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Welfare Reform Bill

I shall be brief as the noble Baroness, Lady Hollis, has said it all, including the quote that I was going to make from the Green Paper. This is the ultimate carrot for lone parents, which we on these Benches support. As she suggested at Second Reading and today, giving lone parents on income support who come under the provisions of the Bill a financial incentive to undertake work-related activity would be a much better idea than sanctioning them if they failed to comply. As she has said, claimants of the work-related activity component of ESA already receive an additional premium of £24 above the JSA rate for participating in work-focused interviews. So the concept of this kind of carrot is not new. We thought that it was going to be in this Bill because of what was in the Green Paper. Basing the new policy on incentives rather than sanctions is a much more attractive proposition. It may be worth nothing that when my honourable friend Paul Rowen suggested this proposition in the other place, the then Secretary of State, James Purnell, seemed to be confused. He referred to the additional financial support available to single parents starting in employment, not to those in the progression-to-work group of single parents. We support the amendment and look forward to hearing the Government’s reply.