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Welfare Reform

My Lords, following the point made by my noble friend, it is clear that these proposals were leaked in advance. Frankly, the Minister’s reply carries no credibility; the Government should just admit that that is the case. On the substance, the Minister talks of a back-to-work action plan and says that claimants after a year will be transferred to an outside provider, who will be paid by results. If changes such as that are so deeply obvious to the present Government, why was it that throughout the 1980s and the 1990s official spokesmen of the party opposite did everything in their power to oppose any steps in the direction that they now propose? The Minister says that in 1997 the present Government inherited a passive welfare state, whatever that may mean, but is not the real position that Ministers have only now woken up to what we were describing more than a decade ago?