Welfare Reform

Lord Mawhinney Excerpts

Thursday 11th November 2010 Lords Chamber

[Lord Freud]

My Lords, I thank the noble Lord, Lord Bilimoria, for that question. We have spent a lot of time looking at the lessons from abroad. When I was doing an independent report three and a half years or so ago, Australia was one of the places that I looked at very closely. I had someone who had been working there to inform me about what was happening. Australia and Holland are two places from which we learn a lot of lessons. There is a debate about whether action should be mandatory or voluntary. Voluntary action works if people have the self-confidence to say, “Yes, I want to try something”, but when you have been out of work for a long time, one of the first things that goes is your self-confidence. That is why mandatory action is not cruel. You need to pick people up and make them do things, because they do not have the self-confidence otherwise. That is one of the main lessons to be learnt from the Australian experience.

[Lord Mawhinney]

My Lords, perhaps I may say how many of us appreciate the fact that, in trying to unlock lives and aspirations, the Minister is focusing on allowing people to keep more of what they earn and trying to build self-confidence. There may be two other locks that he needs to unpick. The longer someone has not been in employment, the more inadequate or perhaps absent altogether will be their education and training. It would be my guess that those locks will need to be unpicked for very many people. Does he share that view? If so, who will have responsibility for addressing proven lack of education and training, and who will pay for it?

[Lord Freud]

My Lords, I thank the noble Lord for that question. I not only share his concern but am very firmly on the record as being very concerned about the division between the Work First strategies that we have been adopting in this country and skills and training. One of the mainstream drivers of the work programme philosophy is an attempt to pull training and employment strategies together. It does that partly by price differentiation, so as people become tougher to put into work, the price goes up. We need to find the right mechanisms to make sure that we price up. It does it also by ensuring that the payments system in the work programme is based on sustainment in work, which can be for one, two or three years. You do not sustain someone in work for a long time unless you pull in the whole training and education element. That kind of change should be going through.