DWP: Performance
Lord Field of Birkenhead Excerpts(10 years, 4 months ago)
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Mr Frank Field (Birkenhead) (Lab)
May I make one point in this debate and seek one undertaking?
The issues that we are debating are immensely important, particularly for large numbers of our constituents. One advantage of being in this place for 35 years is that one notices the changes. I notice that two of the Government Members who are present are part of a parliamentary inquiry into hunger and food poverty. They have therefore had the opportunity to look at what is happening elsewhere in the country and not only in their backyard.
The Secretary of State used one phrase that stung me into action. I wish to address that rather than say what I was going to say. He said that one problem with the Labour Government was that we just paid out money too easily.
Mr Field
I have the quotation here, although perhaps I did not get it right. The Secretary of State said that Labour “wasn’t delivering the money”. It is the delivery of the money that I would like to take him up on and on which I would like to seek the undertaking.
Many of our constituents—not just those of Opposition Members, but those of Government Members—become dependent only and totally on benefit for part of their life. How effectively, efficiently and quickly that benefit is delivered is of immense importance. For many of our constituents, although not all, claiming benefit is not a pleasant thing to do. They do not do it lightly or think that they gain out of it, other than gaining the hope that they will have money with which to put food on the table. It is quite clear not only from my constituency, but from going around the country, that there is a growing difficulty for people in gaining benefit in an adequate space of time. It is undignified not to have money. It is appalling to have to grovel across the counter for money. The alternative of attending food banks is, for many people, a very last resort.
The Department has rules. It makes judgments about who is out of money, and money is paid to people in those circumstances. I ask the Secretary of State to ensure that an undertaking is given in the concluding remarks that he will look at how well—or not well—those rules are working. Although some people are without money because sanctions have been applied against them, others are seeking benefit genuinely but are not gaining it. When I asked the Minister of State, Department for Work and Pensions, the hon. Member for Thornbury and Yate (Steve Webb) how many people had been without benefit for one month, two months and three months, he said that the Department did not know. Just imagine what it is like having no money and waiting one day, let alone months, for benefit to come through. I therefore ask the Secretary of State to give the undertaking that the safety measures that the Department has in place will be reviewed and new rules brought in quickly, so that people are not left dangling at the end of a string, destitute, waiting for decisions that do not come.
Oral Answers to Questions
Lord Field of Birkenhead Excerpts(10 years, 5 months ago)
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Mr Frank Field (Birkenhead) (Lab)
What is the Government’s target for how long people will have to wait for these benefits by the time of the next general election? As the Minister tries to restore order from this chaos, will he be in a position soon to tell those in the queue how much longer they will have to wait?
Mike Penning
One of the things we are trying to do is communicate much better with people who are waiting, which is the most important thing we can do. What we do not want to do is build up promises, so that people think they will be assessed quicker than they will be. On PIP in particular, we will make sure that the providers are doing the job we are asking them to do, and that we are acting as fast as we can and taking the correct decisions. On the first point, I cannot give a time scale at this time, and it would be wrong for any Minister to stand before the House and do so.
Universal Jobmatch Programme (Fraud)
Lord Field of Birkenhead Excerpts(10 years, 6 months ago)
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Mr Frank Field (Birkenhead) (Lab)
It is the first time that I have had the privilege of speaking under your chairmanship, Mrs Riordan, and I welcome it. You will realise from your own constituency work that the debate is immensely serious. It originated with a constituent who was ripped off, to put it in delicate language, through using the Universal Jobmatch that the Government, rightly, provide. I want to say at the outset, to avoid any doubt, that while I have been a Member of the House I have always been in favour of conditionality. The Government’s latest move on conditionality—
Mrs Linda Riordan (in the Chair)
Order. Will hon. Members who attended the previous debate leave quietly? I should be grateful.
Mr Field
I should have hoped for more order at Jobcentre Plus than some hon. Members have been displaying, Mrs Riordan.
It must be at least 25 years ago that I suggested that help should be given to those who had difficulty finding a job. There may be fraud, and we should ask people from that group to come in at different times each day to sign on. I am pleased that after about 25 years a Government have got round to that idea. I approach the debate not in an attempt to wreck what Jobcentre Plus does, but in an attempt to improve it. As a start, Andrew Forsey of my office, who has done all the work on this, checked the Jobmatch scheme for Birkenhead today, as I am sure the Minister did. I know that many of her constituents use the same facilities. In the Birkenhead constituency there are 2,647 people claiming jobseekers’ allowance and, an hour or so ago, 24 jobs were advertised as available within 20 miles of Birkenhead. Fifteen of those were duplicate agency jobs, and two were stand-alone agency jobs. Despite the fact that the search was for jobs within 20 miles, one of those advertised was in Milton Keynes, two were in London, and one was for an overseas worker. There was a grand total of three actual vacancies. The Monster jobsite, run separately from the work that Monster does with the Department for Work and Pensions, had one job listed today, which was a teaching job.
To focus the debate, I thought it would be worth while considering the letter that the Minister wrote to the Chairman of the Select Committee, and the annex to that. The Clerk to the Select Committee kindly sent me a copy of both, and I have 12 questions for the Minister. Five are about the letter, and the others are about the annex. First, the Minister says in her letter:
“We have well established procedures to minimise the risks of this”—
bogus jobs—
“occurring within Universal Jobmatch.”
What are those checks and what are the results of using them? Secondly, she says:
“We have closed the fraudulent account and will compensate all jobseekers that have been affected in this case.”
I refer to constituents who were taken for a ride by a fraudster advertising on the Department for Work and Pensions site. The Minister says that they will be compensated. They lost at least £65 each—the money that they were asked to provide for a Home Office check—and have been offered £25. What does the Minister mean by compensation in those circumstances?
Thirdly, the Minister’s letter states:
“If the employer is in breach of our Terms and Conditions we will remove their right to advertise on Universal Jobmatch.”
What trawling of the site does she carry out, and how many removals occur? My constituent received a letter from the Department, which said:
“Currently there are 179 accounts advertising 352,569 jobs which potentially breach the Terms and Conditions”
that the Department has laid down. If the Department is telling one of my constituents that well over 350,000 jobs advertised may be in breach of the terms it lays down, how are the removals carried out? Fourthly, the letter states that that Department has
“removed…400 non-compliant accounts since…November 2012.”
May we have some idea of the reasons for the removals? How were the accounts breaking the contracts? Will the Minister explain more about the cleansing undertaken to get to that total?
