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Welfare Reform Bill

I support the amendment. I think we have to get real about what happens in practice. What normally happens—it happens in all departments of state—is that they implement a law; they do not know how it works in practice; and then they go and engage a social research unit from an important university to set about a huge research project to find out whether it worked. I have been involved in several of those projects myself. The researchers then go back to the department to get the data but the data do not exist. With the Mental Health Act legislation, for example, no information at all about its implementation in certain groups was collected for about 15 years after 1980. They had no idea about the categories of people subject to it. We know from research literature from the United States that there are certain categories of people who have not done very well with these schemes. They will probably be in the minority and will be hidden in the generality of the results produced about how many people are moving into work and work-related activity. You will not see them because they will be totally lost in the data and the statistics will not show them. We should therefore ensure that we are collecting sufficient data which can at least be translated into information. As the noble Lord, Lord Rix, said, that is not that difficult. Practically all the categories of people we are talking about always carry with them evidence concerning which category they fall into. It can be a very private thing but you will not be breaching medically confidential information. People will need to give this information to their employment advisers regardless. There could be some very simple categories. One might suspect from existing research that some broad categories do not do very well whereas others may do very well indeed. Losing that information in the generality would be a great shame. So I should resist the amendment from the point of view of my colleague researchers in universities who will be lumbered with trying to fathom it in 15 years’ time.