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Welfare Reform Bill

May I begin by welcoming the Minister to the proceedings on this Bill? He has obviously spent some time studying the provisions, and he will know from previous debates that we on this side of the House have expressed broad support for the Bill and its objectives. We support many of the measures in the Bill—as we should, indeed, since we suggested many of them before the Government took them up. I admire the dexterity with which the Minister has approached the Lords amendments, and the main issue that lies at the heart of them. The House could be forgiven for forgetting about Lords amendment 2 altogether, given how long it took the Minister to come to it. From the outset, therefore, I want to make it clear that this is the issue that lies between the parties as far as these Lords amendments are concerned. I shall take a little time to go through the issue, as I think that the Minister will have to accept, when he hears what we have to say about it, that we have been completely consistent. We welcome many of the safeguards, but he has spent such a long time putting them in place and speaking about them that it makes one wonder what is the point of the sanction in the first place. We remain uncomfortable about that sanction for reasons that I shall explain. In approaching the question of what is to be required of lone parents, I agree with the generality of what the Minister said about getting them ready for work. We certainly believe that it is important that lone parents be helped to prepare for work, and we have not opposed general moves to take a more active approach in that field—far from it. We were at the forefront in suggesting that the age at which income support would come to an end should be lowered, and that there should be a transfer from income support to jobseeker's allowance. The Minister knows the thinking of my right hon. Friend the Member for Chingford and Woodford Green (Mr. Duncan Smith) on the issue, and that seems to have played a part in shaping the Government's thinking. We note that until last year single parents were entitled to remain on income support until their youngest child reached 16 years old. Such parents were, therefore, under what has generally been described as a passive regime, which neither made many requirements of them nor, certainly for parents of children up to 16 years old, contained the threat of sanctions that is now in the Bill. The effect of the Government's proposals is to lower the bar for those sanctions from the age of 16 to the age of three. The Government announced the reform of the income support regime for lone parents only in the summer of 2007, and began its phased implementation last year. We have heard from the Minister about amendments in another place introducing safeguards on the requirements to be made of single parents when it comes to work-related activity, and we broadly support those safeguards. They were, in fact, announced as policy when the Bill was in Committee in our place, so in a small way I suppose that they mark progress. However, the important part of this debate is that, after all that the Minister has told us about safeguards, and the lengthy process of missed interviews, case reviews, written warnings, further warnings, home visits, fourth warnings and so on, there remains the possibility that lone parents with pre-school age children of three and four years old could face financial sanctions as a result of failing to comply with the proposed regime.