My fifth and last question about the Minister’s letter arises from her saying that
“we have now concluded our investigations into 183 distributor accounts, resulting in the removal of the accounts and the associated vacancies.”
What are those distributor accounts? What sorts of vacancies were removed, and how many jobs were involved? Answers to those questions arising from the letter will enable us to understand more fully the action that the Department takes to ensure that people who use Universal Jobmatch will not be ripped off.
The first question arising from the annex is about its slightly boastful statement that DWP and Monster
“have already made major improvements”.
May I ask what those are? Secondly, it says:
“Sadly, the existence of ‘rogue’ employers is nothing new”.
If they are nothing new, what does the Department learn from finding out about those bogus employers and acting against them? After all, the Department offered facilities to someone who was known, certainly in some circles, as a fraudulent individual. People skilled in fraud do not normally turn up using their correct names, and nor did the person in question, but he was ushered into DWP to conduct his fraud. What action does the Department take in that respect? Thirdly, the annex mentions “well-established procedures to minimise” fraud. What are those procedures?
The fourth question arising from the annex to the letter is about the assertion that
“like all internet job sites, we manage the issue of duplicate or inappropriate vacancies.”
I remind the House that there are 15 duplicate jobs in the 54 advertised today on the DWP site. How well is that managing the issue? Fifthly, it is claimed that
“whenever we have a doubt”
action is taken. Who registers those doubts, and what is the doubt test that could lead to action? Sixthly—there are only two more questions—the annex states:
“If an employer breaches our terms and conditions we remove their right to advertise.”
Yet, as I said, the letter to my constituent said that there might be more than 350,000 jobs in breach of the terms and conditions. What action is the Department taking?
Lastly, the annex says that
“there has been inaccurate speculation about the relationship of the DWP and Monster.”
Will the Minister tell us something about that relationship, so we can be clear what it is? It is totally proper for them to have a relationship and for the DWP to ask Monster to carry out its functions; but it is not proper to expose constituents to fraud. That is the main point of the debate.
Today, even if we took the Department’s website at face value, only 24 jobs are advertised within 20 miles of Birkenhead, with more than 2,500 people claiming JSA. Large numbers of people are dead serious about trying to get a job, quite rightly, using that service, and they are being let down badly. What actions will the Government take to improve the service? Again, if people do not use the Jobmatch website actively, might they face sanctions, given the numbers of sanctions being employed at present? It is totally proper that the Department should have a website on which to advertise jobs, and totally proper that Beveridge’s idea of labour exchanges should be brought into the IT age, where people can easily advertise and where—we hope—claimants can as easily find jobs. However, the Department has totally failed not only to ensure that there are serious jobs on the site but, even more important, to take action to combat fraud.
I welcome the opportunity for the debate and to face my neighbour in Wirral West. Some of our constituents use the same jobcentre and the same site. I look forward to her replies, although I quite understand that she may need to write to me afterwards with some of them. I am grateful for the debate, Mrs Riordan.
The Minister of State, Department for Work and Pensions (Esther McVey)
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mrs Riordan. I thank the right hon. Member for Birkenhead (Mr Field) for securing this debate, so we can have clarity over Universal Jobmatch and about the many positive things that it is doing at the moment. If we look at the latest statistics and numbers of people getting into work, we see that this year annual employment has gone up to the highest level in 25 years, and this month we have had the biggest annual fall in long-term unemployment since 1998. The number of vacancies at any one time in the market has also gone up significantly, with 600,000 job vacancies at any one time.
I will try to answer as many of the right hon. Gentleman’s questions as I can here today. If I do not get to all of them, I will write to him with further answers, as he suggested. I thoroughly understand why he secured the debate. Although fraud in Universal Jobmatch is less than 0.1%, the one instance took place in his constituency.
I can confirm that the fraudulent account was closed and all the people affected were compensated. The right hon. Gentleman asked about the amount that was given; it was significant. Of course, there was the repayment of money for the Criminal Records Bureau check—£65—and yes, he mentioned £25 on top of that. Significantly, some of those people got up to £1,200, because it is about actual money lost as well as compensation—he will be pleased to hear that. I have the full list of people, what they have got and how we have recompensed them.
Mr Field
I welcome that information. As the Minister knows, in this case, Jobcentre Plus invited the fraudster in to have an office in the DWP, so one of my questions was what steps the Department takes to ensure that when it offers people office space in the Department, they are bona fide, as one would have thought they would be. What actions does the Department take to weed out fraudsters, who clearly do operate in the system?
Esther McVey
I will come to that. We have more than half a million businesses and 6.1 million claimants on the site, and nearly 5 million job searches a day. We know that there will be instances—it is less than 0.1%, as I said—where something goes wrong. What matters is how we deal with it, sort it out and compensate those people, as we did in this instance.
Things have changed considerably over the past 16 years. The right hon. Gentleman was a Minister in the Department, so he will know that. Every Jobcentre Plus, everybody who works there, and every adviser wants the best for their claimant. We have seen how things have changed significantly, from being paper-based to having job points—a quite clunky solution introduced by the previous Labour Government. Job points frequently did not work, were offline, and things could go wrong. I looked for the statistics for fraud during the Labour Government’s tenure, but it seems that they did not wish to keep those figures. Although we have anecdotal evidence that fraudulent and bad behaviour was common, and we know that that was regional, it seems that it may have been brushed under the carpet. I am not sure what was going on then, whereas we have full transparency of what goes on now, significantly so and obviously, because it is online, which is key.
If we think of the changes and transformations over the past 16 years, of course we have to be online. Google did not even exist 13 years ago. The technological advances are significant and not having people online would be wrong, given that 25% of all jobs are online only. We have to get the best service we can. However, by opening up those opportunities—by having more than 227% more vacancies online and 1,316 more employers online—we open up the possibility of fraud, and we have to clamp down on that significantly.
The timeline of what went on may help to explain some of the procedures and things that happened. The vacancy posted by Options 4 Families for a trainee child counsellor went up online on 9 December 2013. On 18 December, the DWP was notified by Monster, which asked whether it was right that we were asking for CRB checks. It was not a constituent coming in to say, “I have a problem here,” as they do through letters, e-mails, and by coming into surgeries. It was our own checks that came across the problem. Ten thousand manual checks are going on per month, and Monster does checks too, so things were looked at then. It was decided that that was fine and the vacancy went back up online, but it was brought back down again and closed on 20 December. It was probably online for about nine days. Only a month or so after that, it seems, the right hon. Gentleman came to us to discuss the matter. We had, however, already seen it, and we were dealing with it and getting in touch with those constituents. That goes to show the checks that are going on constantly, the support that is available and how we deal with things.
