Lone Parent Employment

: I agree. The Government deserve some credit for recognising that, in areas such as incapacity benefit, a huge range of services need to be joined together and funded if people with long-term illnesses are to be helped back into the labour market. We all know from Government figures that when someone is on incapacity benefit for a year or more, they are stuck on that benefit for eight years on average, and might need considerable help to get back into the labour market. The funding of incapacity benefit reform and pilots is critical. Will the Minister clarify the success of the existing employment zones? I understand that some have been extremely successful, and that the Government have allocated some of the funding that might have been spent through Jobcentre Plus to private sector deliverers to encourage them to get people back into the labour market. I have been told that although the zones have been successful, their range has been limited and that there are no clear plans to roll them out further. It would be interesting to receive clarification from the Minister. Over the past 20 years, there has been an enormous turnaround in the number of people on incapacity benefit compared with the number of people on jobseeker's allowance. The figures have flipped on their head. We are now spending three times as much on incapacity benefit as we are on jobseeker's allowance. One of the reasons might be that, as was said earlier, jobseeker's allowance has been at fixed prices for the past 20 years, so its value has contracted rapidly. It is set at what most people would regard as a low level. The longer term incapacity benefit rates are set higher, and many people might be suspicious that, given the differential between the two, there is a considerable incentive for people to get themselves on incapacity benefit, not jobseeker's allowance. When the benefits system was established in its relatively modern form by Mr. Beveridge, he was very clear that benefit levels would be set against a measure of how much people needed to live on to stay out of poverty. I believe that I am right in saying that he thought that it would be appropriate to set benefits for people who were out of work because they could not get a job at the same rate as benefits for people who had disabilities and therefore could not get a job. One can imagine that some people who are unemployed because they cannot find a job and others who cannot get employment because they have disabilities might have similar economic needs. Have the Government ruled out having a single rate of benefit for people on incapacity benefit and those on jobseeker's allowance? Presumably, it would need to be set at a higher rate than jobseeker's allowance, but would that not be more rational than the present position, whereby people have a large incentive to get themselves on incapacity benefit rather than on jobseeker's allowance? I appreciate that the transition to such a new benefit would be complex and that there would be understandable concerns about winners and losers, but is there really much logic in the present system? In addition, given the Government's concerns about the abuse of incapacity benefit and about people who end up stuck on that benefit because of legitimate illness, would it not be sensible to look at that option?