Welfare Reform Bill

Indeed, we have suffered from the curse of incrementalism. Earlier, a Minister was at the Dispatch Box talking about support for industry. He said something like, ““We've had so many initiatives; we ought to get round to telling people what they are.”” One gets that feeling with a lot of employment-related programmes. I was taken back when the Secretary of State spoke about complete maintenance disregards for child maintenance—something that I very much support. He must have been reading my maiden speech in this House, in which I called for that very thing. It has been a long time coming—11 years—but it is very welcome. I want to give a somewhat philosophical perspective on the debate, because as the Child Poverty Action Group put it, the Bill is not so much skeletal as invertebrate. It is not entirely clear what powers the Government are giving themselves. What with the 384 regulations, I sense that we will have years' worth of statutory instruments, and many happy hours upstairs on the Committee corridor. I wanted to try to take a strategic approach to the Bill. To start on an issue on which we can make common cause, I agree with the Secretary of State about the clauses to do with empowering disabled people and giving them control over individual budgets. Broadly, I very much agree with that. We also support the language that he used in speaking of enablers, not carers; we support that change in the power relationship. There is just one concern that I want to register with him on that. Individual budgets cannot buy collective provision in quite the same way as collective budgets. For example, if a group of people are being provided for in a residential setting, and provision is made for them all en masse, it may not be tailored and personalised, but it is an awful lot cheaper than one person buying a package for themselves. To give a simple example, there is a day centre in my constituency, and when I visited it, an outside person came to entertain, or give a talk to, 20 people, and it was economic to do that. When individuals have their own budgets, they cannot buy that shared provision in the same way. The danger is that what they can buy is less varied and of lower quality. I ask the Secretary of State to look at whether we lose something when individuals are solely in charge of individual budgets, and if we do, to consider how it might be replaced.