That is what is key. Why did Universal Jobmatch come into being? What did we have to do in 2012 to give us the best opportunities to help people into work in this day and age? How were we going to have an online system that actually helped people to look for work, matchmaking them 24/7 and not only during opening hours of 8 to 6, Monday to Friday? How could we have a system enabling people to upload a CV, to find more jobs and to know what is going on? Universal Jobmatch is the best possible solution: it is the largest website in the UK, with 5 million job searches every day on average, bringing employers and employees together and with a significant increase in the number of employers using it. That is key, too. We have to reach out to claimants, and we have to reach out to businesses and employers to ensure that they want to engage and play a part. We also have to help Jobcentre Plus staff, who want to know that they have the best possible equipment.
As we have seen, it is important that we close down any fraudulent behaviour. It is also important that we deal with other inappropriate vacancies. It is worth noting that there frequently seems to be confusion between fraudulent vacancies, which are entirely unacceptable, and the duplicate vacancies that we sometimes see and can arise for a variety of reasons. Often, if a vacancy appears more than once on the site, it is a result of an employer using multiple agencies or posting the opportunity by themselves in addition to using other avenues. That is an unavoidable feature of the open-access model that the service provides, and it must be seen in that context. There are significant opportunities but, equally, if such duplication should not have occurred—if people are posting a vacancy where they have no direct relationship with the employer, for example—the vacancy will be taken down.
We have to consider what Universal Jobmatch has brought to the arena. There is Monster and various other services, but Universal Jobmatch allows job advisers to help people find a job and to check that they are looking for work, which is also key. Equally, we can work with claimants through their claimant commitment and help them to use the service. We can also advise claimants. We take things such as data security very seriously and we give advice to our jobseekers on how to stay safe online when conducting a job search. That advice is published on the UJ website, and it is given to people in jobcentres in a leaflet, “Safety and Security when looking for work.” Claimants are also advised not to pay any fees up front for help with job searches, and they are advised not to reveal personal details such as their bank account number, national insurance number or date of birth. Such information should also not be included on their CV. We are giving such advice on a daily basis.
People can access extra support through the “contact us” button. They are asked whether the site is working adequately, and there is a most frequently asked questions page. There is also additional support. Jobcentre staff are able to help people as much as they can. All of that is key, but it is always evolving and changing. We have to ensure that we have the best service, and wherever anything goes wrong we have to clamp down and ensure that it does not happen again. Equally, when a local Member of Parliament brings the activities of a company to this House, it highlights exactly what we do to close down companies and see what has happened. It also shows how we have supported claimants to recoup their money, which is right. The system is constantly monitored, and we constantly survey what is and is not acceptable.
We have made considerable improvements to Universal Jobmatch. When it was first introduced, we ensured that it was easy to use, that people were getting used to it and that employers had confidence in it. Confidence is key, too: we have to ensure that people have confidence in the system. Of course, all those businesses have confidence and think that Universal Jobmatch is a great way to reach out and find employees. It is significant that 90% of businesses that use Universal Jobmatch are small and medium-sized enterprises. For them, it is a cheaper and more reliable way of finding somebody close to their business. People underestimate the service. More than ever before, the Government are reaching out to business and asking, “How can we support you? How can we get somebody employed? What training do they need? Do they need work experience? Do they need any extra support?” That is what we are doing, and Universal Jobmatch is part of that greater relationship. All I can say is that, with the significant increases in getting people into work, all of these things are working.
We have the ability to disable and delete non-essential cookies, and we have taken the ability to close down accounts. We are enabling jobseekers to re-access their Universal Jobmatch account securely when locked out. We have revised access groups to control the web admin for DWP. We are also listening to what claimants would like. They are saying that they would like to search by a keyword or skill; they would like to find work within a specific distance, postcode or ward; they would like to choose how many hours they have to travel; and they want to filter out vacancies already reviewed within the list of results. We are doing all of those things—constant monitoring, constant upkeep and constant development.
The system has revolutionised the way people look for work. It is enabling people to get into work, and it is allowing advisers to work more closely with claimants, but where things go wrong, it is right that that is brought to this House. In this case, the matter was sorted back in December before the right hon. Gentleman brought it to the House, but it is right that the matter is discussed openly so that we get the best possible result for claimants.
Mr Frank Field
If one was a Prime Minister looking for a totally trustworthy Minister to be in charge of our security service and to ensure that nothing of any comprehension could be learned about the service, today’s debate shows that we have a candidate to fill that role. I am as confused as I was when I came in about what actually goes on.
In the few minutes remaining, I have three very simple questions for the Minister. First, she said that 10,000 checks are undertaken. Why 10,000? What is the time span, and what are the results? Secondly, she said that the Government will hunt duplicates and take them down. Of the 24 jobs advertised as relevant for Birkenhead, 15 were duplicates. Who is responsible for taking down those jobs?
Thirdly, the Minister talked in general terms about having to clamp down. Who clamps down, and who is responsible for that? How many people? How often do they do it, given the number of people who put up jobs and depend on the results? I would be grateful for answers to those three questions.
Esther McVey
By way of example, I was showing how, before the right hon. Gentleman even knew about the incident in his constituency, we had found it, dealt with it and closed down the site, which shows that we have our own team working on it within the DWP. Monster’s team is working on it, and it was streets ahead of his good self, even though it is correct that he brought the matter to the House. Of course we have said that anyone who was put to any inconvenience, who paid out or who suffered any loss was paid, and the compensation on top of their loss was significant. For example, where a loss in actual terms was £750, there was £500 of compensation on top. I have the full list of all those who received payments, but trust me that we have worked closely with them. We did not want to be in that situation, and as I said less than 0.1% of people are in that position, but we have dealt with it. Equally, there are 1,002 full-time vacancies within a 20-mile radius of Birkenhead posted on Universal Jobmatch today.
As I said, where things go wrong, we correct them and sort them out, but I hope everyone can see that we have done that in this instance. When we look at the number of people, 11 came forward and wanted compensation, which we have resolved. When we see that 5 million people a day are doing a job search on the site, we can see how, for the overwhelming majority of people, it is a very good addition to the other things that they might be doing to search for work both by themselves and with their adviser.
Question put and agreed to.
Oral Answers to Questions
Lord Field of Birkenhead Excerpts(10 years, 7 months ago)
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Mr Frank Field (Birkenhead) (Lab)
As somebody who supports Jobmatch, may I ask the Minister whether she shares my concern that some of our constituents have been ripped off by those who are acting fraudulently? What steps has she taken to safeguard this scheme, which most of us support?
