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Welfare Reform Bill

It is one thing to have the availability; it is a totally different thing to have to need to use it in particular cases. I was trying to illustrate that. This is an extremely complicated subject. However, one thing that is fundamental to all this is the position of the long-term unemployed individual. I spoke of my personal confusion about who is the personal adviser in any particular case. There is no argument that the operation starts within Jobcentre Plus and that there is a personal adviser who, up to now, has been—from memory—a job adviser. That job is contracted out and somebody else from the prime contractor looks on a day-to-day basis after the long-term unemployed individual. I hope I have that right. The job adviser and Jobcentre Plus must presumably maintain some measure of control in all this. Therefore, it is very important that we understand the relationship between the private sector adviser and the Jobcentre Plus adviser because both people will be in existence at the same time in relation to the long-term unemployed individual and they will have to talk to each other if only because the jobcentre adviser is the person giving directions, dealing with sanctions and so on, on the advice of the contractor’s adviser. I am sorry to make this complicated. I have not written it out in quite such detail as I might have done, but those were the sort of questions that I was asking in this group of amendments. I suspect that it would help us all if the Minister were to write us a letter on exactly how this relationship is going to work, unless of course he wants to do the operation verbally now.