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Welfare Reform Bill

As the Minister said, this is a miscellaneous group of amendments—and I shall speak to a few of them. Lords amendments 1 and 24 deal with pilots. I agree with the Minister that the need for those pilots has been superseded by a change in legislation, but I want to press him in one area that may provide a lesson on how Ministers conduct pilots in future. The pilots were originally introduced in 2001. Given that they are no longer needed, it is right to remove their legislative basis, but eight years seems like a fair wait. In the other place, there was a debate about how long the pilots had run for, how long the assessment had taken, and how long the decision had taken to introduce something else. We need to ensure that the pilots on new measures in the Bill run for no longer than is necessary to establish whether there is sufficient evidence as to whether they work—and that if they do work, we should not necessarily run them for their full period, but should learn from them and then decide whether they should be rolled out more widely. That would be a sensible lesson to draw from the amendments. Lords amendments 13, 14, 17 and 18 improve the extent to which this House and the other place have control over some of the proposals in the Bill, by inserting affirmative resolutions and replacing ministerial direction with a need for regulations. Those measures are welcome, as they strengthen the powers of this House. Lords amendment 16 relates to disability living allowance and the extension of higher-rate mobility allowance to people with a visual impairment. Will the Minister clarify where the funding for that will come from? When we discussed the relevant new clause on Report, the Under-Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, the hon. Member for Chatham and Aylesford (Jonathan Shaw), who is in his place, announced the Government's decision to support it right at the end of the debate, so there was insufficient opportunity to probe him on the date of the introduction of the change, and exactly where the Government had found the funding for it.