Mrs.
McGuire: I thank the hon. Gentleman for
his comments. As usual, he makes an important point. I am please to be
able to give him the reassurance that obviously there is an issue of
confidentiality. There is the issue of customer consent to information.
It has to be informed consent. I appreciate that that is one of the
issues that I mentioned earlier about whether someone fully understands
what they are giving consent to. It is for the general practitioner to
send Jobcentre Plus the information relevant to the benefit
entitlement, not some of the wider issues that may affect the
individual. Just for the record, I point out that for the work-focused
health-related assessment, non-participation is equated to a sanction,
not a disqualification. It would be best to get the terminology
right.
Adam
Afriyie: Will the Minister give
way?
Mrs.
McGuire: I had hoped to make slightly more
progress.
Adam
Afriyie: I appreciate the Minister’s generosity in
giving way. I seek reassurance on one small point. If a
disqualification is forthcoming under the clause, is the claimant
entitled to appeal and, if so, under which
legislation?
Mrs.
McGuire: I can reassure the Committee that where there is
a sanction or a disqualification, there is always the right to an
independent appeal. That is just the way the system operates. I should
reiterate for the sake of clarity that this is about non-participation
without good cause in the prevailing circumstances. The hon. Member for
Inverness, Nairn, Badenoch and Strathspey was worried that if someone
came in and was obstreperous or did not appear to be following the
normal modes of behaviour that would somehow lead to a
disqualification.
This is about misconduct that
leads to an injury or refusal to follow health and safety advice, for
example. That is what is intended under the clause. Although a number
of organisations have expressed some concerns, I hope that the
Committee will accept my reassurances that there will be adequate
training for staff and safeguards will be put in place so that
customers are always given the opportunity to explain their actions
before any disqualification
occurs. We will use
the power in the clause to disqualify benefit where a customer
persistently fails to follow acceptable rules of behaviour, for
example, where they fail to provide their address so a review of
benefit entitlement cannot be undertaken. It has been a feature of
incapacity benefit since 1996 when the incapacity benefit rules were
initially drawn up. We want to maintain confidence in the system and
protect it from abuse. The clause allows us to do that. I recognise the
concerns and I hope that I have allayed some of the
fears. Question put
and agreed
to. Clause 17,
as amended, ordered to stand part ofthe
Bill.
Clause
18Pilot
schemes
6
pm
Danny
Alexander: I beg to move amendment No. 45, in
clause 18, page 15, line 5, leave
out ‘24’ and insert
‘60’. I
do not have a great deal to say about the amendment. It is designed
simply to probe the Government’s intentions in respect of pilot
schemes. I would like the Under-Secretary of State to explain her
thinking on the amount of time to be allowed for those schemes. The
Bill as drafted allows regulations for pilots not to exceed a specific
period of 24 months. Will the hon. Lady spell out why she thinks that
two years is the right period for a pilot, given that there is evidence
that longer pilot schemes allow more time for the evaluation and
understanding of their outcomes?
With those extremely brief
words, I look forward to the Under-Secretary’s
response.
Mrs.
McGuire: I am not aware of any great evidence that we need
longer than 24 months, but if the hon. Gentleman wishes to present such
evidence we will be delighted to consider
it. Our experience has
shown that 24 months is a suitable period to review the progress of
pilots and to test new approaches to welfare. I am pleased that this is
a probing amendment; if the period were 60 months, it would be not so
much a pilot as a sentence.
Danny
Alexander: I introduced the amendment
very briefly as the Minister will have some well-prepared responses,
but the Bill states “not exceeding 24 months”;
“not exceeding 60 months” would give the Government more
flexibility, which I am sure they would
welcome.
Mrs.
McGuire: The flexibility is built into the Bill because if
we need to extend a pilot beyond the 24-month period, clause 18(7)
allows for replacing one pilot with another, which would be dependent
on Parliament’s approval. If it went up to five years it would
stultify the pilot rather than encouraging us to learn from it. In the
spirit in which the amendment was tabled, I ask the hon. Gentleman to
withdraw
it.
Danny
Alexander: I beg to ask leave to withdraw the
amendment. Amendment,
by leave,
withdrawn.
Mr.
Ruffley: I beg to move amendment No. 244, in
clause 18, page 15, line 15, at
end insert— ‘(c) make it
more likely that employers will recruit and retain such
persons.’.
