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Budget Resolutions and Economic Situation

I am not suggesting that. However, the Government have lost a case on the basis of maladministration, although they are appealing, and certain legal obligations might thus be forthcoming. This is not a question of underwriting every single private pension in the country, but we must consider what happens when people have been misled, which is the case in the example that I am citing. We need to look carefully at the matter, and I am not sure that the Chancellor’s announcement succeeded in dealing with the problem. Let me move on to the third and fourth elements of what the Chancellor said in 1997 that remained current yesterday. Welfare reform was at the heart of the 1997 Budget and, to some extent, the 2007 Budget. The right hon. Member for Birkenhead (Mr. Field), who was the Government’s first welfare reform Minister, has said:"““Labour’s hugely expensive welfare reform programme has largely failed.””" Aspects of the programme clearly have failed. I do not want to enter a long debate about the new deal, but yesterday we seemed to have the new new deal. Should anyone want to examine the arguments and evidence, I recommend the pamphlet ““Reforming Welfare””, which was written by Nicholas Boys Smith and produced by the think-tank Reform. Nicholas Boys Smith lists a range of areas in which the new deal has failed and identifies what he would do about it. It is striking that the Freud report, which was commissioned by the Department for Work and Pensions, comes up with almost exactly the same prescriptions as Mr. Boys Smith: more emphasis on outcomes, not procedures; greater involvement of the voluntary and private sectors; and greater conditionality. It is also worth considering lone parents. Again, the Chancellor stressed his desire to improve the employment rate for lone parents. There has been an improvement since 1997, but our rate of 56 per cent. is still the lowest such employment rate of any major European country. The Chancellor’s proposals—whether in 1997 or 2007—appear to be a form of gentle encouragement, but they do not seem to be working especially well. One can sense the frustration of the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, who perhaps looks at these things from a slightly different perspective, when he says that we ask very little of lone parents. The Secretary of State’s emphasis is on conditionality, whereas the Chancellor has avoided conditionality when addressing welfare reform as a whole. Hon. Members on both sides of the House agree that we want to encourage more lone parents to work. However, I think that most Conservative Members hold the view, although it is not necessarily shared by Labour Members, that the best environment in which a child can be brought up is within a marriage, or at least by two parents in a stable relationship. The system has created difficulties because, while the DWP’s figures show that a couple needs more to escape poverty than a lone parent might receive, the levels of tax credits do not necessarily address that adequately. On last night’s ““Newsnight””, Stephanie Flanders made the point that one of the beneficiaries of the Budget would be out-of-work lone parents.