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Welfare Reform Bill

I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman for that intervention. I will be able to state our position at the end of my remarks, and I think he will be pleased with the answer. When we debated this matter in the Public Bill Committee—[Interruption.] I hear the right hon. Member for Stirling (Mrs. McGuire) chuckling away; I will refer to our exchanges on Report as well. In Committee, the Under-Secretary said:""While the Government fully recognise the intentions behind the new clause, accepting it without having the funding to support ""it would require us to withdraw funding from elsewhere in the benefit system."––[Official Report, Welfare Reform Public Bill Committee, 3 March 2009; c. 270.]" He said that he was not in a position to give a time scale showing when he would be in a position to finance a change to the rules. Two weeks later, when the then Secretary of State, the right hon. Member for Stalybridge and Hyde (James Purnell), was asked the same question at Work and Pensions questions, he was unable to give a commitment on being able to fund it. The very next day, 17 March, when we debated the matter on Report, we had a lively debate in which a number of Members took part. The Under-Secretary said right at the end of his remarks that he was""delighted to announce today that we are now in a position to agree to fund this proposal".—[Official Report, 17 March 2009; Vol. 489, c. 855.]" He said that he took great pleasure in accepting what was then new clause 10, tabled by the hon. Member for Glasgow, North-West (John Robertson), who was in his place earlier but is not here now. That was right at the end of the Minister's remarks, and he then sat down, not giving Members the opportunity to press him on when that measure would come in or how it was to be funded. I took the opportunity afterwards to press him with some written questions, and he confirmed that it would not come into force until 2011-12, a year later than had been indicated in earlier written answers. The Government had not committed to introducing it in 2010-11, but they suggested that that would be the earliest available opportunity. In a written answer about funding the measure, the Minister said:""We are confident that by the date of its introduction the Department will have re-prioritised annually managed expenditure to ensure that funding is available."—[Official Report, 23 March 2009; Vol. 490, c. 83W.]" Putting that together with his previous answer, he was effectively saying that he would take the money away from some other benefit to fund the change. He had not really found the money at all, he was just saying that by 2011 he would have worked out some way of paying for it. I can see why he did not particularly want to be pressed on the matter, and it is important that we put that on the record. In answer to the question that the hon. Member for Northavon (Steve Webb) asked, in thinking about the future I have had some conversations with my hon. Friend the shadow Chief Secretary to the Treasury. I can confirm that if—subject to the voters—we were in government in 2011, we would indeed bring that measure forward and fund it from within the departmental budget. It will therefore go forward whatever the result of the general election.