Esther McVey
The right hon. Gentleman, my constituency neighbour, is right in saying that 14 job- seekers —out of the millions a month who are looking for jobs through the scheme—were asked to pay for a Criminal Records Bureau check. The DWP is now working with them. Ten have put in for a compensation claim, and we are helping them to sort that out. If there is a bogus job or one that does not adhere to the terms and conditions on Universal Jobmatch, it is removed immediately. However, despite that one company, more than half a million companies are putting jobs up on the scheme to help people into work. I think we can all say that this is a resounding success.
Oral Answers to Questions
Lord Field of Birkenhead Excerpts(10 years, 10 months ago)
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Mr Duncan Smith
My hon. Friend is not alone, when 73% of the public support the cap as it stands, as did nine out of 10 Londoners in a recent poll. It appears that the only people who do not support the cap are Labour Members. We will keep the policy under review, but the one thing we should celebrate is that we are reforming welfare to ensure that those who need the money get it, and those who do not get back to work.
Mr Frank Field (Birkenhead) (Lab)
When previous Governments changed benefits, they commissioned research to find out about the consequences. Given that we are talking about a benefit cut, is the Secretary of State in a position to tell us who is doing the research?
Mr Duncan Smith
I am not sure from that whether the right hon. Gentleman supports the change or not. [Interruption.] He supports it—yet again a lone figure on his side, on which I congratulate him. We have carried out a whole load of revisions and changes, making sure that we watch implementation carefully. We carry out research constantly when it comes to the effects of all of our benefit changes. This one is an overall positive rather than a negative.
Food Banks
Lord Field of Birkenhead Excerpts(10 years, 11 months ago)
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Mr Frank Field (Birkenhead) (Lab)
Government Members have often cited the use of food banks on the continent, and in my short contribution I want to suggest two things. The first is that there are now movements in western economies that are disadvantaging the poor, and we need to think of solutions to that. Secondly, I want to suggest to the Government where their policies have made this position much, much worse. We may not yet understand the basic forces to which we may want to apply policies, but the Government could raise questions about their own policies and ask how they are impoverishing people. I hope the reason for the absence of the whole of the DWP ministerial team is that it is thinking about what sort of reply it is going to give to this debate, with these possible concessions in mind.
Fifteen months ago the Trussell Trust said that by the general election it would be feeding half a million of our constituents. I asked the Prime Minister at Prime Minister’s Question Time what he was going to do to prevent that prediction from coming true. I did not get a comprehensive answer, to put it mildly. We have learned from today’s debate that that point has already been passed a year and a quarter, or a year and a third, before that general election, and the number will continue to increase.
If we look at the data, we find that in our country the proportion of income the poor now have to spend on food, utilities and rent is rising. I think that gives us an answer to Lord Freud, who said that if we supply a free good, people will turn up and claim it. It might be that if people are worried about not being able to meet their rent or that their electricity will be cut off, and there is the possibility of people giving them food, they will take that opportunity so that they can meet other basic requirements from their budget.
Mark Lazarowicz (Edinburgh North and Leith) (Lab/Co-op)
The figures for food banks are only the tip of the iceberg, of course, as there are many other locations to which people go to get free food, such as soup kitchens. They have also seen a big increase in attendance over the last few years, and that is part of the picture as well.
Mr Field
I do not think my right hon. Friend actually knew Friedrich Engels, but Engels prophesied that as countries become richer, the proportion of income spent on food declines. That law has been reversed, so on that score something fundamental is happening. If we combine that with the changes resulting in a greater proportion of income now having to be spent on fuel and rent, we can see that that is difficult for many people, but it is a disaster for the poor.
Mr Field
I will not because so many Members want to participate in the debate.
These are the questions I would like to ask the Government. First, why are they so frit of having a serious inquiry into the causes of what is going on? Are food banks a passing fancy, or are they the outward visible sign of something very serious happening in our economy? We ought to get an answer to that. Secondly, if we listen to the food banks and the other bodies that are handsomely filling the ranks of those giving help in our society, they say the two things that are increasingly important in driving people to food banks are the sanctions regime and the sheer incompetence of the DWP in relaying benefits. Could the Minister—whoever it is and wherever they are—tell us how many of the exceptional payments the DWP is making are the result of benefit delays?
Also, will a twofold instruction go out from this Government? First, will they ensure that anybody who has waited for more than a week for their benefit gets an advance on the benefit they are entitled to? No one is disputing that it will be clawed back later. That would abate some of the demand for food banks. Secondly, given what is happening to those people who are being sanctioned, where the sanctions are later overturned, will the Government urgently review how just their sanctions policy is?
Oral Answers to Questions
Lord Field of Birkenhead Excerpts(11 years, 1 month ago)
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Mr Duncan Smith
The No. 1 thing we could do was to get rid of Labour—a great move to get more performance and not underperformance, and judging by the performance of its Front-Bench team, that is one of the areas where we ought to start straight away—but I must say to the hon. Lady that we are driving costs down and making savings in every programme. I would love to know this: out of the £80 billion plus we will save as a result of our welfare changes, which the Chancellor welcomes, which ones does she welcome?
Mr Frank Field (Birkenhead) (Lab)
How many permanent secretaries does the Secretary of State think he will get through before universal credit is rolled out nationally?
Mr Duncan Smith
Universal credit will roll out very well and it will be on time and within budget. We should consider the reality of the record of the right hon. Gentleman’s Government on Departments and the mess they got into. They left us with IT blunders of over £26 billion. With respect to him, as he was not always involved, but the others were, I therefore think they should apologise first.
Pensions Bill
Lord Field of Birkenhead Excerpts(11 years, 5 months ago)
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Mr Frank Field (Birkenhead) (Lab)
I am immensely pleased to be able to contribute to this debate, and I shall do so briefly.
The Bill marks a decisive change in the policies of Governments since the 1950s. It is a change I hoped the previous Labour Government would make, but they did not. This Government have made it, under the careful stewardship of the Minister of State, the hon. Member for Thornbury and Yate (Steve Webb), in particular. I congratulate him unreservedly on this success. The objective of having an insurance-based minimum pension that attempts to take people off means-testing is something that voters have long asked for but that Governments have long denied them. On that score alone, I congratulate him.
I also congratulate the pensions Minister on this being the one single move the Government could have made to make an honest man, woman or person out of the National Employment Savings Trust, as we were in real danger of having an auto-enrolment scheme that would automatically enrol people and mis-sell to them the pensions that they would thereby be buying. On those two scores, the Government are to be congratulated.
