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Welfare Reform Bill

My Lords, it will be fairly obvious to most of your Lordships that these amendments are not entirely unrelated to the amendment that I am going to move in a little while. I am not certain of this, of course, but I have a feeling that the proposed amendments regarding the test for the discretion to be used have arisen out of discussions that I have had, which my noble friend Lord De Mauley has been at too, about the effect of the test in relation to charging. I will not elaborate on that now. I would just be interested to know on what basis this test was originally put into the Bill. It must have been the subject of instruction; parliamentary counsel are extremely creative, but only on the basis of what they are asked to do. They are very good at finding words to express what you want. I wonder, and my noble friend may know the answer to this, what they were asked to do in the first instance. Does this reflect a change in the underlying request or not? The third amendment concerns the review. That was certainly mentioned to me by the Secretary of State when I met him a week yesterday. I am entirely in favour of that. However, I suggested to him that it would be fair to do it on my basis and that that would be a real test of how good my suggestion was. However, it was suggested, ““No, we will test it on my basis””—that is, on his basis. Therefore, from my point of view there is not much of an improvement as yet, but who knows what may happen? At present, the amendment is very welcome but, so far as I am concerned, it does not help me at all.