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Welfare Reform Bill

My Lords, I have a quick question for the Minister. I also thank the noble Lord, Lord McKenzie, for giving us the opportunity for this short debate. I wanted to ask the Minister about mentors for these individuals—what one finds, for instance, in the National Grid programme for young offenders, which has been so successful in rehabilitating young offenders. A key factor in that is the use of mentors in the workplace. In the Youth Justice Board they are finding a great deal of success, again by using mentors in tandem with accommodation charities, and so on. In the past, the mentoring work of YoungMinds has identified that long-term relationships with a mentor have positive outcomes for young people. One of the very effective charities working with children in schools, Volunteer Reading Help, has volunteers who commit to at least a year’s work with the children. Given the importance of mentoring, and my sense from discussions on apprenticeships that not much thought has been given to developing and training those individuals in the workplace who provided mentoring for apprentices, I would be interested to hear from the Minister now, or perhaps to have a note from him later, about how they intend to develop mentors for individuals caught by this clause in the future.