In the preceding debate we
heard how long a pilot should be. In my calculation, the piloting of
the new Labour party has been going on for nine years; perhaps that
pilot will end next year when the Chancellor of the Exchequer takes
over, but who
knows? In the clause
and the amendment there are powers to pilot most of, but not all, the
provisions in the Bill. The piloting provisions are intended to allow
for different variations in the conditionality regime in order to
understand what works best to help ESA claimants, and we all agree with
that. As the Bill rightly focuses on the obligations of the individual
as part of the rights and responsibility agenda, the amendment probes
for more information on how employers will be engaged in the process of
helping claimants get from welfare into work.
As well as
the roll-out of pathways, the welfare reform Green Paper also refers to
the piloting of a new initiative in cities—the so-called city
strategy—to bring partners to work together to improve the
chances of claimants getting into work. As the Green Paper pointed out
on page 75, it will entail more effective engagement of local
employers. The Disability Rights Commission’s response to the
Green Paper suggested that employers in city strategy areas could
recruit more people from IB through Jobcentre Plus and its providers
promoting work trials more extensively, and through local government
agencies using their procurement powers to extend the
range of employers that recruit disabled people. In pushing the
amendment, I ask the Under-Secretary what she understands by the city
strategy agenda to get employers more involved, and how the piloting of
new ways of taking people off IB will work. Mrs.
McGuire: The hon. Gentleman raises an interesting point,
because there must be engagement with employers—the people who
will provide the jobs. My hon. Friend the Minister for Employment and
Welfare Reform and I have met employers not only in the proposed city
strategy areas, but in other areas throughout the country, to discuss
how they can play their part in making welfare reform work. For too
long, the business community thought welfare reform was a social issue,
and although it has a social dimension, it is also a serious economic
issue. We are trying to engage employers to ensure that they feel part
of the agenda, and my hon. Friend and I have met various employer
organisations throughout the country.
The hon.
Gentleman asked for information about the trials that we may consider.
My hon. Friend the Member for North-East Derbyshire might be interested
in my answer, because with Tesco and Jobcentre Plus we are trialling a
scheme in which Tesco offers work tasters for up to one week to
pathways to work participants whom a Jobcentre Plus adviser refers.
Tesco will help with the application and interview.
One big difficulty for people
who have not been in employment, and sometimes for people who have, is
how to get past the interview. If one has not been in that situation
before, it can be a real confidence shaker. It is bad enough for
politicians standing up in front of a selection committee, and most of
us have the gift of the gab. We are used to selling ourselves, but
imagine going to an interview after a long period out of work. The
support is necessary, and it will include a work-taster review with the
participant, adviser and company—Tesco, in this case—to
identify the further assistance that may be needed to succeed at an
interview. The scheme
will build on many good factors that the voluntary sector has put in
place for many years. Without going into my background too much, we
would provide such support as a matter of course. The Government are
determined to explore the range of avenues that might lead to better
outcomes, and we are working hard with employers to ensure that they
think of welfare reform as an economic as well as a social issue. The
two are intertwined, and it is important that we ensure that employers,
businesses and companies feel part of the
process.
Mr.
Ruffley: The hon. Lady has given an informative reply and
I beg to ask leave to withdraw the
amendment. Amendment,
by leave,
withdrawn.
Mr.
Ruffley: I beg to move amendment No. 245, in
clause 18, page 15, line 27, leave
out subsection (7) and
insert— ‘(7) It shall be a
duty on the Secretary of State to report to Parliament annually his
evaluation of the pilot
schemes.’.
The
Chairman: With this it will be convenient to discuss the
following: Amendment No. 195, in
clause 22, page 17, line 19, at
end insert— ‘(1A) The
Secretary of State must, on an annual basis for the previous twelve
months, prepare a report to Parliament on the exercise of the power to
make regulations under this
Part’. New
clause 5—Reports to Parliament (No.
2)— ‘The Secretary of
State shall report annually to Parliament on the employment recruitment
and employment retention practices of publicly-funded organisations in
respect of current and previous claimants of employment and support
allowance.’. New
clause 12—Duty to report on impact of Part I on older people
and others— ‘(1) The
Secretary of State shall annually lay before Parliament a report on the
effects of Part One of this Act on recipients of the allowance, with
respect to their employment opportunities and
health. (2) The report shall
describe separately the impact
on— (a) people aged over
50, (b) people with mental
health conditions, and (c)
people who have been in receipt of the allowance for longer than 3
years.’. New
clause 4—Reports to
Parliament— ‘The
Secretary of State shall require the Social Security Advisory Committee
to report annually to Parliament on the operation of this
Act.’.
Mr.
