Welfare Reform

Lord Skelmersdale Excerpts

Tuesday 16th November 2010 Lords Chamber

[Lord Freud]

The mandatory work activity is designed to help a small number of customers to get back into the labour market, with labour market disciplines. If the noble Lord is referring to the attitude of the ILO on the matter, ILO experts produced a report on it in 2007 in which they accepted that this kind of work to help people back into the workplace was acceptable.

[Lord Skelmersdale]

My Lords, may I take my noble friend a little further? Does not Article 2(2)(b) of ILO Convention 29 specifically exclude,

“any work or service which forms part of the normal civic obligations of the citizens of a fully self-governing country”?

Will not these provisions, once enacted, cover that point?

[Lord Freud]

I thank my noble friend for that question. As noble Lords will be aware, Convention 29 was originally designed with colonialism in mind and was then applied more generally. We do not think that the programmes that we are looking at apply in any way to ILO Convention 29 or, indeed, ILO Convention 105. Likewise, the Joint Committee on Human Rights looked at the European Convention on Human Rights in this context and found that these programmes do not apply.