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Welfare Reform Bill

I hear a ““yes”” from the Conservative Front Bench. Perhaps the hon. Gentleman is anticipating an occasion on which he could do exactly that. This is why we need to be careful about what is in the Bill and what is to be introduced through regulations. We remain to be convinced that the safeguards in the system for vulnerable people are sufficient, and a robust system of appeals must also be put in place. As the hon. Member for City of York (Hugh Bayley) rightly said, preparing disabled people for work is not enough if there are no employers ready and willing to take them on. On this point, the Bill and the Green Paper are both lamentably silent. Much more could and should be done to work with employers. For example, the access to work scheme is one of the Government’s best kept secrets. According to their own figures, for every person helped through the scheme, there is a £1,400 net benefit to the Exchequer and a £3,000 net benefit to the economy. Yet still the Government fail to promote the scheme adequately, and about 80 per cent. of small employers are unaware of it. The Government should use the Bill as an opportunity to invest in the promotion of the access to work scheme, particularly to small businesses, and to make changes to the way in which access to work decisions are made, so that people will know their access to work entitlements before they approach an employer. Also, I hope that the Minister will review the decision to remove the access to work scheme from central Government Departments. The DWP’s poor performance in employing disabled people sets a bad example. The Employers Forum on Disability has pioneered the auditing of disability standards for employers. The Government should consult on a duty for larger employers to carry out such audits because, as the forum makes clear, this should not be seen as a burden. After all, disabled people are customers, employees, stakeholders, partners and competitors, and 82 per cent. of customers with disabilities surveyed recently have taken their business to a more disability-confident business competitor in the past 12 months. Each year, 25,000 people leave work due to injury and ill health, but this drain of talent is unnecessary. Forty-three per cent. of European workers say that they could work if employers made adjustments. I hope that the Minister will also take the opportunity that the Bill provides to pick up the idea proposed in a 10-minute Bill by the hon. Member for Glasgow, North-West (John Robertson). I am sure that the hon. Gentleman will say much more about that in his speech, and I do not wish to steal his thunder. However, his proposal for rehabilitation leave is a significant one, and it could make a real difference. I now turn to the Bill’s proposals on housing benefit reform. The proposed local housing allowance has some positive features, but the evaluation has shown that although some benefits have emerged, there have been fewer than had been hoped. The Bill provides welcome simplification of the process of obtaining extended payments when a claimant enters work or has a significant rise in income. The Liberal Democrats welcome the steps to encourage greater financial responsibility. I am pleased that the worries about increases in rent arrears—which the hon. Member for Runnymede and Weybridge (Mr. Hammond) mentioned—and about evictions have so far not been realised in the pilots. The evidence from the pilots also suggests, however, that the objective of simplifying the administration and reducing administration costs has been undermined because the new vulnerability assessment—which I welcome—is needed to help people who cannot manage direct payments. So the savings that will be made by administering the new benefit will have to be balanced against the increase in administration needed to make the vulnerability assessment work properly. There has been a welcome fall in the number of people facing a shortfall in their rents in the pilot areas. However, this depends on how the local housing allowance rates are set. They are set according to broad rental market areas, and are based on the local market rent. Different outcomes can therefore be found in different areas. In Conwy, for example, Shelter found that only 10 per cent. of property was affordable for local housing allowance recipients, whereas the figure was 55 per cent. in Edinburgh. Perhaps rent officers should be guided by the statutory minimum proportion of affordable property in each broad rental market area when establishing those areas. Given the housing and benefit provision duties of councils, it would be reasonable to require the rent service to consult them on the setting of broad rental market area boundaries. The pathfinder areas were given significant extra financial resources to provide financial advice and help to those who had not received direct payments of housing benefit before. I hope that the Minister will make it clear that that will continue as the new system is rolled out across all the local authorities, because in many areas, help such as that provided by Citizens Advice was crucial in preventing the short-term drop-off in payments and subsequent rise in arrears and evictions that the hon. Member for Runnymede and Weybridge mentioned. The Liberal Democrats have always opposed the single room rent, as did the present Secretary of State, and the Prime Minister, when the Conservative party introduced it. It will continue under this Bill, however, in a slightly different form—the shared room rate. While the shared room rate is slightly more generous, the basic unfairness and large rent shortfalls will continue. We will introduce amendments to scrap it, which we hope will have the support of all those who voted against the single room rent when it was introduced in 1996. I now turn to the provisions relating to antisocial behaviour. Liberal Democrat Members bow to no one in our determination to deal with antisocial behaviour, as the performance of Liberal Democrat-run local authorities across the country will show.