Clause 2
Welfare Reform Bill
11:45 am
James Clappison (Shadow Minister, Work & Pensions; Hertsmere, Conservative)
Clause 2 deals with the work-related activity which may be required of certain benefit claimants, including benefit claimants on income support, income-based jobseeker’s allowance or income-related employment and support allowance. Although it is not specifically mentioned in the Bill, the clause appears to affect lone parents of younger children who are currently in receipt of income support. This is the relevant point to ventilate some important considerations for lone parents of younger children.
Amendment 39 deals with the age that the youngest child must have reached before lone parents are required to take part in the work-related activity regime envisaged in these proposals. It would set that age at five. Amendment 44, which has been tabled by the Liberal Democrats, sets it at seven. The background to this is quite important. Until last year it was possible for a single parent to remain on income support until the youngest child reached the age of 16. However, in June 2007 the Government announced that they were moving lone parents from income support to jobseeker’s allowance in stages.
The process began last year, when the age limit for single parents to remain on income support was reduced to the youngest child reaching the age of 12. As we speak, the process of transferring lone parents from income support to jobseeker’s allowance is proceeding in jobcentres up and down the country. The age at which lone parents are transferred from income support to jobseeker’s allowance will fall to seven in October 2010. That leaves open the question of what is expected of lone parents with children under seven. Of course, they will not be expected to move from income support to jobseeker’s allowance, as is the case with lone parents of children over the age of seven, but under the Government’s plans they will be expected to fulfil the requirements set out in the clause, some of which we have already touched on when debating other amendments.
Our understanding of the Government’s proposals as a whole is that they see lone parents as part of a progression to work group from the time their youngest child is aged one. The Government have set out how they see that group in their discussion paper on the implementation of the Gregg review. According to their response to that review, lone parents with children aged between one and two years will be
“Required to attend Work Focused interviews and agree an action plan. They are not mandated to undertake any activities recorded on the action plan”.
However, the important point is that when the youngest child reaches the age of three, lone parents will be
“Required to follow the full progression to Work regime based around Work Focused interviews, action plans, work related activity and the backstop of adviser direction.”
That presumably means that lone parents with children aged three or over will be subject to the regime of sanctions for failing to comply with the requirements, as is set out in the Bill.
Amendment 39 would substitute the age of three with the age of five as the point at which the regime and all its requirements would begin. The age of five was specified in the Government’s July 2008 Green Paper as the appropriate age at which requirements could begin to be made on lone parents. The Green Paper envisaged piloting a requirement for lone parents whose youngest child is five or six to attend relevant skills training where that would address the skills gaps identified as a barrier to starting work. Subsequently, the Gregg review suggested that lone parents with a youngest child between the age of one and seven should be in the progression to work group, as I have indicated, as part of the Gregg vision of personalised conditionality, although I do not believe that Professor Gregg specified the age of three as the age at which that move to the regime would occur, as the Government are now setting out.
The progression to work group is intended to prepare people for full availability for work, and in this case we are talking about preparing single parents for entry to the jobseeker’s regime when their youngest child reaches the age of seven. Commencing the work-related activity for them at the age of five, as suggested in amendment 39, would give them two years in which to undertake work-related activity to prepare them for work, and something along those lines seems to have been present in the Government’s thinking in the July 2008 Green Paper.
The question I wish to put to the Minister is this: why is the two years of work-related activity in that regime from the time the youngest child reaches the age of five insufficient to prepare lone parents for work?