Welfare Reform Bill
4:00 pm
Tim Nichols: I would like to add just a bit to what Eddy said. I want to make it clear that CPAG very much supports the potential that work can have as a route out of poverty for parents and children, provided that it is high-quality, well-paid work. We certainly would not want our criticisms of the Bill to be misunderstood as opposition to that in any way, but we have concerns about the effectiveness of the approaches being taken and about the Bill’s impact on children.
Financial sanctions on a family will have consequences for the children in the family. There are potential conflicts between some of the possible directions and parental caring responsibilities, and we are also concerned about the potential of the welfare to work agenda to drive child care strategy too much.
We think that the needs of children have to trump everything. The Government’s child care strategy has to be at the top and other things must follow it. In terms of effectiveness, the Bill leaves claimants with very little ownership of the process of gaining employment support. The large majority of claimants want to get into decent work. We would prefer to see a system that nurtured that ambition much more and worked in a more positive way with that potential, and that is part of the reason why we are one of the organisations that has suggested that this is an opportunity perhaps to look at ideas around a claimants charter so that a claimant would feel that they had an entitlement to high-quality, personally tailored support, rather than it being something imposed on them through a quite bureaucratic sanctions regime. As somebody who was once a long-term benefit claimant and experienced the new deal, I know that no matter what things look like on paper, the feelings that you have as a claimant and your personal experience of the process as it plays out are extremely important to its success.
We have concerns about the amount of time that is being given for consideration of the Bill in Committee. After the evidence sessions, there will be only six sittings. I believe that there were 12 sittings for the last Welfare Reform Bill. Given how much will be left to regulations, we are not sure that there is enough time really to scrutinise the Bill.