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Welfare Reform Bill

I thank my noble friend for that, although I think in practice paragraph (d) allows a Government not to impose conditionality. This measure protects the individual. Of course, I absolutely understand my noble friend’s suspicion that the measure might overrestrict what another Government might do, which would not favour getting people into work. I am sorry; that was meant to be a joke. Let me come back to the matter in hand. Given that we expect the first use to set the principles and to remain broadly unchanged, I hope I can assure noble Lords that affirmative for the first use is appropriate. We have set out how we intend to use this power. We define a threshold, as we have set out in our note, and add in the additional groups, as in the draft regulations. I can assure the noble Lord, Lord McKenzie, that we do not expect significant changes to this. For this reason, I ask him to withdraw this particular amendment.