Welfare Reform Bill
12:00 pm
Mark Harper (Shadow Minister, Work & Pensions; Forest of Dean, Conservative)
I would like to start with the right to control area of the Bill. This question is probably best directed at Mr. Shaw and then perhaps Ms Helson.
Clause 29(2) starts well by being drawn widely across a range of areas affecting somebody’s whole life. Unfortunately, it gets rather narrower in subsection (5) where it excludes social care services and a number of other things. I have read the reasons for that—that those areas are already controlled under other legislation—but it seems to me that we run the danger, with a number of Government Departments moving in this direction, of ending up with individuals having a number of individual budgets and a number of different funding streams and not being able to draw all those things together. Why not be braver and encompass a range of funding streams across Government Departments to give individuals a genuine right to control, so that they do not have to fit their lives round departmental boundaries but Departments try to fit their service delivery around individual lives?