Welfare Reform Bill

I agree with the hon. Lady. We also think that it is good for lone parents to work, and the evidence is that work is beneficial to them and to their children. However, there is a balance to be struck between the care of young children and the work of parents. We will examine that matter in Committee, which is the right place to do that. We will also examine the strange question of the social fund, about which there seems to be a mystery. The Secretary of State seemed to be unaware of the Government's proposals in their consultation document to charge interest on social fund loans—[Interruption.] The Ministers are shaking their heads, but the proposal is in their own consultation document. In case it has escaped the Secretary of State's attention, he wrote the foreword to that document only last November. I imagine that he does not sign documents without having read them, and that it was not the fact that my hon. Friend the Member for Epsom and Ewell (Chris Grayling) brought the proposal to public attention that prompted a sudden reversal in Government policy. We look forward to going through those issues in detail. Our focus throughout will be on getting people back into work and bringing help to those who need it, even in these dark times. The right hon. Member for Birkenhead talked about a hurricane, and time and again we have come back to the setting of the reforms. For many people, it is striking that the Government have delayed for so long on undertaking those reforms and have then waited for this moment to do so. We have had so much talk and so many promises. Since 1997, we have had seven Green or White Papers on welfare reform. The Bill is the 13th piece of legislation dealing with welfare reform; it will be the third Act to be called the Welfare Reform Act and the second such Act in three years. The Secretary of State talked about the difference between active and passive welfare systems, but the Government have been talking about that and claiming that they have brought about an active system since 1997. I gently remind the Secretary of State that he mentioned the new deal once and that it was barely mentioned at all during the speeches made by his Back Benchers. It was mentioned in more detail by the right hon. Member for Birkenhead, who powerfully dissected and criticised it and its failures. The new deal was the centrepiece of the Government's reforms since 1997 but now the Government hardly dare speak about it. As the UK Statistics Authority has said, after all the Government's boasts and propaganda about the new deal, the sad fact of the matter for young people in this country today is that unemployment among 16 to 24-year-olds is higher now than it was in 1997. It is going up at the moment, but it was going up long before the credit crunch took hold. As the right hon. Member for Birkenhead made clear, the centrepiece of the Government's reform of welfare has been a system that put in place a revolving door, that had diminishing returns, and that failed many young people who kept going back into the system. Those people were made the basis of a claim that the Government had abolished long-term unemployment when all they had done was move people from one queue to another, while more and more young people were unemployed. More people are not in employment, education or training than in 1997. We have to start from the sad position of the number of economically inactive people left behind by the Government, particularly in the 16-to-24 age group. The Government failed to put things right when they had the opportunity to do so, but we look to bring fresh thinking to this subject. It is sorely needed. We will build on the proposals in the Bill where that suits our plans, which we put in place long before the Government did. We will build on what the Government are doing, and we recognise where they have gone wrong. Even now, however, we must seek to put things right, and to bring hope to all the people who are going through the present dark economic times. They include those who are losing their jobs, the 2 million who are economically inactive and who want to work and the nearly 2 million who are now unemployed. We must try and bring hope to all of them, by means of a welfare system that acts much more efficiently than what has been put in place by this Government so far.