Clause 15
Welfare Reform Bill
12:00 pm
Jim Murphy (Minister of State (Work), Department for Work and Pensions; East Renfrewshire, Labour)
It is great to see you in your place, Mr. Hood. We have made substantial progress since you last refereed our proceedings. A cursory look at the Hansard record shows that we have made progress via Marx, Stalin and the Jacobites’ visit to Derby. To understand where they fit in you will have to read the record carefully, Mr. Hood.
I shall be brief so that we can make progress. I can confirm to the hon. Member for Inverness, Nairn, Badenoch and Strathspey (Danny Alexander) that child poverty has been established as the No. 1 priority of the Department for Work and Pensions. We are reviewing all our employment and welfare programmes to ensure that they have the maximum impact on child poverty and we will examine not just this Bill and the transition of existing customers, but every proposal to discover their impact on child poverty and their likely outcome.
I confirm again for the purposes of the record the assurances that I gave on 19 October, to which the hon. Gentleman alluded, about the protections of the Disability Discrimination Act and the Human Rights Act.
The effect of clause 15 is to allow the Secretary of State to authorise providers to carry out certain functions of his relating to conditionality. It does not transfer those functions to the providers. Where a contractor is exercising functions by virtue of clause 15, subsection (7) provides that in most cases any act or omission of the contractors in carrying out these functions is to be treated for all purposes as an act done or omitted by the Secretary of State. For the purposes of the Disability Discrimination Act or the Human Rights Act, anything done by a contractor would be regarded as done by the Secretary of State. That means that the Secretary of State remains responsible for ensuring that those functions are carried out in away that is compatible with both the Disability Discrimination Act and the Human Rights Act. I hope that that reassures the hon. Member for Inverness, Nairn, Badenoch and Strathspey and my hon. Friend the Member for Caerphilly (Mr. David), who also raised the matter in an earlier contribution to our proceedings.