Welfare Reform Bill

My Lords, like other noble Lords, I very much hope that my noble friend will be able to support the amendment or that, if he cannot do so in its present shape, he can see how far he can meet these concerns by Third Reading. I hope that he can do that for three reasons. First, as services need to be reviewed and assessed continually by the users, we must engage users of services—they own them and they can shape them, with the result that the services would be improved. We have surely learnt that over the past 20 years in all our public service activity. Secondly, when a service user is engaged in reviewing services, he should not be out of pocket. A well established social security rule is that, if you can be paid, you are deemed to have been paid whether you have accepted payment or not. I understand the complexities associated with that; without it, we would have manipulation between income and capital, between capital and income and so on. None the less, there is a perfectly good read-across to local authority work in relation to this and no one should be out of pocket. Ideally, people should have modest recompense for their time and their activity. Thirdly—this is absolutely right—one of the problems, which we know from people on disability benefit, is that their world becomes smaller. They lose the knowledge network of jobs and of capacities for entering the world of work, and they lose the confidence to enter the world of work. Although it may take one year, three years or 10 years before someone is ready to return to remunerated work, with tax credits and so on, this proposal is a useful step. We have made these moves with volunteering; we have already established in previous legislation that, if someone volunteers for something, that will not mean that they are regarded as ready for work. We have established those rules for local authorities, too. There are plenty of precedents, so I hope that we will do the same in this case. Other people have rightly said that ultimately we should recast the whole of the earnings disregard rules. No cost is established on this; no benefits will be ““less paid”” than they would be otherwise. In practice, people will not expose themselves to a loss of benefit. This is a nil-cost amendment. If my noble friend feels that he cannot go all the way—I would understand that on the earnings disregard—at least the rule should be extended to non-departmental public bodies, where we want the input of service users across the board, not just for mental health trusts and the like, but also for other public bodies and public quangos, where we want to expand the world of disabled people, lone parents and so on and get the quality and value of their experience. I very much hope that, if my noble friend cannot go all the way with the amendment, he will take it away with the understanding that he will seek to make movement towards the spirit that I am sure the entire House shares.