Welfare Reform Bill

My Lords, before I start on the specific matter, I shall take a short period to thank the noble Countess, Lady Mar, for her remarks a few minutes ago which I appreciate. This amendment relates to the definitions of ““better paid work”” and ““more paid work”” and would require the regulations to be subject to the affirmative procedure. The first point I want to make is that it is not necessary to define these terms. They have their natural meaning: working for more hours, increasing your pay and so on. To that extent, we cannot accept the amendment, but I understand that it is a way of looking for information and I am very happy to have the opportunity to provide it. These phrases are important. Their inclusion in Clauses 15 to 18 allows us to impose work-related requirements on claimants who are already in work. We are currently able to impose requirements on existing JSA claimants who are in some work and we need to retain this capability. Obviously, we are interested in doing more and extending conditionality to claimants who are in relatively substantive levels of work but who are nevertheless capable of working more. A conditionality regime can play an important role in encouraging such claimants to progress towards more self-sufficiency and to raise their standard of living and general status. Clearly, I understand noble Lords’ concerns about the extension of conditionality in this way. It is new and it is a difficult area. I also understand the way that noble Lords want to stay in touch with developments as they progress, so let me reiterate and perhaps expand on the remarks I made on Report. At the launch of universal credit, we will not be imposing conditionality on claimants in substantive employment. In other words, there will be no conditionality for claimants with income or earnings which would, broadly speaking, have taken them over the cut-off point for current out-of-work benefits. We will retain our emphasis on those claimants who would be eligible for JSA, ESA or income support now. The existing system, in that sense, will continue. As a general point about how we are going to introduce universal credit, we are trying to be incremental and to lock in gradually the opportunities that it represents. Before we extend conditionality to claimants with earnings above this level, we will run pilots. We want to gather views on the approaches that could be taken in these pilots and we will therefore be consulting widely. Depending on the design, we expect such pilots to require regulations. They will be subject to the affirmative resolution procedure and therefore to debate in Parliament. I think we have had enough discussion about what that means. I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Hollis, on that point. I have committed to publishing details of any pilots, to monitoring the results of the pilots, in particular, the outcomes for claimants, and to making those results available for scrutiny. We will reflect on this before adopting any national approach. I remind noble Lords that we considered and passed an amendment that I tabled earlier to allow us to test every aspect of universal credit to see how it would change. This is clearly one area where we could do a lot of testing about how different things work. Picking up the point on the relationship with the work programme, if we look at the timetable of the introduction and at what we are doing, noble Lords who can picture calendars years in advance will see that there is a point at which we are going to go to round two of the work programme, which works rather neatly with the timing of bringing in some of the results and outcomes. One of the options we will have at that stage is to look at encouraging work programme providers in a much more sophisticated way not just to get people into work and keep them in work, which are the main criteria today, but to get them into work and to progress in work. That is attractive as an option to be explored because we will start to pull together even more than we are now the work first strategies, which have been the historic drive of the DWP, and the training and upskilling strategies, which in the past have been far too separate. If we have a progression target, we will start to pull in training in a tougher way. It is beginning to be pulled together with the effort to keep people in work, but noble Lords will know that one of my ambitions is to pull those two aspects much closer together through the structures. That is one of the things that I will be looking at very closely as we look at designing these pilots. I hope that what I am saying is interesting and reassuring. We are giving a clear undertaking that we will proceed carefully, consult widely and make our proposals open for scrutiny. On that basis, I hope that the noble Lord will withdraw his interesting amendment.