 House of Commons |
Session 2005 - 06 Publications on the internet Standing Committee Debates Welfare Reform Bill |
Welfare Reform Bill |
The Committee consisted of the following Members:John
Benger, Chris Shaw, Committee
Clerks †
attended the Committee Standing Committee ATuesday 17 October 2006(Morning)[Mr. David Amess in the Chair]Welfare Reform Bill10.30
am
The
Chairman: I remind the Committee that there is a money resolution
and a Ways and Means resolution connected to the Bill. Copies are
available in the room. I have been advised that I must remind hon.
Members that, as a general rule, adequate notice should be given of
amendments. My co-Chairman, Mr. Jimmy Hood, and I do not
intend to call starred amendments. As ever, would all hon. Members also
ensure that mobile phones, pagers and whatever other kinds of
technology they are using are turned off or are in silent mode during
Committee
proceedings? We now
come to the programme motion. Debate on the motion may continue for up
to half an hour.
That— (1)
during proceedings on the Welfare Reform Bill the Standing Committee
shall (in addition to its first meeting at 10.30 a.m. on Tuesday 17th
October)
meet— (a) at
4.00 p.m. on Tuesday 17th
October; (b) at 9.10
a.m. and 1.30 p.m. on Thursday 19th
October; (c) at 10.30
a.m. and 4.00 p.m. on Tuesday 24th
October; (d) at 9.10
a.m. and 1.30 p.m. Thursday 26th
October; (e) at 10.30
a.m. and 4.00 p.m. on Tuesday 31st
October; (f) at 9.10
a.m. and 1.30 p.m. on Thursday 2nd
November; (g) at 10.30
a.m. and 4.00 p.m. on Tuesday 28th
November; (h) at 9.10
a.m. and 1.30 p.m. on Thursday 30th
November; (2) the proceedings
shall be taken in the following order: Clause 1; Schedule 1; Clauses 2
to 20; Schedule 2; Clauses 21 to 25; Schedule 3; Clause 26; Schedule 4;
new Clauses and new Schedules relating to Part 1; Clauses 27 to 37;
Schedule 5; new Clauses and new Schedules relating to Part 2; Clauses
38 to 46; new Clauses and new Schedules relating to Part 3; Clauses 47
to 55; Schedule 6; Clauses 56 to 59; Schedule 7; new Clauses and new
Schedules relating to Part 4; Clauses 60 to 63; Schedule 8; Clauses 64
to 67; remaining new Clauses and new Schedules; remaining proceedings
on the Bill; (3) the proceedings
shall (so far as not previously concluded) be brought to a conclusion
at 4.30 p.m. on Thursday 30th
November. Thank
you, Mr. Amess. I am sure that I speak on behalf of everyone
when I say that we are delighted to see you in your place for the first
sitting of this important Committee. Your duties will be shared by
Mr. Jimmy Hood, whom I also know to be an experienced
Chairman of such proceedings.
It is
generally accepted that the Bill is a very important and necessary
piece of legislation. We have built into its proposals the support and
consensus reflected on Second Reading and contained in the welfare
reform Green Paper. The consultation on the Green Paper and the
Government’s response to it will be reflected in our
conversation and debate during the 16 sittings.
The basis of the Bill is that
too many people have simply been written off as having no worthwhile
contribution to make in our society, despite the fact that nine out of
10 people on incapacity benefits say that they wish for the opportunity
to work. The Bill seeks to give effect to that overwhelming aspiration
of those on incapacity
benefit. I am pleased
to be joined by the Minister with responsibility for disabled people,
the Under-Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, my hon. Friend the
Member for Stirling (Mrs. McGuire). She has a great deal of
experience on the issues that the Committee will seek to
address. Thus
far—it may continue, but I do not wish to tempt
fate—there has been a sense of co-operation both inside and
outside the House about the principles and specifics of the
Bill’s proposals. That spirit extended itself to the Programming
Sub-Committee’s
resolution.
