Clause 11
Welfare Reform Bill
9:45 am
Tim Boswell (Shadow Minister, Work & Pensions; Daventry, Conservative)
I have a few points to make about the clause. The more that I look at the Bill, the clearer it becomes that the next few clauses hang together and cannot be construed in isolation. I wish first to put on record my appreciation that, in this case, the Government have provided us with draft regulations and, as they refer to the substance of the action planned that we shall be discussing again in respect of clause 13, I shall at least touch on some of those issues.
As is evident from the existence of regulations and the absence of specific amendments, the clause is not particularly contentious. It gives rise to several points that I hope that Ministers will bear in mind when they work out the administrative arrangements and that relate to the reassurance of customers and the avoidance of a lot of appeal or difficulty when carrying them out subsequently.
It is clear, by definition, that the purpose of a work-focused interview is that it results in something positive. It is action directed towards the return of the person, the customer or the claimant to work, which is an entirely acceptable principle. Although I do not wish to go on as much as I did on Tuesday about such matters, my experience of looking at the pathways to pilots in Derbyshire confirmed that that approach is being taken, and I welcome it.
Within those pilots, there is no requirement for particular activity; the obligation is to appear for the interview. As we debate clauses 12 and 13, we will see that there is at least the potential of a specific obligation, albeit not necessarily to carry out a particular piece of work-focused activity, but, as it were, the noose is tightening on the claimant to do something about it. We could argue endlessly, but it would not be in the spirit of this Committee for me to suggest that that has a malicious or unpleasant overtone about the motivation of people who are claimants or customers. It is worth recording that figures I have seen from Jobcentre Plus suggest that, under the present pathways, 23 per cent of claimants never actually make the work-focused interview.
On a “saloon bar” interpretation, this could simply be because the claimants have not got a case and they do not turn up. More realistically, it may well be that, for many of them, the condition has worked its way out and they are perfectly fit and able to return to work. We celebrate that. There may be a variety of reasons, but clearly the work-focused interview is a something of a milestone along the way.
There are some interesting issues about the timing. If we take the pathways experience, my understanding is that the interview takes place in the eighth week of claim. That is over and beyond the six months of statutory sick pay, so it is quite a long time from the incidence of the condition or the initial incident. There may be a reason for not attending the interview, and some people would take the view that the system needs time to settle down and for some people to return to work. This is defensible, although my hon. Friends and I will be arguing later in a different context that there is a strong case for earlier intervention in the whole process when the condition establishes itself, even within the statutory sick pay period, but we will not get into that debate today. However, Ministers owe it to the Committee to say something about the optimum time or how flexible that can be in relation to the individual. I think that it is good to connect with people earlier in the process rather than leave them to nurse their difficulties until it is too late to find a remedy for them.
There are issues, which we will return to in later clauses, about the nature of the interview and the basis of the action plan. I cannot help, if only by consanguinity with a member of my family and the sort of discussion we tend to have, although I cannot say we spend our whole weekends discussing the Welfare Reform Bill—