Welfare Reform Bill

I am not sure whether the hon. Gentleman includes among his many qualities that of being a clairvoyant, but he introduces the point that I intended to address. He raises an important issue. It has been made clear on all sides that there is a general wish that any claimant of employment support allowance, whether a member of the support group or of the work-related activity group, should be able to benefit from the support that is available under pathways to work. However, there is a dilemma that needs to be crystallised so that the Minister has a chance to respond to it. If the burden of the new clause and the other amendments in this group is that the entitlement to take part in pathways to work should be made more explicit, it must also be clear that the support being discussed is available. I do not think I had a satisfactory answer from the Minister in Committee, if I may say so. The question is whether the commitment of funding to enable the scale and extent of pathways to work support that is hinted at by the amendments and by the Bill is available in practice. Calculations that I have made suggest that in the pathways to work pilot areas the average cost of providing support was £571 per claimant. Given that the Government have allocated only £360 million to the rollout of pathways to work and to other aspects of the Bill, such as the IT systems required for the new employment support allowance, that would suggest that it is proposed to spend less then £327 per claimant in the rollout. For new claimants alone, the level of resources will not be adequate to provide the same degree of service as has been provided in the pathways to work pilots, which are widely agreed to have been successful. I am concerned that unless we get some clear answers from the Minister about where the resources will come from to allow an adequate level of support through pathways to work so that, for example, all those who may be members of a support group can volunteer freely and of their own volition to take part in pathways to work, in the knowledge that support is available to them, the Bill could end up raising and then dashing the hopes of those people. All of us would wish to avoid that state of affairs. The lack of funding and of financial resource for the rollout of pathways to work, if it is to be extended to all claimants, including those in the support group, is a major weakness in the Government’s proposal. I hope the Minister will take the opportunity to reassure the House that he has an answer to that.