---

Welfare Reform

My Lords, I thank the noble Lord for that question. I not only share his concern but I am very firmly on the record as being very concerned about the division between the Work First strategies that we have been adopting in this country and skills and training. One of the mainstream drivers of the work programme philosophy is an attempt to pull training and employment strategies together. It does that partly by price differentiation, so as people become tougher to put into work, the price goes up. We need to find the right mechanisms to make sure that we price up. It does it also by ensuring that the payments system in the work programme is based on sustainment in work, which can be for one, two or three years. You do not sustain someone in work for a long time unless you pull in the whole training and education element. That kind of change should be going through.