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Welfare Reform Bill

I strongly support this amendment and declare an interest, going back many years now, when I was involved as a local authority housing chair in setting up both a refuge for battered women and some of the halfway houses to which they were able to move. Obviously, circumstances changed and differed among the women who suffered domestic violence, but most who came to the refuge had to move on every few weeks as an aggressive, abusive and violent man sought to find them. They would try to track down their children at school, follow them back from school and then break the windows of the refuge. Above and beyond all the physical assaults that lone parent had had, she had to deal with the fact that she and her children were constantly moving home and school; sometimes she would even move out of the local authority area into an adjacent local authority area for her own safety. Apart from all the trauma and stress of the impossible situation in which that put the lone parent, it was impossible for the DWP and any prospective employer to have a working relationship with somebody who was essentially on the move for her own physical safety. That will not be true of all of them, but it was true of many of the women that I worked with those years back. For all sorts of reasons, I hope that my noble friend can agree the amendment today and we can bank it and regard this as a step forward. There is no way that such a woman in such a situation will be job-ready or remain focused on work when she is thinking about her physical safety and her child’s emotional safety. I hope that my noble friend will simply say that it is a done deal; that would be terrific, we could all applaud him and we could all go home thinking that we had achieved something worth while.