Welfare Reform Bill

As has been said, there has been a great deal of cross-party, or all-party, consensus on the principles behind this important Welfare Reform Bill. In particular, there was consensus that we need to encourage greater responsibility from claimants on the one hand, and to offer greater reciprocal support from Government to enable people to get back into work on the other. That is a philosophy that Liberal Democrat Members support very strongly. The Bill is the first that I have dealt with as a Front Bencher, and the same is true of the hon. Member for Bury St. Edmunds (Mr. Ruffley), as he said. I am particularly grateful to my hon. Friend the Member for Yeovil (Mr. Laws) for his support. Like the Minister, I would like to thank the Chairs of the Committee, the Clerks, the police and all other people who made our proceedings, and particularly our Committee proceedings, run so smoothly. I also put on record my thanks to the lobby groups. The hon. Member for Bury St. Edmunds mentioned them, too, and I will not list them all. However, the Disability Rights Commission and the Disability Benefits Consortium, which represents a wide range of organisations, both provided enormously valuable briefings and support on part 1. Shelter and Citizens Advice were particularly helpful on part 2, not least on some issues to do with single room rent, which we debated today. Sometimes, political consensus gets too cosy. The Committee certainly was not cosy; it was friendly and frank, and both the criticisms and the ministerial responses—and, occasionally, concessions—were perceptive. None the less, too cosy a political consensus is not good for the soul, and things can often seem too cosy from the outside, too, so I should like to offer a few pointers on issues that need to be taken further, beyond proceedings on the Bill. On some of them, there will again probably be cross-party consensus, bizarrely enough. First, I return to an issue that I mentioned earlier, although the Minister poured scorn on what I had to say. The issue of funding and support, particularly for the pathways to work programme as it is rolled out, is important. We must make sure that the programme is genuinely available to the 1 million claimants—I suspect that there are actually a lot more than that—who would like to benefit from the additional support. I hope that that subject will be probed further in the other place. On a related subject, in respect of the roll-out of pathways to work and the use of the private and voluntary sector, the job has been half done. The Government are taking steps in the right direction, but they still have not fully grasped the opportunities that can be gained by taking advantage of the innovation of the private and voluntary sectors, and their potential to deliver some of the services. I hope that, in due course, the Government will have greater confidence in taking more radical steps in that direction. We Liberal Democrats will certainly develop our own policy on the subject in months to come. The Minister has been reassuring about the personal capability assessment today, but there is need for a great deal more reassurance, through further research, evaluation and testing, before everyone can be confident that the new test genuinely meets all the needs that people place on it. The Chairman of the Select Committee, the hon. Member for Bradford, North (Mr. Rooney), rightly referred to the role of employers. It is striking that the Bill has often seemed like a supply-side device to get people ready for work. Too little attention is paid, both in the Bill—although that is perhaps natural, given its context—and generally, to the importance of tackling disability discrimination among employers, and raising disability awareness and confidence among employers. That must be done if we are to avoid a situation in which, because of the successful implementation of pathways to work, hundreds of thousands of former claimants are ready for work, but are unable to take advantage of the opportunities available to them because of other barriers, which might relate not to their disability or impairment but to attitudes in wider society. That is why it is so important to take the social model of disability as a conceptual basis for the Bill. On housing benefit, there is unfinished business on the subject of the single room rent and in particular on openness among rent officers, and the way in which the process can be further opened up to public scrutiny. The most significant problem, which taxed everyone in Committee, is the issue of people with mental health problems. There is mixed evidence from the pathways to work pilots of the advantages for people who claim benefit primarily because they have mental health problems. I draw the attention of the House to the work of Lord Layard on the provision of mental health support in the NHS, which is critical to the condition management programme that helps those people to return to work. There is a big gap, however, and a great deal more work must be done if we are to help people with mental health problems back into work. One Committee sitting was rather odd, as all parties declared their support for the long-term objective of a single working-age benefit. Thinking on benefit reform must be directed much more along those lines. I hope that those considerations will be taken into account and, with those few caveats, Liberal Democrats are happy to give the Bill a Third Reading.