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Welfare Reform

My Lords, I served on the New Deal taskforce for many years and then on the National Employment Panel for seven years. I am delighted and heartened by many of the initiatives in the Government’s programme for welfare-to-work reform, in particular tackling the benefits trap. We used to talk about the Australian experience. I spoke to John Howard after he stepped down as Prime Minister and asked him about Australia’s welfare-to-work experience, which we used to look to as a great success. He said that he did not want to remove the safety net but to get people back to work. One way in which his Government had sought to do that was a programme whereby people were made to do some community service. He thought that it would be a very unpopular move; it turned out to be very popular, because people who worked and paid taxes did not like to see people, quite a few of whom could have worked, not working. As a result, the Australian Government got public support for it. Have the Government looked at the Australian experience? Have they learnt from it? Do they think that it was a good and effective scheme, and will their scheme be as effective?