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The Economy and Welfare Reform

The hon. Lady knows that the whole argument is about how regulation is framed. I shall pursue the example of the working time directive, on which the Government are now in a very difficult position. Last week, Brendan Barber, the TUC general secretary, wrote a thoughtful article in which he pointed out that the trade unions might well have come on board on the working time directive if the Government had confronted at an earlier stage the crucial distinction between workers who genuinely want to work long hours because that is their lifestyle preference and workers who are coerced into working long hours by their employers. If the system of regulation had captured that distinction, no problems would have occurred. The issue is not about, as the hon. Lady put it, ““protective regulations””; it is about the how regulations are phrased. The matter must be addressed in a market-friendly manner, which relates to the key issue of the working time directive. At Prime Minister’s questions, my party leader touched on another big theme, pensions, about which enough has been said not to pursue it in great detail. However, a tension clearly exists between whether we address pensioner poverty through large-scale means-testing, which is the Chancellor’s preference and which is becoming unsustainable because of the scale of the testing and the disincentive effects that have been created, or whether we pursue it in another way. We have advanced the idea of a citizen’s pension for men and women that is above the means-tested level, at least for older pensioners. We must debate the matter, but we cannot do so until the Government give a clear message on how they want pension policy to evolve.