Welfare Reform Bill

The hon. Lady is very gracious. What I am really saying is that I do not sense that there is a strategic road map, and incremental moves towards a carefully honed goal. It is more a case of a series of botched reform attempts that have come unstuck. The rhetoric has been the same all the way through, but it has been applied to half a dozen different policies. Even now, we are introducing great complexity into the system. What the Government call simplification means cutting the money for carers, maternity benefits and so on; that is what they mean by simplification. As the Chairman of the Work and Pensions Committee said, we are introducing employment benefits with multiple rates and multiple sets of eligibility criteria. As Citizens Advice has said, there will be a real chance of genuine official error and claimant error. Complexity has bedevilled the whole subject. What people really need to know is simply and straightforwardly where they stand.