Welfare Reform Bill

Not at all. Many of those regulations are technical and flow, as the noble Lord, Lord Skelmersdale, said, from changing the current IB system. The Delegated Powers and Regulatory Reform Committee made recommendations in relation to Part 1 of the Welfare Reform Bill. We have accepted those and have tabled amendments to Clauses 25 and 67, and Schedules 3 and 6. The amendments will make regulations made under the following powers subject to the affirmative procedure: Clause 2(2)(c) and (3)(c), as well as Clause 4(4)(c) and (5)(c) regarding additional conditions of entitlement to the support and work-related activity components; Clause 15(2), to which I shall return, where the regulations relate to the contracting out of decision-making functions in relation to failure to comply with conditionality requirements; Section 65(4A) of the Child Support, Pensions and Social Security Act 2000—this subsection will be inserted into the 2000 Act as a result of a consequential amendment in Schedule 3 to the Bill; and Sections 7(4B) and 9(4B) of the Social Security Fraud Act 2001—these subsections will be inserted into the 2001 Act as a result of a consequential amendment in Schedule 3 to the Bill. We have also followed the committee’s recommendation on Schedule 6, which would allow us to add, amend or remove cases from the list of those in which a person is not to be regarded as a relevant employer of a person disabled by a disease to which this Act applies. In addition, the committee commented in relation to the annual review of amounts of employment and support allowance. We have considered the issue further and have tabled an amendment to Schedule 3 to the Bill to amend Section 150(1) of the Social Security Administration Act, placing an obligation on the Secretary of State to review the relevant employment and support allowance amounts in each tax year to determine if they have retained their value. I am most grateful to the committee for their recommendations and comments and I shall, therefore, move those amendments. On non-Government Amendment No. 92, I believe that the amendments that we have tabled will satisfy the concerns raised by the noble Lord. Amendment No. 92 would make all regulations under Part 1 subject to the affirmative procedure. That would go much further than the Delegated Powers and Regulatory Reform Committee’s recommendations and would result in a significant and inappropriate burden on time in both Houses and make the new benefit hard to manage in relation to meeting customer’s needs. We need to build a social security system that takes account of changing needs and circumstances and it is crucial that our regulations can be updated quickly. Many of the changes to regulations involved in this process will be technical, so it would not be appropriate to subject them to the full affirmative procedure. The committee’s recommendations strike a sensible balance and requiring all Part 1 regulations to be made under the affirmative procedure is unnecessary. On Amendment No. 38, quite rightly, the review of the PCA has attracted considerable interest and it is essential for us to evaluate how it is working. Your Lordships will have seen the recently published evaluation report of phase 1—a limited exercise carried out last October. A more comprehensive phase 2 evaluation is due to begin in March. The Minister for Employment and Welfare Reform has given an undertaking that he will continue to monitor the effectiveness of the revised PCA for the first two years following implementation. After then, a decision will be taken on the best way to provide further evaluation. Like the phase 1 evaluation, phase 2 will be carried out by independent healthcare and other professionals from the technical working groups and will continue to involve the independent external experts in the ongoing programme of evaluation. Asking the Commission for Equality and Human Rights to provide an annual report on the operation of the PCA assessment would distort this natural accountability, placing at least some of the responsibility for policy operation stewardship elsewhere rather than on those responsible for the specific policy and its operation. The assessment of limited capability for work involves evaluating the effects of medical conditions on individual people. This inevitably requires the exercise of clinical judgment, because it involves assessment of symptoms, such as pain, which cannot be measured exactly. This amendment would require the Commission for Equality and Human Rights to carry out evaluation of a process involving medical judgment, for which it is not equipped. To impose an entirely new and unrelated burden on the Commission for Equality and Human Rights, such as that proposed, would be inappropriate and conflict with the high degree of independence envisaged for it. Adequate and appropriate provision is already in place to achieve the aims that the noble Lord seeks. Policy development and implementation are monitored for their impact on disabled people and we can provide access to published information. Of course, there are also the usual parliamentary safeguards of Select Committees and parliamentary questions. A number of specific points were raised. I shall deal first with the point raised by the noble Lord, Lord Skelmersdale, about Amendment No. 95, which would make regulations under Clause 15(2) relating to the contracting out of decision-making functions in relation to the failure to comply with conditionality requirements that make those subject to the affirmative procedure; that is, if we contract out decision making under Clauses 10, 11 or 12, we can do so only after affirmative regulations have been made. I hope that helps the noble Lord. The noble Baroness, Lady Thomas, asked whether removing the three point-scoring descriptors in the PCA was just a way of ensuring that fewer people are entitled to benefit. The answer to that is no. The technical groups involved in the review were unanimous that those descriptors do not add up to an overall level of disability at which it is unreasonable to require people to work, but rather they reflect the sort of condition that any person might expect to experience without having any resulting functional limitation. The noble Baroness also raised issues about LIMA. The computer is a prompt and a tool that is used by healthcare professionals; it does not carry out the assessment. It is very important that that distinction is recognised. The noble Baroness also asked about stakeholders being involved in changing the LIMA programme. LIMA is a dynamic system which is continually being improved in response to feedback from a number of sources, including users and stakeholders. Of course, it will need extensive amendment to reflect the changed descriptors and scores of the revised PCA. Designing these changes is best left to those who are expert in the medical and technical requirements. Atos Origin is always pleased to receive a more carefully considered contribution from stakeholders, particularly in relation to such things as key questions that should be programmed into the system to ensure that the right information is being used in assessing functional capability.