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Welfare Reform Bill

Clearly, the assumption behind all this is that drug users are economically rational, change their behaviour in response to financial sanctions, and so on. One wishes; I hope. I sent a note on this to the noble Baroness, Lady Meacher. I absolutely support what my noble friend is trying to do, which is to use the hook of this to try to turn lives around. We would normally have, for any person with dependants who is exposed to sanctions, a hardship regime, so that they can be sanctioned to only, say, 10 or 20 per cent of their benefit and they continue to get the rest. That is never normally applied to single people, and I suspect that most drug users will be single people—certainly not in sustained relationships. Given that my noble friend has accepted that we are talking about illness—I am sure that the Department of Health will support him on this—conventionally, in social security policy, anyone with an illness is entitled to hardship finance as opposed to having their benefit completely wiped out. Can my noble friend help me? Will someone who, without good cause—because good cause assumes a rationality that, almost by definition, someone with a mental health problem does not possess—none the less, by virtue of that illness comes within the category of vulnerability, of dependency, be therefore exposed only to a limited sanction rather than a wipeout of the complete benefit?