Let me now enter some caveats. Clearly, objectives are immensely important for any Government, as they give us the direction of travel, but they do not necessarily mean we will reach the desired destination. I wish to discuss those who will regard this scheme as unfair and the costs. First, it is clearly unfair to the group of women in respect of whom the pensions Minister was actively defending his stance: those born between 1951 and 1953. He said that they will not be worse off than they would have been, but of course they feel that they will be worse off than they would have been because the Secretary of State and the pensions Minister are changing the pensions that males born during that period will get. I seriously question whether the Government will be able to maintain their line on that issue. It was a good debating point in this House, but I do not think we can take an annual cost—the shadow Work and Pensions Secretary was talking of that—and equate it with the cost over decades. The annual saving the Government will get from cancelling the contracted-out rebate is £5 billion to £6 billion, and that comes in every year—the cost of doing justice to this group of women is a very small proportion of that.
The second area where injustice has been created is between the employers and employees of public and private pensions. Why have the Government allowed employers in the private sector to have the right to adjust the pension of their employees, given that less money will be going into those schemes and given that they will get a better state pension, but not allowed that for the public sector as a whole? If there are real problems in the health service—leaving aside other public services—the near £1 billion the NHS would have to pay in additional pension contributions will play its part. Unless one wants another period of contracting out of state schemes, what is the Government’s game plan behind the inequity they are creating?
Thirdly, I wish to congratulate the pensions Minister, because I have rarely seen such pork barrel politics in my 30-odd years here in Parliament. We know that at the cornerstone of the Liberal vote are the self-employed, and they will be cheering all the way to the bank because of what he has delivered them. He dresses it up in this language about putting aside unfairnesses, but the rest of the population will not think much of his definition of “fairness” because this is an unbelievable, God-given gift to the self-employed. [Interruption.] Conservative Members are saying, “Hear, hear”, but they have not realised what the electoral ploy is vis-à-vis the Tory vote and Lib Dem candidates. The pensions Minister is still blindly leading the coalition on this issue, even when what he is up to has been spelt out, and I congratulate him on that. I do not believe the settlement he proposes for the self-employed—as opposed to that for the employed, with their contributions and their employers’ contributions, which are part of the wages settlement after all—is sustainable.
My last point was touched on by the Chairman of the Select Committee, my hon. Friend the Member for Aberdeen South (Dame Anne Begg), and concerns the losers from the Bill. One might have thought that the Bill offered milk and honey for everyone and, indeed, when the Secretary of State was introducing it I could not but think that it was almost like Moses was leading us into the promised land of milk and honey for everybody. During that journey, however, quite a few people will drop out. We know that the Government’s own data show that 22% of contributors will be worse off and that the average income replacement ratio will be lower. It all comes back to the key point of the £5 billion to £6 billion that the Government are taking out of the scheme and the price that the pensions Minister paid to get this important reform past the Chancellor.
I give the Government credit for having the nerve to get up and criticise the previous Government for taking £5 million to £6 million out of the pension scheme every year and saying that that does not lead to better pensions when this Bill proposes to do exactly the same. This is the second whammy for pension schemes in this country and if people outside think they will get a better, sustainable deal with that sort of financing, they have another think coming.
Under-Occupancy Penalty (Birkenhead)
Lord Field of Birkenhead Excerpts(11 years, 8 months ago)
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Mr Frank Field (Birkenhead) (Lab)
Mr Benton, it is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, on not only a personal but a regional level, as I will explain. I am grateful to the Speaker for giving me the opportunity to debate this issue, which unfairly affects my constituency, yours and others in the north-west.
I have been in the House for more than three decades, and I have witnessed many so-called welfare reform measures, but I have never witnessed a measure as grossly unfair as this one. As the Minister well knows, under-occupancy is a supply-side issue, yet we are trying to control the demand side to make people on low incomes fit into the regimented holes into which the Government would like them to fit.
I know the Government have a fig leaf to parade around to cover their nakedness, and no doubt we will hear about it. They will say that there is a huge number of people in social housing properties who have too many bedrooms and a shortage of social housing. If only those damn people would move from their under-occupied properties to ones that fit, a major problem would be solved. We all know that it will not be, for reasons that I hope to explain.
I feel so strongly about what the Government are doing to my constituents and similarly placed constituents around the country that I call on both social housing and housing association landlords to defy the measures, not by not operating them, but by doing what landlords did after the nine years’ war, when a Government similarly stretched for money imposed a window tax. In many instances—we see it in older properties in our constituencies—landlords bricked up windows. I hope that landlords will brick up the doors to spare bedrooms and, where appropriate, knock down the walls, so that the properties can safely fit the tenants. I have never before asked for direct action. I do so now because I feel that the measures are grossly unfair. In more than three decades, I have never debated such a vicious cut. Even if most people wished to do what the Government want them to do, they would be unable to do it.
The background to the case is that the Government claim that there are 1 million spare bedrooms throughout the country, and that the subsidy for those spare bedrooms costs £500 million. If only they could get people to move around to fit into the accommodation that the Government would like them to have, £500 million in public expenditure would be saved. The means of doing so are as follows. From April this year, those who have one so-called spare bedroom will lose 14% of their housing benefit, and those who have two spare rooms will lose 25% of their housing benefit.
This is the last opportunity for the House to debate this wretched measure before it comes into effect in our constituencies. We know that about one third of social tenants will be affected, and that their average loss of benefit will be £14 a week. We know that 40,000 will lose their entitlement entirely, and, as I said, a higher percentage of tenants in the north-west will be affected than in London and the south-east.
In this debate, I will rely on figures supplied by Riverside, one of the larger housing associations offering accommodation to my constituents. Some 25% of its tenants will be affected by this vicious little measure, and 20% of tenants of Wirral Partnership Homes will be affected. Let us look at the facts that Riverside dug out. In the three years between 2008 and 2011, in one part of my constituency, Tranmere and Rock Ferry, 500 new tenancy allocations were made. Of those households, 302 needed one bedroom, yet only 126 one- bedroom flats were available. Even if those tenants wanted accommodation that fitted their needs as defined by the Government, they would not be able to meet the policy. Riverside sensibly asked those who would be affected by this vicious little measure what they intended to do to try to balance the books. Some 32% said that they would try to move to smaller properties, 11% said that they would ask people in their household to help them pay the rent, 16% said that they would ask people outside their household, 17% said that they would try to earn extra money, 9% said that they would take a lodger, and 42% said that they would probably fail to pay the rent.
