Clause 11
Welfare Reform Bill
9:45 am
Tim Boswell (Shadow Minister, Work & Pensions; Daventry, Conservative)
I am delighted to hear that my hon. Friend thinks of nothing else.
I am inclined to look at what may be termed the hard case, or the judicial case—the moment when somebody says I have not been treated fairly and I am going to appeal because they are stitching me up. In constituency traffic, that is the kind of thing we get asserted to us by constituents even if it is not the case. To avoid any doubt, that is not the sort of approach to this process that the pathways officers I saw were taking. It is not a penal process and nobody here wants it to be.
Even within the narrow terms of clause 11, which is about the rules for interview, and paves for the draft regulations that I mentioned, there are some interesting issues. What is an interview? What is co-operation with an interview, which is required under section 6 of the draft regulations? It is to talk about assisting and encouraging the person to remain in or to obtain work and about identifying activities the patient may undertake to make that more likely.
As we have said extensively in this Committee, many of the claimants may well have mental conditions, attitude problems and feelings about themselves that are probably not objectively justified, but we do not want to penalise people if they do not quite fit in the interviewing officer’s book. On the other hand, if someone sits in the interview in what used to be described in the armed forces as a mode of dumb insolence and refuses to answer any questions or to co-operate with the interviewer, one could reasonably argue, and the regulations appear to argue this, that they have not had an interview at all. They may have attended, but they have not played their part. There are some issues about how that is to be defined.
I am a little more concerned about the nature of the record and we may need to return to this on clause 13. An action plan ideally should be consensual and signed by both parties. It should say, “We have discussed your case. We realise that you have these problems which have been identified by the work-focused health-related assessment, but nevertheless we think that you could try to do this”, and the person will undertake to do so. There is also the question of a record of what is to take place. That is specified in the draft regulations.
As the Minister said the other day, the benefit situation for the individual should be incorporated in some way into the action plan. It is a little bit more than an action plan. In financial planning, if one went to an independent financial adviser, one would call it a report and a series of recommendations or agreed undertakings. It will be quite a complex document.
Some of these things may be done for good reason over the telephone. There is always an evidential problem. There is also a serious issue—again, I do not want to get at officers involved—concerning the appropriate bag of qualifications for the individual conducting the interview. What was immensely impressive about pathways to work was that the personal advisers clearly knew what their job was. They were highly motivated and in certain cases rather movingly so. I watched them from across the room carrying out interviews. When going into institutions one looks at the body language and it looked like a positive interview, with no lurking behind a screen and telling people to account for themselves.
To do what they will be asked to do, for not great remuneration, these officials need a full bag of qualifications. They have to have reporting skills. Something has to be written down. They have to have the personal adviser skills to try to tease out what is possible. The main point for the Minister that concerns me is that they have to have an understanding of the benefits situation because that is clearly relevant to the action plan. All my experience of the Department is that people can be very good on the benefit that they are administering, or they may be good at getting people back into work, but they are not omnicompetent.
Some of the difficulties arise where people are operating in silos. One person will understand the disability living allowance very well. I see the Under-Secretary of State is nodding. Another will understand the linking rules, someone else will know what the local employment position is for the person being coaxed back into work and someone else will have an input into the health-related assessment. That is all perfectly sensible but it all comes together in an action plan which has to be competent. It has to be authoritative because it can give rise, at least in principle in later clauses, to sanctions.
Unless I have grossly oversimplified the pathways pilot model, personal advisers on the benefits side talk primarily about the return-to-work credit, which is relatively straightforward and part of the whole complex, but not the overall bag of benefits. A benefits adviser would be brought in if necessary. We are asking a lot of these action plans. They are meant to advise and to help individuals. I am sure that that is the intention. They are meant to cover a lot of ground with people who have quite a lot of difficulties. It is important that they are well conceived and defensible—if necessary, in a tribunal—because we do not want people being given low-grade action plans that do not cover their needs, might contain factual errors or give rise to other arguments further down the chain when, for example, things do not turn out to be feasible. In this clause, we need to make certain that the work-focused interview is prescribed a proper gateway to action, that it can all be dealt with in a professional way and will not be skimped on or hurried through, which can give rise to difficulties. We will no doubt want to explore this matter seriously in other clauses. I do not find anything personally objectionable in the structure or regulations at all, so there areno amendments on it but Ministers do need to think about it.