Through
the wise counsel and advice of the Whip, the Vice-Chamberlain of Her
Majesty’s Household, my hon. Friend the Member for Nottingham,
East (Mr. Heppell), the Programming Sub-Committee has agreed
to 16 sittings without knives or guillotines, on the basis that the
Committee will find its own way through our proceedings. If we do not
make the necessary progress, he reserves the right to recall the
Programming Sub-Committee to introduce knives and guillotines, which
all of us would rather do without, judging from the way that we have
progressed thus
far.
Mr.
Ruffley: I welcome you, Mr. Amess, to the
Committee. I look forward to speaking before Mr. Hood later.
I hope that you do not mind that I have adopted the traditional modern
Conservative garb of no
jacket.
Mr.
Ruffley: The Minister playfully suggests that we have no
policies. He will soon discover that we
do. I thank the
Minister and the Labour Whip for the amount of time that they have
proposed for discussion of the Bill. We are happy to accept it. In the
current climate, 16 sittings seems a generous allocation. It reflects
the seriousness with which Ministers and the Government take the
subject. It is a big
Bill in two senses: it is long, and it is a big issue. We all agree on
that. The Green Paper, to which we shall refer in our proceedings, gave
a magisterial analysis of the scale of the problem. All politicians,
everyone with limited capabilities and those who support them, such as
lobby groups, agree on some important facts: currently, some 2.7
million people are on incapacity benefit, 1.5 million of whom have been
on it for more than five years. Statistics outlined by Ministers, and
which I also use, show that if a person
has been on incapacity benefit for more than two years, they have a
better chance of dying or retiring than of getting another
job. The Bill is
designed to hit the target of reducing by 1 million the 2.7
million incapacity benefit recipients by 2016. There is a lot of work
before us, which the clauses in the Bill aim to do. Many of us have had
extensive briefings on many issues from outside groups. I am not going
to list them all, but Ministers as well as my hon. Friends have been in
deep discussion with them. I pay tribute to them for the volume and
quality of their briefings, not just on the Bill but on the
consultation findings published by the Government in early summer on
the back of the Green Paper and for their representations before the
Green
Paper. A
cornucopia of issues needs to be teased out. We have 16 sittings in
Committee. Some people have suggested that we might not need all those
sittings, but let me explain why I think that we will need them. The
nature of the incapacities people now experience is changing. According
to a remarkable statistic—both sides find this
worrying—again in the Green Paper, 40 per cent. of those on
incapacity benefit are on it because they have a mental or behavioural
disorder. In 1995, that figure was 22 per cent. Many think that most
people claim incapacity benefit because of bad-back syndrome—the
classic, and rather lazy, identification—and muscular skeletal
problems. That used to be true, but this year only 19 per cent. claimed
it for that
reason. The
nature of incapacity or disability is changing, which raises questions
about how we treat not only those with predominantly mental and
behavioural difficulties, but those with physical disabilities, with a
fluctuating condition. That is a massively important issue on all our
radars, and we want a good debate on
it. We need to remind
ourselves that the Bill has a great deal of good in it, which I shall
be making clear. However, a lot of outside groups as well as the
Opposition question whether the successes in the well resourced
pathways to work programmes will be continued. We know that we need to
tease out that issue, no doubt in a clause stand part debate so that we
are in order, and to ask how quickly existing claimants will be
migrated on to the new employment and support allowance, which is the
subject of the Bill.
I do not mean to be
confrontational—Ministers themselves have flagged up frankly
this issue—but what is the ability of those on the support
component in the Bill to volunteer for work-related activity and how
quickly will they be able to do so? It is neither the
Government’s nor the Opposition’s intention to force
those in the support component to participate in work-related
activities, but if they wish to volunteer, they must be properly
resourced. There are
issues around the quality of the training of the personal advisers
delivering the allowance and, indeed, the regime that precedes it. Do
they have enough understanding of mental health issues? There are
further issues around the other two targets set out in the Green Paper,
which the Bill is designed to meet. They are noble aims that we
support—returning to the work force 1 million older people and
one third of a million lone parents. We all agree on those things. The
Bill addresses those policy imperatives—they are policy
imperatives for us all.
