Welfare Reform Bill

I shall not repeat the many excellent points that hon. Members have made, in particular my hon. Friends the Members for Aberdeen, South (Miss Begg) and for Kingswood (Roger Berry) in their remarks about disability and the need for a clear differentiation between fiscal measures and what the Bill sets out to do. I firmly believe that the Bill goes in the right direction, and that rights and responsibilities are the way forward. We should all pull our weight. If we ask anybody around the country, that is the usual answer that we will get. People should be usefully occupied, whether in paid employment or in caring roles. We should make sure that we give proper support to those who need it. We need to be careful that people do not muddle up what the Bill seeks to do with the difficulties that we face in the economy and the fact that some people will, unfortunately, lose their jobs. We know that when we talk about conditionality, we are not talking about the sort of people who are desperately anxious to get back to work and who will do everything possible to find further employment if they are unlucky enough to lose their jobs in the current economic circumstances. There has been considerable misinformation about the situation of single parents. We are not talking about 14-hour factory shifts for people with very young children. Although there are some well organised, capable and fortunate single parents who know what they want to do and how to organise their lives, we know that a significant number of single parents come from difficult and inadequate backgrounds and need all the support they can get. For those young people—often they are young—it is a matter of basic skills such as parenting, reading, writing, numeracy and IT skills and confidence, which we take for granted. They need those skills both in order to help their children develop better—speech development, for example—and in order to better their own prospects as their children grow up. Everybody would agree that the support now being made available is the right sort of support. Proper child care and proper help can do an enormous amount to build confidence among young parents who find themselves at the margin of society. The proposed measures have essentially been a pilot up till now. We must make certain that when the Bill rolls that out across the country, we have the necessary staffing levels and trained staff ready in our jobcentres. It is an extremely difficult job. Very often staff in jobcentres are faced with tremendous frustrations, depression and difficulties from their clients, and sometimes even clients who do everything they can to be awkward. It is important that we provide support and, if necessary, increase staff numbers if we want to carry out these programmes and possibly cope with other unemployment difficulties. We should make certain that we support employers. I have seen employers bending over backwards to help to find work and provide support for people who find it difficult to get themselves to work in the morning—employers who have been very patient and who have succeeded in getting people back into work, although one would not have thought they would manage to do so. But we all know that although many people are able and willing to help themselves, there are a few who play the system. We must do something about that. When I talk to groups of young people, they invariably tell me that everybody should pull their weight. Sometimes they think that I am completely mad, because I talk to them about being shipwrecked on a treasure island. They say, ““You have come to talk to us about politics.”” I ask them what they would do, how they would organise themselves, what rules they would make up and how they would sort out food and shelter. They always say, ““Everybody should pull their weight. Everybody should do something.”” When I ask them what they would do about a poor, unfortunate man who has lost his legs in the shipwreck, they say, ““We will feed him, but perhaps he can sit by the fire and do the cooking.”” They have the idea in their minds that everyone should contribute. When I ask them about a lazy, idle, selfish person who does not want to help or who wants to finish early—this relates to the points raised by the hon. Member for Glasgow, East (John Mason)—they say that there should be no free ride and no food. Their suggested sanctions are far tougher and far less tolerant than the conditionality in this Bill. They make it clear that if people can, they should. We all know that 99 per cent. of people do not need conditionality, but we also know that a few people play the system again and again. We all know about those people, because our constituents tell us about them, and there must come a time when the whistle is blown on them.