Jobseekers (Back to Work Schemes) Bill

Debate between Lord Haskel and Baroness Sherlock

Monday 25th March 2013 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Sherlock]

My Lords, the amendment would require the Secretary of State to prepare guidance on how claimants might mitigate any penalty. This is necessary because there are some serious questions for the Government to answer about how the sanction system will work in practice after a delay of many months, potentially longer, and how a claimant is able to limit the effects in the way in which Parliament envisaged when it passed the legislation.

I want to turn briefly to the question of recompliance raised by the noble Lord, Lord Kirkwood of Kirkhope. The Jobseeker’s Allowance (Employment, Skills and Enterprise) Regulations 2011—the regulations that were found to be at fault by the Court of Appeal—explain the consequences of failure to participate in the scheme covered by those provisions. Regulations 8(4) to 8(6) provide that a claimant who fails to participate in an activity may face a loss or reduction of benefit for a period of two, four or 26 weeks. Regulation 8(7) provides that if someone has been sanctioned for 26 weeks but has recomplied, the period for which benefit is stopped is reduced to four weeks—a point explained by the noble Lord, Lord Kirkwood. Recompliance is defined in Regulation 8(8), which refers to the claimant as “C”. It states:

“C will be taken to have re-complied where”,

on the same date, before or,

“after the date on which the Secretary of State determines that C has failed to participate in the Scheme, C complies with … (a) the requirement as to participation in the Scheme to which the determination relates, or (b) such other requirement as to participation as may be made by the Secretary of State and notified to C in accordance with regulation 4”.

Here come the questions, and I apologise that they are not very exciting. Can the Minister tell the Committee how this will work some months after the event? Let us say that a claimant with a fluctuating health problem has failed to turn up for a training course imposed as part of skills conditionality and has been sanctioned for 26 weeks. The course ended last September. Had he been sanctioned at once, he could perhaps have attended the remaining days of the course and had the sanction reduced from 26 weeks to four weeks. Can the Minister explain how that person could now show compliance? It is obviously too late for him to recomply under Regulation 8(8)(a), but perhaps he could recomply under sub-paragraph (b). If so, can the Minister explain how that will work? If the person has been given any subsequent direction and has complied with it in any way at all, will that count as recompliance; does the recompliance have to be specific to the particular scheme that he was put on; or does it have to be specific to the requirement made of him at the time—that is, that training course? Presumably, the Government would want to make sure that this person was not treated any less fairly than he would have been had the Government’s regulations and notices not been found to be unlawful, but how would the Minister do that? If he is not in a position to explain to the Committee in detail now, I would press him to accept the amendment, which simply asks that he issues guidance explaining to jobcentre staff how they should act in order to put the claimant in the position in which they would have been but for the delay caused by the failure of the regulations to be accepted by the Court of Appeal as lawful.

My second question relates to the question of good cause, which the Minister referred to at an earlier stage. If a claimant fails to participate in the scheme, they are notified by the DWP and will be sanctioned unless they show what is known as “good cause” for their failure to participate within five working days.

Let me give another example. I am interested in exploring how good cause works in this time-delayed world. Let us imagine a single mother who was due to attend a course but missed the registration on the first morning because her 13 year-old son was up all night vomiting and she could not take him to school. She could not leave a sick 13 year-old at home alone the next day, so she phoned up the course and explained what had happened and that she would not be in that day. She talked to the receptionist who took a message and said that it would be passed on. The message was not passed on and when she turned up the next day she was told that she could not join the course because she failed to be there for the start. I should say that I have heard of real cases where precisely these things have taken place, and I am sure that the Minister has as well. Can the Minister help us to understand what would happen in that circumstance?

I understood from what the Minister said early on that that lone parent would have been written to at the time that this alleged breach took place, asking if she had any good cause for failing to turn up for the course. So what happened then? Presumably the decision-maker did not make a decision at that stage, so perhaps this would be sat on from that point, say the previous September, until it got around to being processed from the pile of deferred decisions. Would she at this stage have to explain more about what happened? For example, if there were not enough information in the explanation, did the decision-maker go back at the point at which this happened last September to say, “Tell me more”, or will that happen, say, the following April or May? If so, will she be expected to recall precisely what happened with this child’s bout of sickness last September, when it is now potentially April or May? Will she be asked for evidence for a bout of sickness that may not have required a medical appointment if the child was recovered within 24 hours? If she did give all the information but she was then deemed not to have good cause, presumably she could now appeal. If so, can the Minister explain to the Committee how the normal standards of evidence will be relaxed, if at all, given the serious time delay, to deal with the evidential problems and the possible recall problems that come with that?

Finally, can the Minister explain which set of regulations will apply to someone who committed the alleged breach under the old sanctions regime? Will he or she be sanctioned using the provisions that applied at the time of the alleged failing, because of course the ability to reduce the sanction by recomplying has since disappeared? Can the Minister reassure us that in fact someone will be able to reduce a sanction period by recompliance even if such an option no longer exists under the current regulations?

I apologise for having to go into such detail at this stage, but I did not choose to be conducting a Committee stage at quarter past one in the morning. I do think, if we are going to be asked to fast-track a Bill of this complexity and importance, that it is very important that the Committee is given every opportunity to understand precisely what the Government are trying to do to these people. I beg to move.

[The Deputy Chairman of Committees (Lord Haskel)]

My Lords, I must inform your Lordships that the result of Division 3 on Amendment 5A should have been Contents 35, Not-Contents 139—not 137 as announced.