Welfare Reform Bill
12:00 pm
Mark Harper (Shadow Minister, Work & Pensions; Forest of Dean, Conservative)
I am still not entirely convinced, and we will have more debate on this when we get to the detailed consideration of the Bill. First, the legislative framework for adult social care is in place, but it is not very advanced in the sense of the number of people in the country who have an individual budget. One of the witnesses on Tuesday was Paul Davies, the director of adult social care at Oldham. His authority has a fifth of the national total of people on adult social care who have an individual budget. The number of people with an individual budget in adult social care is very disappointing. Picking up the point that you both made about pilots or trailblazers, he said in his evidence that he understood why people wanted a pilot but, having rolled this out to everybody in his authority, he was convinced that there was sufficient evidence about what works and how to proceed, and he said unequivocally that he would like the Government to press forward with this. That is broadly my view.
Have you considered the alternative to a piloting system, which is putting the legislation in place and being very clear with authorities about the direction that you want to go? Obviously some local authorities, and possibly even some parts of the DWP and its delivery organisations such as Jobcentre Plus, would move faster. You could then use those leading organisations to learn the lessons—to see what worked—and then roll out to those that were slower. That would set a clearer direction and would be more likely to lead to this concept taking hold than running pilots for three years, during which a lot of authorities will be tempted to sit back and wait and not engage with the process because they are not sure that it is inevitable.