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Welfare Reform

My Lords, I thank both noble Lords for what I take to be support for the thrust of the Green Paper. Let me first deal with the points raised by the noble Lord, Lord Taylor of Holbeach. He asked whether the Government take the role of Parliament seriously in all this. Of course they do. I do not know who was involved in leaking what to the press over the weekend or before. The reality is that issues surrounding welfare reform have been debated in the public arena for a long while. It is important that these matters are properly dealt with through Parliament; hence the Statement today. The noble Lord said that these proposals were lifted from Conservative policies and claimed Freud as justification for that. It was this Government who commissioned the Freud report in the sense that it was part of the analysis that we sought to undertake. The noble Lord asked about further legislation. A number of the proposals in the Green Paper would require primary legislation and a Bill would be brought forward at the first opportunity. He asked whether everything will be implemented. This is a Green Paper: we want to consult on the proposals, some of which are more advanced and entrenched in the thinking than others. It is important that we get a wide input from a range of stakeholders, which has traditionally been the way we have engaged in welfare reform. Noble Lords who were involved in the proceedings of what is now the Welfare Reform Act 2007 will attest to the fact that that is very much part of the Government’s approach. The noble Lord asked whether HMT has signed off the proposals. All the proposals in the Green Paper have been agreed by the Treasury. He also asked whether the Government will support the end of the couple penalty in tax credits. The tax credits system is a matter for the Treasury and outside the scope of the Green Paper. However, the Green Paper contains proposals for additional work support for partners of benefit claimants; we know how important it is with regard to child poverty to have both members of a couple working. That is one way forward. I do not think that either noble Lord commented on the fact that there is an unlimited disregard for child maintenance. We debated that during the proceedings of the Child Maintenance and Other Payments Bill quite recently and I hope that it will also be welcomed. The noble Lord, Lord Kirkwood, talked about Dame Carol Black’s report. It is ground-breaking and we are hoping to respond to it across government in October. We have already announced some aspects of it that we will support—in particular, the fit-for-work service and the piloting around that. It is a central part of these reforms to recognise that work is generally good for people’s health and well-being and is the best route out of poverty. That is a cornerstone of these reforms and of the active welfare state. The noble Lord asked about intermittent health conditions and whether the work capability assessment would take account of them. The answer is yes. We touched on that in part in our welfare reform debates last year; it is not a snapshot—it takes account of the effects of the person’s condition over time. The noble Lord talked about decentralisation. Again, that is absolutely right. Clearly, job advisers should not be pursuing sanctions if there are no jobs available. Notwithstanding the challenging economic climate, the job market has been pretty buoyant. I am not sure what the current vacancies are across the country—I think that it is about 650,000. Part of the decentralisation is to work through city strategies so that you have local partnerships with people who really know what is happening on the ground and are best placed to help to pursue some of these ideas. As the noble Lord identified, we are doubling the budget to Access to Work, which will be a major expansion of the support that we can offer to disabled people to help them to get and sustain employment. Our estimate is that it will expand the programme’s capacity to around 48,000 people by 2013-14. There is a gradual increase in the budget starting in 2009-10, through to 2013. I hope that that has dealt with the points that the noble Lords raised and thank them again for their support for this Green Paper.