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Welfare Reform and Incapacity Benefit

Time is fearfully short, so I hope that the hon. Lady will forgive me for not giving way. There was a zero-sum game. The law of unintended consequences—classic new Labour reform. Since that reform, the proportion of IB claimants who had been receiving incapacity benefit for more than five years rose from 47 to 51 per cent.—Members should remember that the duration of the claim is at least as important as the number of claimants. The proportion of new IB claimants coming from the unemployment register is up from 46 per cent. in 1997–98 to a staggering 60 per cent. in 2003–04. That is despite the Prime Minister rightly saying in 1999 that IB had to be reformed because it was merely"““an alternative to long-term unemployment or early retirement””." The problem is that he has done nothing about it. Earlier, it was said that the Conservative party had no positive proposals. Let me set Labour Members straight about that. The modern Conservative party certainly has more thinking to do on welfare reform, and the new leader in December will start that work. It will take time, but we already have positive proposals on the table, specifically those we talked about last May. There should be more payment by results, with contractors paid a fixed amount per claimant on completion of various milestones for putting claimants back into employment. We need more rehabilitation, possibly with spend-to-save measures; for example, an additional fee paid to contractors to cover the cost of expensive medical and vocational rehabilitation, such as higher level physiotherapy. We also need a greatly enhanced role for the voluntary and charitable sector as, by and large, it is more effective—certainly more so than some of the state functions that I have seen in my constituency.