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Welfare Reform and Incapacity Benefit

No. I am sure that the hon. Lady will understand that other colleagues want to speak. This autumn, as the Prime Minister looks fretfully at his legacy, he seems to be thinking quite radically about incapacity benefit—at least, if his leaked October memo to the then Work and Pensions Secretary is anything to go by. I shall quote—from a transcript that appeared in a national newspaper—the words of the Prime Minister to the right hon. Member for Sheffield, Brightside (Mr. Blunkett), who was then Secretary of State for Work and Pensions. The Prime Minister said:"““We should publish information on the number of sick notes signed by GPs, and audit the top ten per cent . . . Employers should have a right of appeal when an employee is signed off sick . . . We could propose taking sick note certification away from GPs and create a new specialist service . . . Incapacity benefit should be paid at £56 per week, the same rate as the jobseeker’s allowance””—" which would of course be a cut. The memo continues:"““Claimants have to attend compulsory monthly work-focused interviews . . . Those not engaging in activity lose the entire premium.””" Best, and most controversially of all, the Prime Minister said in his memo:"““Given the cost of employment programmes, it seems that the only funding option might be to widen the scope of means-testing the system . . . Alternatively, part of the benefit top-up could be paid as a voucher””—" for ““rehabilitation and training programmes””. I quoted at length for a simple reason—those proposals are anathema to the majority of Labour Members. We know that they object to that radical thinking, and those proposals are certainly radical. Some of them may be worth mature and serious debate and discussion, and some of them may be to the liking of the Conservative Opposition. As my hon. Friend the Member for Witney (Mr. Cameron) said, if the Prime Minister comes up with good ideas, we will back him. The question is: will his own side back him? As I have indicated, there is much opposition to the Prime Minister’s radical thinking on welfare. We may have to support his ideas; who knows? However, we know that the right hon. Member for Oxford, East (Mr. Smith) resigned his position rather than implement radical reform as dictated by No 10. We also know that when the Secretary of State for Trade and Industry was Secretary of State for Work and Pensions he fought a pitched battle—he won that one—to rule out the time-limiting of incapacity benefit from the strategic five-year review that he published. We have already heard from our Front Bench about the delays in the Green Paper. First, the Prime Minister said that it would be published before the summer recess. Then, the Minister for Employment and Welfare Reform, who is in the Chamber, said that it would be published later in 2005. Finally, last week, the Prime Minister said that it would be published some time in January. We might think that we needed no more evidence, but there is more to come. We know that the Secretary of State for International Development did not want to take the job of Secretary of State for Work and Pensions because he knew that he was on to a loser. He would have had to defend and argue for radical reform that his own side could not stomach. Perhaps most depressing of all for the Prime Minister—it really shows that he is beleaguered—is that he cannot even install his No. 10 hawk on welfare policy, Mr. Gareth Davies—the gentleman who wrote the memo to which I referred—as a director in the DWP serving the Secretary of State, due to opposition from the civil service. As was widely reported in the Financial Times and elsewhere, Sir Richard Mottram, the permanent secretary, blocked the appointment of Mr. Davies. One of the newspapers reported:"““Sir Richard put his foot down . . . In the old days Blair would have won the battle with no difficulty but this is just a sign of how weak he has become.””" The Prime Minister once said that in the area of welfare reform he would think the unthinkable. With the amount of opposition on his side, is not it a case of him trying to do the undoable?