Welfare Reform Bill

We are committed to writing to the noble Lord about our debate last time about spreading best practice. With regard to provider-led arrangements, there are clear requirements in the contractual arrangements for the dissemination of best practice. It is not something you can bottle, though; in many ways it is cultural. If we do not ensure that best practice is shared across the piece, this will not be as successful as it could be. Everyone has an interest in ensuring that we share best practice. That is easy to say, but more difficult to achieve, I acknowledge. To return to my script, we took the bold step of moving beyond the old system of just giving financial handouts to customers. We have embedded the principle of the Government offering back-to-work support through the new benefit. Instead of abandoning people, that approach supports customers’ ambitions of returning to work. The success of the measures we have introduced bears repeating: we have more than doubled the job entries in Pathways areas compared with non-Pathways areas, and there has been an increase of more than 9 percentage points in employment for new customers after 10 and a half months. Ultimately, central to the successful approach are sanctions for those who refuse to engage with us and have no good cause not to. That is fair, particularly on the vast majority who want to, and do, engage with us. The purpose of the sanctions is not to punish customers arbitrarily, but instead to ensure that there is a clear incentive to engage with the support on offer. That is reflected in the draft regulations we have published for Clauses 10 and 11, which will remove a sanction once the customer has participated in the conditionality requirement. In Pathways pilots the awareness of sanctions has led to customers engaging with us and sanctions being applied in only about 1 per cent of cases. We are not just requiring those subject to conditionality to engage in interviews. The work-focused health-related assessment will identify what an individual can do, any health-related barriers that prevent him from moving towards work and the health-related interventions that could help to break down those barriers. In time, and as resources allow, we will require customers to engage in work-related activity to help them overcome their barriers to work. Before discussing treatment of a failure to meet conditionality requirements, I shall touch on how we notify customers of requirements to undertake interviews.