Clause 11
Welfare Reform Bill
10:00 am
David Ruffley (Shadow Minister, Work & Pensions; Bury St Edmunds, Conservative)
I endorse everything that my hon. Friend has said. I would like to add a further point. This clause underpins the rights and responsibilities agenda, which both the Government and Her Majesty’s loyal Opposition support. As with anything to do with rights and commensurate responsibilities, there is a fine balance to be struck. This clause seems to be about encouraging people to find out more about the support that they can get. The work-focused interview is a good thing. It is designed to showcase the types of support that are available to the customer. However, it must not frighten people off. There is always that tension throughout all these reforms.
Mind and the Child Poverty Action Group have raised a point about some of the literature that customers have been receiving in pilot areas, regarding their attendance at work-focused interviews. They have evidence—I am not going to quantify it—that a threatening tone has been deployed, threatening withdrawal of benefits for non-attendance. I am not suggesting that that is widespread at all, but CPAG wants a review of some of the language used. It quotes a standard letter sent to claimants regarding their attendance at a WFI in a pathways pilot:
“As your adviser, I need to meet with you to discuss how we can improve your chances of finding work, now or in the future. We want to make sure that you are getting the right support and are claiming all the right benefits. It is important that you attend and participate in this interview. If you do not, your benefit may be affected.”
I am used to the rough and tumble of politics. I used to be, when I had a proper job, a lawyer—[Interruption.]I was going to say that I earned an honest living as a lawyer—well, a living anyway. To many in this room, that kind of language may seem straightforward and factual. It touches all the right bases in one respect: it talks about the right support and making sure that people get the right amount of benefit. However, it has affected some customers. Sue Christoforou, the policy officer at Mind, said in evidence to the Select Committee for Work and Pensions earlier this year that, after receiving such letters, some of Mind’s clients had
“gone out immediately to get a job because they feel that is what the letter is saying to them, completely inappropriate jobs and after a number of days that job fails.”
I stress that that evidence undermines neither the propositions in the clause, nor the successes of pathways and the progress that it has made. However, will the Minister commission, or assure us that he will commission, a review, whereby officials continually analyse and perhaps audit such specimen letters to ensure that the language can be tweaked, not so that it loses its force, becomes meaningless prose or is so bland that the customer takes no note of it, but so that it does not threaten clients and customers—not my words—in the ways in which some bodies say it does? One hopes that such cases are in the minority.