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Welfare Reform Bill

My Lords, my surprise, in view of what the noble Lord, Lord Freud, has said, is that he has not pressed his amendment again. Will he explain to his e-mail recipients why he has not done so, because I do not believe that the Bill would have been lost? During the passage of the Bill through this House, we have come a long way over the issue of lone parents and when and how they should prepare for work. In overturning the amendment in the other place, admittedly a flawed amendment from Report, which sought to exempt some lone parents with children under school age from the work-related activity sanctions regime, the Government have now tabled this amendment in lieu, which simply gives the House a chance to have another debate on affirmative statutory instruments about the issue of work-related activity before the pilots are rolled out nationally. I think that the statutory instrument is for lone parents with children under the age of seven. This is certainly a way of drawing the House’s attention to the issue, but it is an extremely rare procedure for the House to vote down a statutory instrument. I am sorry that the Grand Committee gave such short shrift to my attempt to bring super-affirmatives into the Bill. That procedure would have given the House the chance to suggest amendments, although it would still only be the Government who could amend the statutory instrument. In parenthesis, it always strikes me as misleading that affirmative statutory instruments are laid in draft as though Parliament had the power to amend them, but that is a debate for another day. Turning back to the subject of lone parents of very young children and the work-related activity sanctions regime, I was encouraged that the Minister said on Report and again today in terms that the action plan agreed at work-focused interviews could be as light as one work-related activity between two three-monthly work-focused interviews. He also made it clear that any work-related activity would be required to suit only the hours that the lone parent could manage and that if satisfactory childcare was not available, no work-related activity would be expected. The Minister also made it clear, both on Report and again today, that any financial penalty would be the very last sanction to be imposed after four failures to comply with work-related activity. At the end of all this, we come back to the fundamental question at the heart of this section of the Bill. Is this whole sanctions regime for lone parents, starting when their child is three, aimed at giving them a genuinely helping hand out of a life on benefits and therefore relative poverty, or is it beating them with a stick to make sure that they comply with the demands of the state or risk losing benefits when they have their hands full with the demands of a young child? How Jobcentre Plus offices around the country make this part of the Bill work will be all-important. We must all hope that staff there are sensitive to our concerns about this very vulnerable group of parents. If we hear that all the safeguards in the Bill are not enough to stop too many lone parents of very young children falling foul of the sanctions regime, we on these Benches will not flinch from voting down the appropriate statutory instruments rolling out this part of the Bill in due course. In the mean time, we hope that the sanctions regime for all groups of vulnerable people will be used as little as possible during the pilots and that they will all be monitored as closely as possible before rollout.