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Welfare Reform and Incapacity Benefit

I beg to move, To leave out from ““House”” to the end of the Question, and to add instead thereof:"““welcomes the Government’s consistent commitment since 1997 to pursue welfare reform to create an active, enabling welfare state where rights match responsibilities; supports the recent publication of the Principles of Welfare Reform, which builds on the foundations laid out in A New Contract for Welfare, published in 1998 and the Department for Work and Pensions’ Five Year Strategy of February 2005; commends the Government’s achievements in helping 2.1 million children out of absolute poverty since 1997; recognises the success of the New Deals, through which over 1.2 million people have moved into work; notes that new claims for incapacity benefit have been cut by one third since 1997; further recognises the importance of the National Pensions Debate in creating a dialogue with the public and building a consensus on pensions reform; further welcomes the progress made on tackling disability discrimination, opening doors for disabled people to remain in or return to work; in contrast, condemns the shameful record of the Opposition who spent more on administering the Child Support Agency than they paid out in maintenance and who allowed those on unemployment benefit to hit three million twice whilst also trebling the numbers on incapacity benefits between 1979 and 1997, costing the taxpayer billions and condemning millions of people to a life of benefit dependency.””" I thank the right hon. and learned Member for Kensington and Chelsea (Sir Malcolm Rifkind) for his kind words of welcome; I very much appreciate them. I, too, look forward to our exchanges inside and, I suspect, outside the House. I congratulate him on his speech. It was the traditional rhetoric that we expect from him: it was high on rhetoric and depressingly low on content—in fact, there was no content or substance whatever that would allow anyone inside or outside the House to have any inkling of his solution to the catalogue of misery that he described.