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Welfare Reform Bill

My Lords, we are getting into philosophy here. I accept the point and have always been uncomfortable with the ““work first”” philosophy. It worked in the short term, as the noble Baroness has said, but the evidence is that, in relative terms, we have a poor workforce because we have too many people with no skills and too few with intermediate skills by comparison with our main competitors. We have to think about the balance between ““work first””—which does get people a job—and the risk that training is sometimes used as an excuse to do nothing. There is a difficult balance here. We have not got it right. We had a welfare-to-work system that got it completely wrong. We are trying to pull it together. I do not think that this is going to be a rapid process but everyone in this room knows that it is very important to get this right. It will take some years to get it right but we are beginning to travel in the right direction.