Clause 17
Welfare Reform Bill
5:30 pm
Tim Boswell (Shadow Minister, Work & Pensions; Daventry, Conservative)
I am sure that the Committee will be relieved to hear that I do not object to the principle of the amendments, and that I shall not advise my hon. Friends to oppose them. However, I would like a moment of the Under-Secretary’s time. First, I make the point that apparently, or overtly, the provision on prisoners has been omitted. That may have been purely a technical oversight, but she should acknowledge the role of my hon. Friend the Member for Runnymede and Weybridge in drawing attention to the fact that many of the issues involving prisoners and their benefits have been rather overlooked by the Department. It is obviously unacceptable for prisoners to receive benefits when they are in Her Majesty’s custody.
That issue prompts a slightly more substantive point, because, as the Under-Secretary made clear when moving the amendments, we are talking about short periods of incarceration. What is the position regarding available support services and the pathways to work programme? Clearly such services are not geared towards people who are resident in prison and may not be extendable to people who are in prison, but there may be cases in which they could be used—for example, with someone who has a fluctuating, explosive condition, who has been put in the cells and charged with some public order offence. There may be sensible reasons, to do with rehabilitation, for the pathways programme to continue at that point. If the Under-Secretary cannot give me a pat answer, will she consider whether that should not be ruled out? I am interested in this not in relation to the moral approbation of a crime that has been committed, but as a realistic pathway to rehabilitation. Many of us are interested in prisoners in that wider context.
I pause on only one other matter now, although we may have some comments to make in the stand part debate, which is the reference to Great Britain. The hon. Member for Inverness, Nairn, Badenoch and Strathspey has tabled amendment No. 201 to schedule 2, which raises the same issue. As we will debate that amendment later, I do not wish to anticipate or rehearse any of the comments that he might make, but I am genuinely puzzled about one point.
This country is the United Kingdom, with Great Britain and Northern Ireland. We know, and clause 60 reminds us, that we are not legislating for Northern Ireland in the Bill. That may happen either by an Order in Council or through a procedure of the devolved Assembly if it is reconstituted and takes up its powers. I simply make the point that moving to another part of the United Kingdom is not the same as moving to a UK dependency such as the Isle of Man or Guernsey; it is not leaving the UK. It is odd, therefore, that the structure of devolved government, or otherwise, seems to preclude Northern Ireland. There may be a perfectly innocent explanation for that, but I am genuinely puzzled by it. I raise this issue only for completeness, and do not make any suggestion that I wish to oppose this particular amendment, which seems entirely sensible.