In summary, for the record, I
agree with what the Minister just said. He said that the Bill had
built-in consensus and support for its central planks. That is true. He
knows our good intent because we had the option of not voting for the
Bill on Second Reading in July. We did not take that option. We were in
favour of the Bill, and I hope that that spirit of consensus will
continue for these 16 sittings.
A “but” is
coming, however, which the Minister will respect. The spirit of
consensus does not mean that we can agree with everything in the Bill;
that is not how parliamentary scrutiny works. We want a good airing of
the issues. In that respect I should like to draw attention to the fact
that quite a few clauses are enabling clauses. They refer to
regulations that are to be published where the fine grain, granular
detail will be exposed.
The Minister has done his level
best and the civil servants have done a good job in producing much
draft regulation material for the Committee, but two of the three draft
regulations relating to the assessments under clauses 8 to 10 are not
available. That is not the Minister’s fault. We have had a very
grown-up discussion about why they cannot be published. Ministers would
be greatly criticised if they rushed out draft regulations when
everyone knows that they and their officials have been deep in
consultation on the design of the limited capability for work test, the
work-related health assessments and the work-related activity
assessments. If we are
to have a sensible debate about those very important clauses, we will
need some latitude to kick around the issues. The outside world,
disabled people and those with incapacity, the advocates and the groups
who support and advise them will want to know that we are teasing out
the issues at this stage, and are not waiting for the regulations to
appear at some time in the future. It would not go down terribly well
with any of us if we did not have the opportunity to have an extended
debate, notwithstanding that the clause does not include much detail
and the draft regulations are not available for completely
understandable
reasons. With those
minor caveats, I am happy to begin this Committee in a spirit of great
consensus. I would just say parenthetically, as a former Opposition
Whip, that this is probably the first time, certainly in my experience
in the last two years, that the Opposition have not voted down a
programme motion. We agreed the programme motion in the Programming
Sub-Committee and are very grateful to the Government for affording
such
time. Danny
Alexander (Inverness, Nairn, Badenoch and Strathspey)
(LD): It is also a pleasure for me to be serving on this
Committee under your chairmanship, Mr. Amess. I look forward
to our discussions and the guidance that you and Mr. Jimmy
Hood will give. It is a particular pleasure for me as a relatively new
Member, because it is the first time that I have served on a Standing
Committee. I look forward to any guidance or instructions that you
might be able to give
me. As the Minister
and the Conservative spokesman both said, there is a great deal of
consensus around the principles and objectives of the Bill. As I said
on Second Reading, the Liberal Democrats certainly share
in that. There is a strong need and, indeed, a moral imperative to
tackle the problem of the 2.7 million people who are on incapacity
benefit. Many of them wish to work; they would like to have the
opportunity to work but, for a variety of reasons, it is denied them.
Those principles are the driving impetus behind the Bill, and the
Liberal Democrats would like to enter into the debate on them in a
consensual
manner. A
huge number of people are affected, so the Bill is important for that
reason; it is also important because there is such interest in the
wider community in the Committee’s deliberations and the results
of its discussions. An enormous number of outside bodies—lobby
groups, representative organisations, and so on—take a great
interest in this Bill. I am grateful for the support and briefing that
they have provided me with and I am sure that other Committee members
are,
too. 10.45
am As the
Conservative spokesman, the hon. Member for Bury St. Edmunds
(Mr. Ruffley) said, broader issues relate directly to
whether the provisions contained in the Bill can be successful, and I
hope that we have a chance to discuss those. In particular, many of the
changes made under the Bill depend for their success on the success of
the pathways to work programme that has been piloted in several areas
and has been proven to be successful for at least some of the groups
for which it provides help. However, I am concerned that, under the
Government’s proposals for rolling out that programme across the
whole country, those people for whom we are talking about changing the
benefit arrangements and increasing the amount of conditionality that
applies will then rely on pathways to work to provide the positive side
of the
equation.
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| ©Parliamentary copyright 2006 | Prepared 18 October 2006 |