Welfare Reform Bill

David Amess (Southend West, Conservative)

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.

Jim Murphy (Minister of State (Work), Department for Work and Pensions; East Renfrewshire, Labour)

I beg to move,

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.

David Ruffley (Shadow Minister, Work & Pensions; Bury St Edmunds, Conservative)

Can I have a name check?

Jim Murphy (Minister of State (Work), Department for Work and Pensions; East Renfrewshire, Labour)

We will leave that till the end of our proceedings.

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.

David Ruffley (Shadow Minister, Work & Pensions; Bury St Edmunds, Conservative)

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.

Jim Murphy (Minister of State (Work), Department for Work and Pensions; East Renfrewshire, Labour)

No policies.

David Ruffley (Shadow Minister, Work & Pensions; Bury St Edmunds, Conservative)

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 (Shadow Minister and Disability Spokesperson, Work & Pensions; Inverness, Nairn, Badenoch and Strathspey, Liberal Democrat)

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.

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.

David Ruffley (Shadow Minister, Work & Pensions; Bury St Edmunds, Conservative)

I do not wish to interrupt the hon. Gentleman’s flow, but again in a spirit of consensus, would he agree that there are issues about sanctioning, for instance, about which outside bodies and disability groups are concerned? I am sure that the Minister will want to debate that in a spirit of co-operation.

Danny Alexander (Shadow Minister and Disability Spokesperson, Work & Pensions; Inverness, Nairn, Badenoch and Strathspey, Liberal Democrat)

I think that we could take this spirit of co-operation and consensus thing too far. However, I agree with the hon. Gentleman and I hope that the Minister will, too, because there are important issues involved, including whether the people who will have sanctions and conditions placed on them will have genuine access to the support and help that they need.

This has rightly been described by the Government as a something-for-something arrangement. We support that approach, but we have to ensure that the something that is on offer to support people back into work—the pathways to work programme—is rolled out properly. I hope that the Minister will be able to offer some assurances about the level of funding that will be available for that package. I am concerned that there is a big shortfall in the funding that will offer people outside the pilot areas a “pathways to work lite programme”, which will mean that the responsibilities that they are being asked to take on under the Bill are not balanced by the opportunities and support that is on offer. That is my first caveat.

The hon. Member for Bury St. Edmunds made the important point that, over the years, we have seen an increasing proportion of incapacity benefit claimants claiming for reasons of mental health. One Government evaluation of the pathways to work programme has suggested that incapacity benefit was not as effective for people whose first reason for claiming benefit was mental health. We need to return to that issue, particularly when we are discussing the personal capability assessment. We will need to ensure that there are protections and assurances for the people involved. Likewise, there are important questions to be asked about how quickly existing claimants will be migrated on to the new benefit and to what extent both the conditions and benefits of pathways to work will be available to them.

An important issue regarding the amendments that we want to discuss is the extent to which the Government’s approach offers any sense of support to, or engagement with, employers. This is not just a supply-side issue about getting people ready for work; it is also about ensuring that employers are encouraged to keep their side of the bargain.

I am happy to support the programme motion. The approach that has been suggested—not having knives, but allowing the Committee to find its own way—should command support from all Committee members. I hope that we have a mature and sensible discussion, and I am sure that that will be so. I dare say that we will find consensus on some issues, but also that there will be disagreements and I am sure that they will be discussed on both sides in the constructive spirit that has governed the Bill’s proceedings so far.