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Christmas Adjournment

I want to say a few words about welfare reform. I had hoped to deliver this speech during Monday's debate on the Queen's Speech, but after hours of sitting on the Benches, and as the time available got shorter and shorter, it seemed that it would not be possible to do justice to the subject. I suspect that will be the case again today, so I offer just some preliminary thoughts. What concerns me at the moment is the criticism of the Government's proposals coming from two, probably opposite, sides of the political spectrum. Both have quite a distorted take on what we are doing, and neither helps to take the debate forward. The criticisms do not help the people whom the welfare reform proposals are intended to help. A great deal of scaremongering is going on, and some very vulnerable people could be distressed by it. The first viewpoint, to which I do not subscribe, says that the Labour Government have, by their support for the welfare state over the past 11 years, fostered a welfare dependency culture in this country. That view states that it has almost become the norm to be unemployed, people can have quite a comfortable life living on benefits and we have bred what I tend to call the Jeremy Kyle generation—other people call it the underclass—whereby people have no ambition or aspiration, and there are inter-generational cycles of poverty and worklessness. That has most recently been thrown into the spotlight by the cases of baby P and Shannon Matthews, where the parents or adults involved have been presented as typical examples of the people who have been bred by that sort of culture. The other take on our proposals is that the Government have become bullies. People say that we are almost dragging people from their sickbeds, and that we are forcing people who have very serious disabilities and mothers who have just given birth down to the job centre to take on work that might be completely unsuitable with the threat of benefits being taken away if they do not comply. Neither view is helpful, and I shall say a bit more about that in a moment. The other thing that surprises me is the number of people who seem to regard what the Government have been saying lately as something of a departure from what we have been doing since we were elected in 1997. It has been said that my right hon. Friend the Member for Birkenhead (Mr. Field) was entrusted with thinking the unthinkable, but the Government subsequently lost their nerve and did not go down that path. These welfare reform proposals are very much a continuation of what we have been trying to do since 1997—helping people to make the transition from welfare into work. It is frustrating to have to reiterate that in this debate, but I wish to reiterate it briefly. First, our approach is about the financial side of things: ensuring that people would be better off in work, which involves measures such as tax credits and the minimum wage. Secondly, it is about being able to facilitate working, which means making affordable child care available to people, having flexible working so that people can juggle their other responsibilities and giving the necessary personalised support and encouragement to job seekers through things such as the new deal and Jobcentre Plus. I met Jobcentre Plus staff in Bristol last Friday. We talked in detail about what would really help the welfare reform proposals to work, and we found that it comes down to small things, such as the availability of child care. One of the things that those staff told me—I have been banging on about poor public transport in Bristol ever since I got elected—is that the most important thing for those people, and for lone parents in particular, is how close to the schools and how close to their home the jobs are. People do not want to travel for longer than 20 minutes or half an hour, because when someone is on a tight schedule and they have to drop the kids off at school, go to work for a few hours and then get back to the school gates to pick the kids up or get to the childminders' place, having to use unreliable, expensive buses or having to travel to the other side of the city means that things do not stack up for them. As we introduce personalised support, it is important to remember that it is not about a back-of-the-envelope calculation that someone would be financially better off back at work, because work has to fit into their lives and be practicable and doable. Otherwise, people will try working, give up and fall foul of the new sanctions regime, and their children will be the ones to suffer. The Government deserve credit for approaching this issue in terms of not only adults who are already in the system, but children. We hear a lot about apathetic, good-for-nothing youth, but I have met phenomenal young people in my constituency, and they certainly were not born with silver spoons in their mouths. I was at an awards ceremony in Bristol the other day for young achievers. They do community work and make a real difference to people's lives through their voluntary activity. Part of that is down to changes in the school system. One of my sisters has three children and has just returned from living in Spain. It is amazing to talk to her kids, because they cannot believe that the schools in Kent that they now attend have laptops, interactive whiteboards and independent learning. In Spain, the schools are much like they were when I was at school, with learning by rote, copying things off a blackboard and no stimulation or incentive to take an interest in what is being learned. They have only been back a few months, so the feeling may wear off, but at the moment they are delighted to go to school. I have many sisters, and I could probably keep the debate going until 6 o'clock talking about various aspects of their lives, but one of them has two sons, one aged 18 and one aged six—quite a gap. She tells me that the difference between when the 18-year-old started school and when the six-year-old started school is phenomenal. She has seen the years of change under this Labour Government, which shows that we have made a real difference and that what we have done is working. However, we still have a long way to go. I was struck by what one of the Jobcentre Plus staff said to me on Friday. I presented her with a Remploy regional award for her work with people with disabilities—she went on to win the national award, too. Her name is Julia, and she talked to me about people who have been put on the new employment support allowance regime since October. She said:"““Only one of them doesn't want to work—and he will by the time I've finished with him.””" That might sound like a threat, but it was not. She knows that people are sometimes very nervous when they come to see her. People think that they cannot possibly work, that their disabilities or illness are too great, that they have not worked for years and that they have no qualifications or skills. She knows that she can work with people like that and, with support, encouragement and the right training courses, she can help to turn their lives around. She is not a box-ticker or a bureaucrat, nor is she interested in forcing people into work just for the sake of saying that she has met her targets, but she is passionately devoted to her work. I met some of her colleagues who are working on the new deal for lone parents, and I was impressed by just how seriously they take their work. They welcome what the Government are doing. People talk about an underclass. In one way, I am reluctant to dwell on this issue, because the danger is that it distorts the picture of the majority of those on benefits or who rely on the welfare state as a safety net, the vast majority of whom want to work. It is easy to present a stigmatised and stereotypical image of a lone parent, but the truth is that only 2 to 3 per cent. of lone parents are teenagers, and only 15 per cent. have never been married to or lived with the father of their child. We cannot deny that some families have a multitude of problems and lead dysfunctional and chaotic lives. We need to look at them almost as a separate category, because they will not benefit to such an extent from the new proposals. We have to consider, for example, family intervention projects—we have Sure Start, and the Home Office has a family intervention project. The danger is of being accused of interfering too much in people's lives, but when such families have children, the problems can be passed on to them multiplied tenfold, so we have a responsibility to intervene. The issue is not about judging people by their family structures, which is very wrong. We can talk about whether marriage is the best state in which to bring up children, but we must accept that many people do not grow up in that sort of situation. I do not judge people by whether their parents are married to each other, cohabiting or divorced, or by whether they live with a single parent or stay with their dad at weekends. We should judge people by their relationships, their parenting, their values and their behaviour. I do not think that the financial levers in the welfare reform Bill are enough. We need to have a good hard look at what else we can do to break the cycle with those people. I do not think that Karen Matthews is at all typical of the single parents out there. We have to tell people over and over again that she is not typical, because otherwise it will undermine the whole consensus on which the welfare state is built. However, I do not think that we can turn our backs on people like that and just write them off, either. I just have time to say merry Christmas to everybody, especially you, Madam Deputy Speaker.