Welfare Reform Bill

The Bill will be memorable to me for three reasons. The first is, as has already been said extensively, the remarkable degree of consensus on the principle, if not on the detail. The second is my own entirely consensual and painless transition from the Front to the Back Benches during its passage. I am grateful to my hon. Friend the Member for Bury St. Edmunds (Mr. Ruffley) for his kind remarks about that. The third is the entirely unnoticed but nevertheless confessable sin late in the Committee stage of confusing St. Augustine with Martin Luther, which I hope will draw the indulgence of both confessions. We need to remember that the Bill deals with people who are extremely vulnerable. The nature of their relationship with the state is an asymmetric one. The state has abundant coercive power. It can remove benefits from people who have quite small resources. On the other hand, people have to live and find a living. They are not always articulate, they are sometimes unwell and they are sometimes in difficulty. So if we have emphasised the right side of things, and if we have queried, as my hon. Friends and others have done even on Third Reading, some of the applications of the details of the Bill, it has been from the best of motives. As we well know, there is a process of welfare reform encompassing the Bill, the regulations that will need to follow, the decisions that flow from them, and the introduction of contractorisation. It also encompasses the principles that continue into other aspects of welfare reform. I did not succeed in getting my baby, the principles clause, debated here, though perhaps it might attract some attention in another place. Nevertheless, it is not only a matter of law. Ministers might be frightened of judicial review, but I hope that they will take the principles on which we have agreed and put them in the front of their programme for rolling out the Bill, in the regulations that they draw up, in the benefits handbook and the instructions to decision makers and those who advise them, and finally in the way they handle individual cases. In the end, we can agree, and that is a good thing. It is an advance. However, we need to remember that the people about whom we agree do not always have the powers that we have. The credibility of the Bill and what it achieves will stand or fall by whether we treat them decently. It is as simple as that.