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Welfare Reform Bill

In the absence of my noble friend Lord Alderdice, whose name is on the amendment, I shall speak briefly in support of it. However, a lot of my words will be exactly the same as those used by the noble Baroness, Lady Meacher. I do not want to repeat them all. My speech also contains the phrase "we may be pushing at an open door". The noble Baroness quoted the words of the Minister in the other place, so I shall not do so. However, the Government have made clear that activities to stabilise health conditions can be included as part of work-related activity, and hence a claimant might be subject to sanction if they are not undertaken. The worry of health professionals like my noble friend Lord Alderdice, who is a psychiatrist, is that the measures in the Bill have the potential to blur the boundaries of consent. While claimants might appear to consent to do particular activities, such as take certain medical treatment, it might not be entirely clear to them that they had a choice. Therefore, the taking of such medical treatment might be seen not as a voluntary decision but compulsory if the claimant wanted to go on receiving their full benefit entitlement. One of the main worries of health professionals and others is, as my colleague the noble Baroness, Lady Meacher, said—I would like to call her my noble friend but I shall call her my noble colleague—that, whatever else a Jobcentre Plus personal adviser is, he or she is not a trained health professional, but could potentially be requiring a claimant to undertake specific activities to improve their health. This might extend to therapy programmes, medication regimes or to other activities such as exercise or weight management. If these activities are genuinely agreed voluntarily by the claimant, that is all well and good, but we must be sure that this will always be the case. That is why we need a statutory safeguard in this very important area of how the Bill will work in practice.