Welfare Reform Bill
12:00 pm
Mark Harper (Shadow Minister, Work & Pensions; Forest of Dean, Conservative)
I have a final two-part question on this clause. First, I am saying the opposite about constraining. When I read through the Bill I was encouraged that clause 29(2) was all-encompassing, covering a range of areas. It is later narrowed by excluding some other funding areas. If you left those bits out, you would enable individuals to start from looking at how their life works, pulling in the funding streams from across Government. You would be able to give yourselves the powers to do that.
My second concern about the piloting is the opportunity cost of not doing this fast enough. You will know from your visits that when you talk to people who have managed to get an individual budget for social care, they say that their lives have been transformed and enhanced and that a huge difference has been made. There may be snags along the way that need to be sorted out, but I would like to be able to bring help faster to all those people who will not get the opportunity to get control of their lives in the next three years or more. In the legislation, you have powers to run a further set of pilots after that; it seems that we are in danger of not making this happen fast enough for all those people for whom it would be a life-enhancing experience.