Ruffley: Amendment No. 245 asks for there to be a
requirement that the Secretary of State reports annually on the
evaluation of pilot schemes. What lies behind the proposal is that,
while we all celebrate the early successes of the pathways to work
pilot, there is still a lot more information on how it has performed
that is not available in the public arena. Opposition Members are not
the only people to express worry that a full-on, all-singing,
all-dancing cost-benefit analysis of pathways to work will not be
available until next year. The pilots have been going for some time. I
am not criticising in any way some of the early successes, but it is
quite a job for all hon. Members to table written questions endlessly
and diligently to tease out
information. It might
be in the interests of a more transparent debate if we have as much
information as possible in the public realm that has come from the
evaluators at DWP and the research bodies that it commissions to
evaluate pathways to work and other pilots. It would be useful in that
context for there to be an annual evaluation of all pilot schemes, not
only pathways to work and its successors, but the other schemes that
will no doubt be put in place to test work-related health assessments
and much else
besides. New clause 5
seeks to flag up the importance of the employer in making welfare
reform work. As the Under-Secretary of State said, that is a subject to
which Ministers pay attention. I was encouraged to hear her remarks in
the previous debate. New clause focuses on the requirement that we
would like to see for the Secretary of State annually to report to
Parliament on employment and recruitment, and employment retention
practices of publicly funded employers in respect of claimants of ESA.
I do not want to open up a long debate at this stage in that respect in
Committee now because we must make progress. Moreover, access to work
has been alluded to and will be touched on in a minute by my hon.
Friend the Member for South-West
Surrey. As an example of what the new clause would drill down into, I
wish to remind the Committee of a DWP memo on the removal of access to
work funding from central Government Departments from October 2006. It
stated: “Access
to Work funding will be removed from central government departments
... from October 2006. Departments will be responsible for funding
from their running costs the workplace adjustments required by their
disabled staff. Central government departments can continue to use the
advice and expertise of Jobcentre Plus staff. This is in line with
practice in the DWP since
2003. The
‘savings’ to the Access to Work budget resulting from
this change will be kept within the programme. As a result of this
change Jobcentre Plus will be able to re-focus support towards people
who work for smaller
employers.” I am quoting
the whole story, and I hope that the hon. Lady will give me credit for
that. There is a rationale and a logic to the policy change, but it did
concern Susan Scott-Parker, who asked the Secretary of State about it
in a letter on 9 June. On new clause 5, how many disabled employees did
the DWP support under the access-to-work arrangements until 2003? How
many has it supported since 2003, when it changed its access-to-work
funding regime? Could those questions be answered at the end of the
debate?
6.15
pm
Mr.
Boswell: Does my hon. Friend not agree that his point was
confirmed when it was made clear to me that no baseline transfer had
taken place? Other Departments, which are critical to delivering the
Government’s agenda and setting a good example through the
public sector, would therefore have no additional funds and would face
the invidious choice of reproviding access-to-work funds from their
running costs or finding alternative provision. Is it not particularly
important, therefore, that the effects of the change on what is, after
all, 20 per cent. of total employment, should be evaluated to determine
whether the issue has been dealt with or whether provision has withered
on the vine, with fewer disabled people able to get work through the
public sector
route?
Mr.
Ruffley: I am grateful to my hon. Friend, who makes a
typically powerful and eloquent point. I am sure that the
Under-Secretary will want to respond to his point and mine, which are
closely related. New
clause 12 would require that the
“Secretary of State
shall annually lay before Parliament a report on the effects of Part
One of this Act on recipients of the
allowance”. Subsection
(2) suggests that the
“report shall describe separately
the impact on...people aged over
50”— older workers
or potential
workers— “people
with mental health conditions, and...people who have been in
receipt of the allowance for longer than 3
years.” Those groups are
singled out for a reason. We must remind ourselves that the aim of the
Green Paper was not merely—I say “merely”, but
this is asking a lot—to get 1 million people off the incapacity
benefit roll and
bring it down to 1.7 million claimants by 2016. The Green Paper also set
out two other noble objectives, which were not so time limited. One was
to get1 million more older workers into employment, while the
other was to get about one third of a million lone parents off
benefits. The Bill is designed to achieve those important
aims. The reference
in the new clause to people over 50 is important because most of us
feel that not enough reference is made to older people. We must remind
ourselves that just under half the existing stock—48 per
cent.—are over 50 and below the age of retirement. They form
quite a large proportion of the IB case load, and we must not forget
them. I remark parenthetically that the interests of this large group
of our fellow citizens have been flagged up in the past couple of weeks
by the Leader of the Opposition, my right hon. Friend the Member for
Witney (Mr. Cameron), in a well received and widely reported
speech. I hope that Ministers will join us in highlighting the need to
do even more to get more support for those people over the age of 50 so
that, when they are able to, they can get back into work, as so many we
know wish to do. Age
Concern, which we all agree does marvellous work in highlighting these
issues, has reminded me of some important statistics of new claimants,
around30 per cent. of which are by people who are over 50.
