Welfare Reform Bill

We support Amendment No. 76. I shall speak to Amendments Nos. 77 to 81 tabled in my name and that of my noble friend. I propose to focus my remarks mainly on Amendment No. 76 because it raises very important questions. While I stand to be corrected, I do not think I quite understand the assurances that the noble Lord believes have been given by the Minister. Our amendments are really just to ensure that in areas such as disability discrimination and so forth, the outside contractors are properly controlled and operating in the same way as the Jobcentre staff would. On the basic question of sanctioning, we read carefully the various assurances given under pressure by the Minister, Mr Murphy, in the Commons. I am bound to say that I was, again, taken with what the Conservative Member for South West Surrey,Mr Hunt, said. He was talking about the concern expressed by private and voluntary sector organisations that it is fundamentally against their ethos to be judges; they want to support and help someone who is trying to engage in the world of work. If wewere talking about sanctions, that would be a fundamentally different role, and that seems to me to be very important. My colleague, Danny Alexander, pressed the Minister to say under what circumstances Ministers would seek to give the private and voluntary sectors the power to make decisions about whether someone’s benefit should be sanctioned. The Minister gave a series of replies, none of which was satisfactory. I hope that, having taken account of that, the noble Lord, Lord McKenzie, will be able to go further and to be more specific than Mr Murphy was in the Commons. He said, first, that, as the capacities of the private and voluntary sectors evolved, decision-making could be passed down to them. He then talked about considering changing the location of the benefit-entitlement decision-maker. He then very firmly said: "““It is important to retain the power in the Bill for further introduction as welfare provision evolves throughout the country””.—[Official Report, Commons Standing Committee A, 31/10/06; col. 332.]" In summing up that discussion, I think it would be fair to say that the Minister was effectively saying, ““We have no plans to outsource benefit cutting or sanctioning for the foreseeable future but we are going to defend to the death our right to do it””. That, to me, is wrong. Either they are planning to do it or, if not and if they have no plans for the foreseeable future, that provision should not be in the Bill and a further Bill should be brought forward in due course in a few years’ time if that is what they want. We have had a good deal of discussion in this Committee, particularly about the problems of mentally ill people and the difficulties that they already have with the system, but are we seriously prepared to give Ministers the power to let private contractors cut benefit for mentally ill people? We on these Benches believe that that would be an unacceptable abdication of responsibility by the Government towards their most vulnerable citizens. I look forward to the noble Lord reassuring us better than the Minister was able to do in the Commons.