Schedule 4
Welfare Reform Bill
9:15 pm
David Ruffley (Shadow Minister, Work & Pensions; Bury St Edmunds, Conservative)
I will keep my questions brief. As the hon. Gentleman said, the explanatory notes refer to regulations that could provide for either voluntary or mandatory migration. It would be extremely useful and important to understand what would influence Ministers to take the voluntary route as against the mandatory route. I know that there are two options, but it would be useful to understand why they are there.
The second question relates to the financial terms on which the migration, whether voluntary or mandatory, will take place. For someone who was, before the commencement of this Act, on good old-fashioned incapacity benefit, it seems logically to be the case that, on migrating to ESA, they will go on to the new higher rates. There is a question attached to that.
When the migration takes place, existing claims on IB migrate on to ESA at the higher rates. Does it not follow that an IB claimant who, for the sake of argument, passed a PCA at the beginning of 2008—weeks before the commencement of the Bill—and then migrated on to ESA would in the act of migration have to have an assessment under clauses 8 and 9? If they were in the work-related activity component, would they have to take the test in clause 10? It seems that the regime would have to be repeated for the IB claimant who passed the PCA a matter of weeks before the commencement of the Bill. Otherwise, there would be no way in which the higher component for support or work-related activity could possibly be awarded, unless the migrating IB claimant had gone through the full panoply of the new ESA regime.