Clause 13
Welfare Reform Bill
3:15 pm
Danny Alexander (Shadow Minister and Disability Spokesperson, Work & Pensions; Inverness, Nairn, Badenoch and Strathspey, Liberal Democrat)
I will try to be relatively brief. All three amendments relate to the action plans and raise concerns which I hope the Minister will address about how the action planning process will operate.
Amendment No. 157 goes back to a debate that we had earlier, so I shall not dwell on it too much. However, it is important to talk a bit more about the requirements on employers. In a debate last week, the Minister said that engagement with employers is essential because, in the main, the Government do not create jobs. But he also implied that the Government themselves should be doing more as an employer to engage with the sorts of people we have been discussing.
Can the Minister expand a wee bit on what role he thinks the Department for Work and Pensions and other central Government Departments could have as employers, and whether they will have a role in recruiting people from incapacity benefit, or from employment and support allowance, as it will be?
Another key question is how any employer engagement undertaken by the Department or, indeed, by contractors on behalf of the Department—delivering pathways to work, for example—will relate to the action plans that will be drawn up for individuals. Is it the Minister’s thinking that within the action plans reference could be made to the role that employers will play? That is the substance of the first amendment. The burden of one of the other amendments is that the action plan is not just about the individual. It is about what the personal adviser can do to help an individual and what potential employers might do in the context of the individual action plan.
Amendment No. 38 is about safeguards in relation to the reconsideration of an action plan. Subsection (4) provides that an action plan can be reconsidered under certain circumstances to be specified in regulations. Will the Minister assure us that an individual who is the subject of an action plan will have the right to request a change to it, or to withdraw it completely and to ask for a fresh one to be drawn up if circumstances change?
Amendment No. 143 is intended to probe the Government’s definition of the “prescribed circumstances” in which a person will be provided with an action plan document. With those brief words, I invite the Minister to spell out his thinking.