My Lords, I intend to speak very briefly as we have had a good debate on sanctions and the noble Lord, Lord Low, introduced his amendment with characteristic care and detail.
I just want to say a couple of things to the Minister. I know that the department is not attracted to statutory guidance in universal credit in particular. One of the reasons is that it likes to make personalised decisions. Before the noble Lady tells us how the system is meant to work, I want to flag something up. I worked in government and know that you always get complaints from non-profit organisations about how things are working. At some point, the noise being made reaches a certain level, and you know that maybe things are not working quite the way they are meant to work. It is my judgment that we are approaching that level.
The level of concern expressed by charities about the way the sanctions environment is working, particularly for vulnerable groups, and about the severity of some individual mistakes that have been made, suggests there may be something systemic going wrong. I am not suggesting that means it is going wrong on a large scale across the caseload, but that something is going wrong often enough, and on occasions badly enough, to merit attention.
When the Minister responds, even if she is not attracted to the way the amendment might resolve this issue, could she address the underlying problems and tell us how the Government might like to deal with them?
7 pm