Welfare Reform Bill

moved Amendment No. 51: 51: Clause 25, page 19, line 12, leave out paragraph (b) and insert— ““( ) regulations under sections 8 to 14;”” The noble Lord said: My Lords, the amendments in this group are a refinement of those that I tabled for Grand Committee. At that point, I believed that all the regulations flowing from Part 1 of the Bill should be subject to the affirmative procedure. The Minister pointed out that some 400 orders would be consequential on the enactment of the Bill, most but by no means all of them translating orders for incapacity benefit to fit the new regime of the employment and support allowance. Therefore, it would be a complete waste of parliamentary time to have all of them debated again and again as the situation changed. However, as I said at the beginning of today's proceedings, we are dealing with a wholly new benefit, which has not even been piloted very far as yet, although pilots have started—indeed, we were grateful for the report of the first year of the pilots that the Minister provided some weeks ago. Your Lordships’ Delegated Powers and Regulatory Reform Committee did a pretty thorough job in recommending that certain of the orders should always be affirmative, and the Government have acquiesced, putting down amendments to cover those. However, the committee’s report stated that it was ““not inappropriate”” for some of these orders to be affirmative the first time they appear. All the subsequent changes would be, as the Bill states, by regulations subject to the negative resolution procedure. While I have tried to incorporate some of the Minister’s concerns about making all the Part 1 regulations subject to affirmative approval by this House and another place, I have not heard any suggestion that the second and subsequent orders would be of such a minimal nature that the negative resolution procedure would be appropriate. Naturally, I appreciate the Government’s attempts to take into account the recommendations of the DPRRC and to make some of the more contentious regulations arising earlier in the Bill subject to the affirmative procedure. I hope that I can persuade the Government to do the same with the regulations that will arise from Clauses 8 to 14, which deal with the meat of the system: they cover how the assessments will be set up, what they will assess and what the results of those assessments will be. Although the Government have attempted to show us as much draft regulation as possible, it is impossible for them to provide us with a full picture, especially as the various pilot stages have yet to be completed. It is therefore inevitable that quite major changes will be made after the first regulations are made. For example, the pilot could well show that the original method of conducting assessments or a particular facet of them was not working as expected or indeed desired. Only last Thursday, the Minister and I debated a JSA order to give effect to the original policy intention of the pilot. It is therefore crucial that Parliament is given a chance to consider the final ESA system properly, not only when it is fully rolled out, but as it changes. I do not believe that a one-time only debate will do. Although I originally thought, as I said, that it would be right to make all the Part 1 regulations affirmative, I was, as I also said, gently steered off that by the Minister, who called my proposal ““overkill””. I agree. However, after Committee, the Bill team helpfully provided me with a table of what regulations each part of the Bill empowered. These clauses cover 15 separate regulations—hardly an enormous burden on parliamentary time given that they are closely associated in many cases and will surely be made and therefore debated together. The amendment would give the House an opportunity to have a fully informed debate on this new and unproven system as it changes—as it assuredly will. It will be of great value in providing further scrutiny of what your Lordships—even the Minister—will agree is a very complex Bill. I beg to move.