---

Welfare Reform Bill

Following on my noble friend’s questions, as we leave Clause 1 there are practical issues still to be resolved—certainly in my mind if in no-one else’s. For the avoidance of doubt, I declare an interest as a non-remunerated, non-executive director of the Wise Group, which provides intermediate labour market jobs in Glasgow; it is a social enterprise of which I have been a director for three or four years. It is exactly the kind of organisation that may in future take advantage of bidding for these contracts. Reinforced by the previous debate about whether 2001 was a long while ago, I should like an assurance about the timetable. I am not looking for hard and fast dates but for an impression of how long it will take to complete due diligence and get the scheme up and running. If everything that can go right does go right, when does the department expect to be able to offer this employment programme? It is important for us to have an idea about that as we leave this clause. The Minister will know that the preferred bidders are already out for the Flexible New Deal contract, phase 1 of which will start in 2009 and phase 2 next spring. I expect the employment programme set out in Clause 1 to come in after the second year of the Flexible New Deal has been gone through by customers and claimants, who would then be available for "work for your benefits". So one way of looking at this is to say, "The scheme is at least two years away after the programme starts, so we have plenty of time". However, there are some fast-track provisions in the legislation which I want to understand. If a discretionary power is available to a personal adviser and a customer or claimant comes in who would be particularly assisted by gaining access to a "work for your benefit" scheme, could that be anticipated before the end of the two-year period normally expected before these programmes become available? If there are going to be pilots—my noble friend made the powerful point that there is no guarantee that there will be—will one be in a rural area? Can we explicitly have an assurance that there will be pilots in rural areas? We have had a very good debate about childcare, and the Minister has been very helpful in trying his best to respond to the questions, but I suspect that there is still scepticism about whether this will all work out in the way that he thinks. We will not be able to be sure about that in rural areas unless we study it in great detail. I make a plea for that and hope that he can give us an assurance. Can he give us an idea of where the scheme will fall on the scale of price per customer claimant? Colleagues probably understand that in employment programmes, a range of costs per head are used to price contracts of this kind. Some can be as low as £2,500 a year per customer for very basic Jobcentre Plus support. In some employment areas I have had experience of some customer claimants having upwards of £10,000 a year spent on them. That sounds like a lot of money, but if it gets people into sustainable, long-term work, it always saves the taxpayer money. I should like to have an idea of where this will fall in the scale of things. I assume that for it to work and work well, it will need to be at the upper end. If we are trying to get specialist providers to do that very difficult work, I would expect the programme cost to be framed towards the £10,000, not towards the £2,000 figure, as the contracts are worked out. I am very nervous about recycling. I am very nervous about people coming to the end of 26 weeks of this programme and being recycled into stage three of Flexible New Deal. That is going round in circles. If nothing else happens, they can go round in circles indefinitely. That is in absolutely no one’s interests. I should like some assurances about what plans, if any, there are to deal with people who go right to the end of year one in Jobcentre Plus, right to the end of a year of Flexible New Deal in the hands of the Wise Group, or whoever, right to the end of the 26-week period of this scheme and then go right back to stage three of Flexible New Deal. We need to think very carefully. There should be provision in that circumstance to reclassify them as people who have no job requirement, to go into the old ESA category where there is no conditionality of any kind. That should be an option, because at that stage we may have uncovered difficulties that were undetected earlier. Can we have an assurance that there will be a system for complaining that is absolutely transparent to customers? I have read the case studies; I know what the Government say; I also know, however, that if you are working with an employment provider, it is very difficult to complain to them if it is them that you are complaining about. If I am on the "work for your benefit" scheme and I have a real issue about how I am being handled, what is the complaints procedure? Can the Minister give us a guarantee that there will be some easily identifiable way to deal not with your immediate job supervisor but someone in authority either in the contracted-out provider—or, probably better, in Jobcentre Plus—to whom you can say, "I am not getting a fair deal here. I need some support", and that that will be addressed? Finally—I think I know the answer to this—it would be excellent if the Minister could give us a categorical assurance during the passage of the Bill that voluntary activity, as decided by the claimant, will be possible under "work for your benefit". That is to say, if I go through year one with Jobcentre Plus, then year two with the Wise Group, or whoever, and then I really want to volunteer with the Salvation Army and think that there is a case for me doing that because it will help me get long-term confidence and work experience and get me back into the employment market, I should be entitled to do that as part of "work for your benefit". The important part of that volunteer work within the scheme is that it is determined by the claimant—obviously in conjunction with the personal adviser. He or she cannot be told to do something that they do not want to do, but if there is something that they are keen and enthusiastic to do, they can. I have seen that work in schemes in Glasgow where, if you get a well-organised framework for placements, it is almost like an intermediate labour market and is a cheaper way to do it, to get some weeks, if not months, of some volunteering activity—volunteering with a capital "v"—at the discretion of the claimant. If it was made clear that that was possible, that would make the success of the scheme more likely than it otherwise might be. There are some practical details here that we need reassurance about before we leave Clause 1 and move on.