Welfare Reform Green Paper

My Lords, I am grateful to my noble friend for his general welcome. I am sure that we will enjoy his contribution when legislation is brought before your Lordships’ House. He made an important point about undue pressure being put on someone who has suffered health problems or is disabled. I assure him that the kind of process that we are taking forward, built on the experience of Pathways to Work, is very much about encouragement and support. The previous system has been passive and all the incentives have been wrong. We want to turn the incentives around with the impact that work-focused interviews can have. This is about ensuring that people are given support to be as independent as possible. It is not too much to ask for an element of conditionality in the requirement to attend work-focused interviews. As time passes, we will develop that in terms of work-based activity. That might embrace training and tasters of work so that someone can discover what it is like to be at work again if they have been on benefits for a long time. There is a rights and responsibilities agenda. It is right for us to be assured that it is appropriate for a person to continue to be on benefits or to go onto benefits in the first place. Here I would commend the new personal capability assessment process that we will develop, which, instead of just focusing on the nature of incapacity, will assess whether a person should be on benefit and look at their capability for work. My hope and intention is that this should be seen as a positive process. We should never forget that the outcomes for a person will be much better if they can be in work than if they have to remain on benefit.