Welfare Reform Bill

I wish to try to persuade the House not to give the Bill a Second Reading. I do so not because I do not believe that welfare reform is relevant, which I do, and not because I do not think that welfare reform is becoming more urgent, which I do. I simply believe that the Bill is largely irrelevant to the position in which many of our constituents will find themselves long before it receives Royal Assent. I pose the question to my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State: when were the ideas that built up the Bill conceived, and in which world? They were conceived in a world in which we though that the boom would go on for ever, that there would be no problems such as we have experienced in the past and that the marvellous record of the past 10 years, when at least 3 million jobs have been created, would continue into the future. Two pieces of information in the pre-Budget report are relevant to our debate. One is the Government's estimate of the borrowing requirement; the other details unemployment levels. Before long, when the Government revise both figures, they will envisage unemployment reaching the pre-Budget report levels not at the end of next year, but, sadly, by the middle of this year. We are entering an economic hurricane and we need to judge whether the Bill will protect the jobs of those who are in work—some of my hon. Friends pleaded for such protection—and whether we are spending the valuable resources of the welfare reform of the past 10 years in the best way possible to get people who are out of work into work.