I want to dwell on two aspects. One is the 17% who said that they would try to earn more money. One of the Merseyside police’s worries about the measure is that there has been a significant increase in the number of people being encouraged to use spare bedrooms to grow pot. One consequence of this Government action will be to enable those gangs who try to enrol vulnerable constituents to make extra money in that way. That will be a real first for the Government. They should be proud, shouldn’t they?
Let us then look at the 42% who will fail to pay their rent. They will face eviction due to significant reductions in their income. Of course, they will try for a time to cut down on other necessities, such as fuel. I can switch on the heating, but unlike me, many of my constituents do not switch it on during the day. They will now spend even less time with their heating on. Others will eat a far less healthy diet.
When push comes to shove, what will those with children do? They might let their rent fall into arrears, which the Government do not seem to realise is a far better option than not paying other bills, because other bills attract penal rates of interest if they are not paid, and as yet—although no doubt there will be a measure to help them—local authorities and housing associations cannot enforce this wretched little measure by charging interest on debts that accrue.
My plea to housing associations is not to evict. As a result, their revenue will be affected. All the housing associations in Birkenhead have gone down the route of going to the banks to pledge their future revenue against loans. Once the revenue is not forthcoming, what will the banks do? I would prefer the housing associations to go bankrupt rather than bankrupt my constituents. One of the not-so-hidden consequences of this vicious little measure is that housing associations will risk going bankrupt. What will the Government do then? They will not be able to allow them to remain bankrupt. I hope that a plan B that is slightly more effective than the plan B for the economy is on the stocks.
Let us suppose that the tenants could move. The housing stock is not available, but suppose they could. We know from those who have managed to find alternative accommodation that it actually costs more. For example, one-bedroom places in Birkenhead average £71 a week, but in the private sector they are £88 a week. If every wonderful tenant in Birkenhead affected by this vicious little measure did what the Government wanted, the savings would not be made and the housing bill would go up, defeating the measure; the Department for Work and Pensions, which wants people to move around to free up accommodation, would have to have a serious conversation with the Treasury about why the idea has failed to deliver the £500 million cut.
Housing associations should follow the example of the landlords who took action after the nine years’ war to ensure that they and their tenants did not pay an unfair tax. If tenants request such action, the doors to spare bedrooms should be blocked up, as the windows were, and their walls should be knocked through to make one larger room, where it is possible and safe to do so; that would apply only where no downsizing options were available. It would not solve the problem of a grossly unfair tax, but it would mitigate some of the worst results by freeing tenants from this poll tax.
The Government are of course unlikely to achieve the £500 million cut in housing benefit demanded by the Treasury, but their cover is blown anyway: for the reasons I set out, even if all the tenants could move to smaller accommodation, the Government would make no savings in public expenditure at all. Indeed, as suitable accommodation in the private sector is more expensive, the housing benefit bill will rise.
Why am I for the first time advocating direct action? I do so because this tax is so grossly unfair, and it is being levied on some of the most vulnerable people in our society. Wicked actions require a different response from us parliamentarians.
The Minister of State, Department for Work and Pensions (Steve Webb)
Good afternoon, Mr Benton. I congratulate the right hon. Member for Birkenhead (Mr Field) on securing a debate that is of considerable importance to his constituents. I entirely accept that the effect of this nationwide policy is different in different areas, and that a higher proportion of working-age households are affected in the north-west than in some other parts of the country.
Steve Webb
I thought that that was fairly uncontentious, but I will give way.
Steve Webb
I am representing the Government rather than discussing my constituents, but clearly far fewer of mine are affected than the right hon. Gentleman’s, which is no great surprise to anyone.
The right hon. Gentleman’s speech was made in a vacuum, without mention of the fiscal context or how we treat other tenants. He used various lurid adjectives to describe the policy, as though it was some uniquely unfair concept that where benefits are paying someone’s rent, the level of benefits should have regard to the size of the household. He suggested that this is some unprecedented, evil thing, the like of which he has never come across in 30 years in Parliament—except that he was a Minister in my Department and, intermittently, a supporter of the previous Government, who introduced the local housing alliance. As I am sure he knows, with that allowance we say to private sector tenants on housing benefit that, broadly speaking, the rents we pay will reflect household size: generally, if not universally, someone can have private rent up to, now, the 30th percentile of rents for a household of the size it is. For some years, therefore, we have said to 1 million LHA private sector tenants, “We won’t pay benefit for an extra bedroom. If you want one, that’s fine, but you pay for it.”
If that policy is fair and appropriate for private sector tenants, why is it squalid, evil and unprecedented for social tenants? Surely consistency and fairness—a word the right hon. Gentleman used—mean that we should treat people the same way, whether they are private sector or social tenants. One might argue, indeed, that social tenants generally have the advantage of a subsidised rent, which private sector tenants do not have, and we treat private sector tenants unfairly in the sense that we do not give them an extra bedroom.
Steve Webb
The right hon. Gentleman reinforces my point: people in the private sector were having to pay higher rents than those in the social sector, and they could not have a spare bedroom.
Steve Webb
People in the social rented sector still benefit from subsidised rents and, potentially, spare bedrooms. The figure used by the right hon. Gentleman was of more than 800,000 spare bedrooms in households where the rent is paid for by housing benefits.
To give a sense of scale, we are asking a household with one spare bedroom to contribute £2 a day on average for having the spare bedroom. I do not belittle the financial pressures that many households are under, because it would be entirely wrong of me to do so, but we know from experience of the private rented sector that some households will decide that, notwithstanding the financial pressures on them, £2 a day for the advantage of that extra bedroom is a price that they will pay. There will also be many other responses. The right hon. Gentleman mentioned taking in lodgers, and some housing associations and local authorities have given their tenants advice on how to do that. It is good use of a spare room, because it provides accommodation to someone, such as a young single person perhaps, as well as extra income to the household, and deals with the problem.
There will be some movement in the social rented sector. In the right hon. Gentleman’s area, 20 housing associations and local authorities have come together to form Propertypool Plus, doing exactly what they should be doing, which is pooling their stock and giving a much greater chance of having something to suit a particular family than an individual housing association would have. If we facilitate someone moving from under-occupied accommodation into a house that fits, someone else who is living in overcrowded accommodation can also move to a house that fits, which seems to be an entirely good thing, although the latter person’s voice was silent in the speech of the right hon. Gentleman.
