---

Welfare Reform

I would normally thank the Secretary of State for an advance copy of his statement, but instead of doing that, may I ask him to explain to the House why he has given such an extensive briefing about the content of the statement over the past few days in the media? Does he not think that briefing the media in that way, ahead of the House, flies in the face of both the rulings that have come from the Chair in the past few months, and the now rather hollow commitments made by the Prime Minister when he was first elected to that position, about the importance of the House? I pay tribute to the work of David Freud. It was his report, commissioned by Tony Blair and comprehensively rejected by the current Prime Minister three years ago, that started the debate in Britain. When we published our Green Paper in January, we drew heavily on David Freud's work and added to it the recommendations for mandatory community work to be added to the back to work process in the UK. All those recommendations—David Freud's and ours—have now, it appears, been adopted by the Government. We know that the Secretary of State will face a big rebellion on his Back Benches, so may I assure him that we will give the proposals our support? We know that his Back Benchers, his union backers and his own social security adviser are clearly opposed to the measures, but as much of what he is proposing comes from the work that we published in January, I can assure him that Conservative votes will help the measures on to the statute book, even if Labour Members try to stop them. There will certainly be issues for debate when the Bill comes before the House. I think the Government are wrong to extend from six months to 12 months the date when young people are referred for specialist back to work support. We would change that in government. I am glad the Secretary of State agreed with me that the proposals in the Gregg report to make lone parents of one-year-olds prepare for work were just plain wrong. Even so, I remain unconvinced by some of his other proposals on lone parents, and we will want to debate those vigorously when the Bill comes before the House. There are far too many pilots in the proposals. After 11 years in office, surely the Government can, for a change, do something properly and not just pilot it. There is one huge, unanswered issue, on which I would like the Secretary of State to concentrate his response to me. He has rightly accepted our proposal to put every single person currently claiming incapacity benefit through an independent medical assessment; that is clearly the right thing to do. However, it will also be a complete waste of time if adequate back-to-work places are not available for the people who go through the test and are told that they have the ability to prepare for work. Our intention was always to fund those extra places for a proportion of 2.6 million people through the so-called departmental expenditure limits-annual managed expenditure, or DEL-AME, switch—the invest-to-save mechanism—using initial savings from getting people off benefits and into work to fund the cost of the programmes that get them there. The Secretary of State has said only that he intends to pilot that plan in two areas after 2010. However, the assessments start in 2010. What will happen in the rest of the country? Where will the extra places come from, and how much extra money does the Secretary of State have to put into the budget for pathways to work programme after 2010 to pay for those extra places? If those places are not there, many of these proposals will not be worth the paper on which they are written. We have had a wasted decade for welfare reform. The Government promised change, but failed to deliver it in the good times. Now unemployment is rising and these proposals will be much more difficult to deliver. The measures in the White Paper are mostly right for Britain and we will vote for them. It is a shame, however, that the Government have talked for so long and done so little. Let us hope that, this time, they will finally do something—start the real reform process and establish proper foundations for change that will enable the next Conservative Government finally to end Britain's entitlement culture.