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Welfare Reform and Incapacity Benefit

We called this debate in our own time with the aim of giving the Government an opportunity of clarifying and explaining their own policy, and we did so in a genuine spirit of inquiry on behalf of many millions of claimants, who want to know what the Government mean by reform. The hon. Member for North-East Derbyshire (Natascha Engel) said that the Government are in a continuous reform programme. All I can say is that we have not noticed that. The windy rhetoric that accompanied the first election victory of the Labour Government has simply not been carried into practice. Again, in this short debate many questions have been raised and almost no answers have been provided, so I do hope that when the Minister gets to her feet to wind up the debate she will start to give us some hard answers to some of the hard questions that we have asked—not least by my hon. Friend the Member for Bury St. Edmunds (Mr. Ruffley), who in an excellent short speech asked, in effect, which side is the Department on: the Prime Minister’s, or Back Benchers’—or perhaps its own side? That triangulation is going on between different bits of the Government and the Labour party, and it is profoundly damaging to any real or genuine reform. For instance, we have not got to the bottom of the incredible shrinking Green Paper on welfare reform, which the Prime Minister promised immediately after the election. In fact, I think that it was the first promise that he made in May this year. He said that the Green Paper would be produced by the new Secretary of State by July this year. I join other hon. Members in welcoming the new Secretary of State to his position, but I hope that, despite the fantastic turnover of Secretaries of State in the Department for Work and Pensions, he will survive long enough to see the publication of his own Green Paper. The victims of the continuing confusion and delay are not just successive Secretaries of State and Ministers, but more importantly, the benefit claimants themselves who are trying to grapple with a system of increasing complexity that is not only beyond their own comprehension, but very often a bafflement to those whose job it is to administer the system. The National Audit Office made some observations on that only earlier this month. It pointed out that the very complexity of the system is itself an inducement to fraud, because those who are administering the system are trying to process vast quantities of information, often of a very personal kind, and—in the language of the NAO report—that"““may persuade some people that fraud is a risk worth taking.””" We need a massive simplification programme as part of the reform, but we know that benefit claimants are not part of the debate at all. The real dynamic is between No. 10—the Prime Minister and the policy unit—on one side and the Department on the other. The Prime Minister generally cries, ““Forward.”” The Department cries, ““Back.””