I looked at the Wirral housing strategy for 2011 to 2026, and the council has realised that under-occupation is an issue. Before we invented our policy, the local authority stated:
“Research has identified that there are a number of people who are under occupying their home, regardless of tenure,”
going on to say that
“the Council will seek to help people by offering a range of services”
to help them live in more appropriate accommodation. There is therefore recognition in Wirral of a mismatch between the homes people are living in and the homes that they might need, perhaps particularly in the case of older people, although I stress that pensioners are exempt from our policy.
Creative things are being done in the right hon. Gentleman’s part of the world. For example, Wirral metropolitan borough council has obtained £2 million of Homes and Communities Agency funding to work on empty properties and plans to bring 765 empty properties back into use over a three-year period. He is right to say that supply is a crucial part of the story. We want to ensure that the supply is there for people, but that will not happen overnight. We also know that initiatives to deal with under-occupation have not really worked. Simply saying, “Would you like to move to somewhere smaller?” when there is no reason for anyone to do so, has not worked, and we have to regard the spare bedrooms in social housing in this country as a precious resource, because there is not enough housing.
The right hon. Gentleman colourfully described bricking up spare bedrooms, but I can save the landlords he is seeking to send down that track the trouble. If, for example, they want to designate a property with one bedroom occupied and a spare bedroom as a one-bedroom property, they can do so. They do not need to brick anything up or knock any walls down; they can simply designate it as a one-bedroom property. They will take the lower rent, but the tenant is not under-occupying. The reduction in the spare-room subsidy would not apply because there is not a spare room; it is the landlord who takes the financial hit in that situation. Knowsley local authority has, on occasion, followed such a policy. If landlords decide that that is the best solution, we have no problem with that. Obviously, we get the saving, because we are only paying the rent for a one-bedroom property and not a two-bedroom property, so if local authorities and other landlords can bear the financial impact, that might be a part of the mix. I do not think that many will be able to do so, but questions of bricking up rooms do not arise.
I have come across cases in which housing associations have designated a box room as a second bedroom and they have been gaily claiming the rent on a two-bedroom property. Then this measure comes in and it is quickly apparent that it is not really a bedroom; it is just a box room. Part of the answer is for landlords to be honest about the nature of their properties and say whether there really is a spare bedroom that someone could sleep in. They should then designate the property accordingly.
The right hon. Gentleman mentioned fairness. I have referred to fairness between social and private tenants, but what about fairness between overcrowded households, households on the waiting list and those who are in under-occupation? In Wirral, there are 21,280 households on the waiting list for a home. Where is their voice in this debate? I may be wrong, but I do not think the right hon. Gentleman mentioned the people on the waiting list or the people who are overcrowded. Fairness is surely about them as well as the people already in occupation.
We recognise that there are some people who should not be affected by this measure. That is why, for example, we have exempted pensioners. People living in their lifetime home, who have retired and have no prospect of working again, are exempt. We have also taken the view that local authorities need money to deal with what one might loosely call hard cases. In Wirral, in the year that is coming to an end—2012-13—roughly £500,000 of discretionary housing payments were available; next year it will be not far short of £1 million. For individuals whom it would be wrong or inhumane to expect to move, money is there to make up the shortfall. Nearly £1 million in that local authority and about £150 million nationwide is a huge sum of money, provided to make sure that where the room is not really spare and where it would be inappropriate to expect someone to move out or put someone else in the room, local authorities have got the resource to respond appropriately.
It is vital that local authorities spend the money, yet we have come across cases of local authorities underspending their discretionary housing payments. Hon. Members berate the Government and say how terrible the policy is, but their local authority is sitting on cash that it has not spent to help people who have a shortfall in their housing benefit.
Steve Webb
My understanding is that the right hon. Gentleman’s own local authority had a discretionary housing payment contribution of £464,000 for the current year, but has a carryover that takes it up to £522,000. I am happy to write to him with figures for the country. That is not a one-off example. It is surprisingly common. I have spoken to local authority leaders in the past few weeks who have said, “We are not spending the money we have got.” We and they need to make sure that the money that is specifically there for hardship is actually spent.
Steve Webb
We expect local authorities to budget, but of course this measure comes into effect on a single day, and good landlords and good local authorities have already been looking at the existing stock of people. It is by definition a stock of people that does not turn over very much, so it is pretty predictable. My plea to local authorities is to use the money that we have given them.
We have given local authorities discretionary money, initially with two groups in mind. The first is people whose houses have been substantially adapted for disability. We accept that if there is a spare bedroom in a house that has been completely redone to reflect wheelchair access or whatever, it is not cost-effective, sensible or humane to say, “You’ve got to move,” and then either the public purse has to pay for another property to be done up or the people have to live somewhere inappropriate. We estimate that, nationwide, roughly £25 million of the potential saving from the measure would be related to properties of that sort. Our initial plan was to try to define that centrally in regulations: what is a substantially adapted property? We then took the view that it is better left to local discretion, so we made the money available locally.
We did the same for foster families who have a spare room because they are between foster children. Most people would accept that foster parents need to have a spare room. Initially, we thought that we would support that through £5 million of discretionary payments, but the message we got back was that foster families wanted to have a right to a room and not to be reliant on a discretionary payment from the council. We have now passed regulations, which will come into force next month, that give foster families the right to a spare bedroom, subject to certain constraints. We have also recently made it clear that where, for example, a child with a disability or health condition cannot sleep in the same bedroom as a sibling, the family can go to the local authority, which, having satisfied itself that it is a valid claim, can allocate an extra bedroom.
I stress that the measure is not a crude one-size-fits-all cut. We have to save money. The right hon. Gentleman knows that we have to save money and that housing benefit is one of the biggest working age benefits that we have. He knows that two thirds of the housing benefit bill is for social tenants and that we have already cut back on the housing benefit bill for private tenants. In the context of needing to save money on social tenants’ housing benefit bill, not paying for spare bedrooms seems to be a place where we can find savings, subject to the crucial proviso that we protect the most vulnerable.
We have protected the most vulnerable through discretionary housing payments. Of course, although local authorities can use such payments for substantially adapted properties, the clue is in the title: they are “discretionary” payments. Local authorities have the payments for this purpose and for other changes. They have core discretionary housing payments that they had anyway, before any of the measures came in. Local authorities have that pot of money, which is of course not limitless and does not cover everybody, but at least it gives them the flexibility to respond to people as they come to them. The crucial thing for anybody listening to our proceedings who is concerned about the impact of the measure is that if people genuinely need the additional room, and if the options that some would take up, such as swapping, taking in a lodger or working extra hours, are not options for them, they should approach the local authority.