That proportion has only declined slightly in the past decade. I make
no party political point; I am sure that that figure was as
disappointing at the end of the last Conservative Administration. It
has certainly not been improving. Only 29 per cent. of over-50s come
off incapacity benefit within six months compared to35 per
cent. of under-50s. Under the pathways to work pilot, this measure has
increased by 9 per cent. for those under the age of 50 but by only 4
per cent. for people over the age of 50.
These statistics show that
pathways to work and the current regime are doing a better job for
those under, rather than over, 50. This new clause therefore draws
specific attention to the fact that reporting should be made by
reference not just to all claims and to the way in which the Act and
the new regime is helping them, but specifically to the people over 50,
because there is a differential in the performance of pathways to work
for those under and over 50.
I will not detain the Committee
with statistics; the exact quantum might be disputed. However,
statistics show that almost 1 million older people want to get back
into paid work—part-time or full-time—and that this
under-employment of older citizens costs the United Kingdom economy
billions of pounds a year. I know that that is something that Ministers
and officials will concede. The new clause seeks to focus with
laser-like intensity when Ministers come to report to Parliament to
talk specifically about the effect on those over 50.
The same arguments could be
made in reference to subsection (2)(b) of the new clause, which refers
to those with mental health conditions. Is the number of those with
mental health conditions coming off the new allowance and getting into
work higher or lower than the average? What about those who have been
in receipt of the allowance for more than three years? How are those
further away from the labour market performing compared with the
average?
We need that information teased
out in an annual report so that we can all see it in a handy and
useable way. We can all go to the Vote Office and pick it up without
the tedious preface of putting down large numbers of written questions.
Such information should be openly available and I hope that any
Government of any political persuasion would want the rays of
transparency shone on this particular area.
We need to know not just what
the new regime—that this Bill will usher in—will do for
the general stock, but whether it will get 1 million people off the
current stock of 2.7 million. What sorts of people will be coming off
the stock and being helped? We need to disaggregate the off-flow. It is
as simple as that and this new clause will achieve
that. New clause 4 is
very much in tune with the preceding amendments to which I have spoken
in that it would require the Secretary of State to procure a report to
Parliament on the operation of this Act from the Social Security
Advisory Committee. This new clause is slightly different in intent
from the other new clause and amendments in the group, because it asks
for a report from a body that is at one remove from the Secretary of
State. We would like the Secretary of State to report, not because we
do not trust his or her bona fides to produce good information but, as
a belt-and-braces approach. Having the Social Security Advisory
Committee report to Parliament as well as the Department seems to me a
valuable safety net. By requesting the Government to provide reports or
procure them from arm’s-length bodies, we want the evaluation to
be transparent, whether it is of piloting or the general operation of
the legislation.
Before I
conclude, I shall give an example to flag up why we need to delve
deeply into some of the evaluations that are likely to come out before
2008. Our old friend the Police Complaints Authority will be not so
much piloted as subject to dummy and parallel runs. The Rethink
organisation has rightly pointed out that Atos Origin will run the
current and new tests side by side, and, more importantly, that it will
be analysing customer satisfaction surveys in 2007. It sounds
reasonable, on the face of it, that there should be an evaluation of
how well the dummy runs are operating—we all have an interest in
knowing how the assessments in clauses 8 to 10 will operate in
practice—but as Rethink pointed out, not many claimants are
likely to complete the surveys after spending time at an assessment
centre. They might have other things on their minds.
[Interruption.] The hon. Member for Glasgow, North-West (John
Robertson) is speaking from a sedentary position. Does he wish to
intervene? It
is suggested that such surveys are an inappropriate way to gather the
views of many claimants, including those with learning disabilities,
such as autistic spectrum disorder, and those with difficult mental
health problems. People with literacy problems might also be excluded
from participating efficaciously in the surveys, which we expect to
form a key part of the evaluation. Some of us who have noted those
observations think that there should be a more objective evaluation
procedure. If that is put in place, we certainly want to know about it
in the annual report, so that the annual reports to whichthe
amendments refer explain exactly who has done the evaluation over what
period and what the results are.
I sense that Government Members
are getting a bit restless, but I hope that they have taken my
observations on board. To sum up, we are calling for greater
transparency and a greater call to accountability for Ministers,
whoever they are, so that Parliament can access, in a more
user-friendly way, information on exactly how these critically
important proposals and the new regime will
operate.
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