front Bench together. Everyone acknowledges that and supports it, yet now large numbers of people are trying to shoot it full of holes before it is even often off the launch pad. That is not sensible. I am not going to put a lot of weight on the point about deficit reduction. It is valid but others have made and will make it, and people can make up their own minds about how important it is. Personally, having caused some trouble for the Government on this on a number of occasions, I do not think it sensible or reasonable to go on voting twice a week, in whatever form, to make the deficit worse than it otherwise would be. That is all I will say; if people want to do it, they can. I have a straightforward social security reason for being opposed to this and every other amendment on our agenda today. It is a great pity, as my noble friend said, that they are being debated in such a disorderly fashion; there are linkages between all of them. For example, the amendment of the noble Baroness, Lady Howe of Idlicote, on regional variations in housing clearly links with what we are discussing at the moment, and it would have been far better if these things had been discussed together. For a long while as Social Security Minister—I was sometimes attacked for this—I made sure that social security legislation left wide powers in secondary legislation because you would never get it all right in primary legislation and you needed the flexibility to be able to respond to the things that you had not spotted in advance. However much work you do, that will happen. There is no doubt, though, that we have here a series of amendments, designed—some of them pretty hastily and off the cuff—to write requirements and restraints into the primary legislation that would certainly prove a drag when the detailed work was done. As with the DLA last week, there is a right course for the House to take, and I will join it in taking it. Ministers know from me, privately and publicly, the importance that I attach to transitional measures and protection, but the place for that is in the secondary legislation. If the House wants to vote for enhanced affirmative procedures, as I said last week, I would be inclined to support that so that we would all get a proper opportunity to consider the detail when it had been done. However, I am not in favour of tying the Government’s hands and writing anything into the concrete of primary legislation that we shall regret in six or eight months’ time. I hope that the House will accept that and not vote to put this stuff in, in the way that is proposed today.