The right hon. Gentleman said that if people move into the private sector, it will cost money, but that is a very static way of looking at things. When somebody moves out of the social sector and into the private sector, a social sector property will be freed up that someone perhaps paying a high rent in the private sector will move into. It is not self-evident that in cases where someone moves from the social sector to the private sector, it costs money overall. Yes, we are trying to save money, and half a billion pounds will be saved by the measure, but let me set that in context: in the final year of the previous Labour Government, we were trying to fill a hole not of half a billion pounds, but of £150 billion a year. The right hon. Gentleman objects to the measure, but it illustrates the scale of the task we have been faced with. Even a measure such as this, which has been controversial and difficult, saves only half a billion pounds, and we have had to take many more such decisions to deal with the fiscal deficit.
Good things are going on in local authority areas such as that of the right hon. Gentleman. I welcome the fact that housing associations and councils are pooling their stock to enable people to exchange. My local housing association and others have had what they call “speed-dating” events—I am not being flippant; that is what they call them. They try to bring together people from among their tenants, some of whom have a spare room and some of whom are desperate for a family home. I think of a constituent of mine who contacted me after receiving a letter about this. She said, “I am living on my own in a three-bedroom house. What are my options? Actually, could my brother and sister-in-law move in?” I said, “Absolutely. Talk to the landlord.” That was an ideal outcome: it meant that the housing stock was better used and someone else had suitable housing.
To summarise, the way in which people respond to the measure will be individual and varied. Some will be able to exchange with someone else. Some will stay where they are, regarding £2 a day, on average, as worth paying for that spare bedroom. Some will fill the spare bedroom with a lodger. As the right hon. Gentleman colourfully suggests, some landlords will redesignate properties, so that in effect there is not a spare bedroom, and the landlord will take the cost. Some people will go to the local authority, and we have put money into the pockets of local authorities such as his—nearly £1 million in the Wirral—so that the most vulnerable people can go to their local authority and make their case and be heard.
Again, I urge the local authorities to spend the money that they have been given to help people, because we have sought to protect the most vulnerable. We have sought to protect families with disabled children, fosterers, and people with service personnel living at home. We have given local authorities the ability to respond on a case-by-case basis. None of these decisions is easy, but they are necessary decisions that we have sought to mitigate where possible. We are trying to bring about a beneficial effect: to make better use of scarce social housing stock and to create fairness between private and social tenants, which, I have to say, in the past, we have not had.
Question put and agreed to.
Jobseekers (Back to Work Schemes) Bill
Lord Field of Birkenhead Excerpts(11 years, 8 months ago)
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Mr Frank Field (Birkenhead) (Lab)
I would like to congratulate the Government on their incompetence with the Bill. I would like to say that these are measures that a future Labour Government would support, but differently. We would have a human face to our approach, unlike this Administration.
First, let me deal with the point about incompetence. These are fairly simple regulations compared with what the Secretary of State is preparing for the nation with his universal credit. If the Department cannot get these regulations right, what hope for universal credit?
The Secretary of State for Work and Pensions (Mr Iain Duncan Smith)
I am listening to what the right hon. Gentleman has to say, but it sounds a little rich coming from him. From his time in government, he and others well know that sometimes the view of judges is very different from a lot of other legal advice. The reality is that by saying that this is incompetence he must be claiming that his own Government were deeply incompetent throughout their time in office.
Mr Field
Well, if that is true, this Government have learnt nothing from our experience, so it is doubly worrying. Universal credit, which the Government are going to deliver, is an immensely complicated reform and if they feel that— [Interruption.] The Secretary of State says not true. Should the day ever arrive when universal credit began to be delivered, we would all be in a position to judge. However, these are arguments for another day. Let us congratulate the Government on their incompetence and their need to come here and seek out support to rectify the errors made in the Department.
The second issue is important. We are dealing with an attitude of mind whereby there is a feeling that, even without ever making a contribution, a person has a right to benefits and to a pension from other taxpayers. That attitude is now deeply ingrained in our culture, and the Secretary of State’s welfare reforms and universal credit will encourage it. Under his scheme, more people will think they have a right to benefits than do now. Many of us, even those in areas with high unemployment, know that there are people, particularly young people, who feel that unless they will be offered jobs at three times their benefit level, it is not in their interest to work. That is why it is so important to change—[Interruption.] The Secretary of State is making faces, but I am trying to support him in the case that he is making.
We are trying to move from unconditional welfare to welfare that attaches conditions to drawing benefits. The last Government started those important reforms, and we continue to support them. The big divide has been between a welfare state based on contributions, in which people are eligible for benefit only if they have paid the requisite number of contributions, and one in which people think that they should get benefits because they are citizens. The Secretary of State may continue his conversation, but he knows full well that as he tries to limit the entry of Bulgarians and Romanians into our welfare system, the weakness of his hand is that they will be able to claim benefit here, because large numbers of other people do, and we will be discriminating unless we give them benefit on the same terms.
The lesson that I hope we will draw is that the Opposition will go into the election with a clear mandate to move from a means-tested welfare system, in which people think that they have a right to benefits, to one in which people gain entrance to welfare because they have paid contributions. The difference is in job offers and job guarantees. The most crucial welfare reform that the last Labour Government made was the future jobs fund, which was destroyed by this Government when they came into office. If we are to build up a medley of worthwhile alternatives for people who cannot find jobs, we the Opposition and the Government must play some part in creating those opportunities.
There is debate on both sides of the House about the best routes back to full employment, but no certainty about what they are. In the immediate future, therefore, we will have to rely on an even more severely tightened future jobs fund than the Labour Government did. We know from our constituencies that the real test of whether people want to work is to have jobs to offer them. Without those, we are in difficulties. That is not to say that we would not sanction without them. London, for example, has the second highest youth unemployment, but in 10 years of Labour government, 1 million immigrants came to London to work. There is clearly some problem in people’s thinking about what is suitable for them to do versus what is suitable for immigrants.
In my short contribution, first, I congratulate the Government on their incompetence and on having to rely on the House to rescue them from it. Secondly, like them, we are moving away from an unconditional welfare state to one that attaches conditions, but unlike them, we believe firmly that they need to engage actively in trying to build up something like the future jobs fund, so our constituents are offered real opportunities to work. I hope that those of us who have Labour authorities or even decent Tory or Liberal authorities, despite their current budget difficulties, will seek to implement that approach so that over the years, we will be able to offer more people proper, dignified alternatives to sitting on their backsides on the dole.