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Welfare Reform Green Paper

My Lords, I am grateful to my noble friend. I agree with her two points, the first of which was about no automatic read-across. That reinforces the importance of, as the noble Lord, Lord Addington suggested, an individual approach to individuals, rather than blanket categories, which we have had previously. I also very much agree with her about the case for early intervention. All the work in this area suggests that early intervention can pay off enormously. Everything that we seek to do—whether in relation to incapacity benefit reform or the wider issues of healthy workplaces, which is the subject of a strategy that is very much embraced within the Green Paper—is about early intervention. My noble friend is absolutely right. GPs and the health service can play an important part, as can individuals, but we need employers to be on board as well. We need them in relation to incapacity benefit, lone parents and older workers. I think that this will be a major challenge for the Government in the future. The Pathways to Work experience is good—we have had co-operation from employers—but we need to do very much more. We particularly need to work with small and medium-sized enterprises. The evidence suggests that the large companies recognise these issues and are prepared to work with us. Indeed, on the wider health and safety agenda, in many places employers look very carefully at workplace design, are quick to deal with issues around stress, have very good occupational health services and make early interventions. I have come across a number of companies in which, if an employee reports sick either with muscular-skeletal disease or with stress, that is often a trigger to an immediate referral to an occupational health adviser, so that early intervention can take place. That is not so easy for SMEs, with which we clearly need to do much more. We will shortly be launching the Health and Safety Executive initiative Workplace Health Connect, which is designed as a free phoneline service for SMEs in relation to workplace health. That can be followed up by visits and signposting to expert services. I hope that it will one of the important tasks that we will take ahead to embrace employers. Clearly, we need to do much more as well and I assure my noble friend that this will be a priority for us.