Jobseekers (Back to Work Schemes) Bill

Debate between Liam Byrne and Russell Brown

Tuesday 19th March 2013 Commons Chamber

[Mr Byrne]

I will address that point directly, as the answer is very simple: because this Bill restores the general legal power of the DWP to issue sanctions. It is a broad sui generis power that has been in place since 1911. I will be interested to hear later the hon. Gentleman’s argument on why he thinks the power to issue sanctions, which has been in place since 1911, should now be struck down for the period in question.

The worst aspect of all this is that the Secretary of State was warned that he was heading for a failure not simply in this House, not simply by commentators opposed to his plans, and not simply by people who had a profound disagreement with him, but by the very specialist Committee he set up to advise him on these questions. This is what the Social Security Advisory Committee said about the 2011 regulations:

“SSAC ask why the Department did not opt to narrow the scope of the original regulations”,

Indeed, it was, of course, their broad and unspecified content that the Court of Appeal objected to.

[Mr Russell Brown]

I want to take my right hon. Friend back to the recent intervention of the hon. Member for Perth and North Perthshire (Pete Wishart), from the Scottish National party Benches. Has my right hon. Friend picked up from those comments that the SNP is totally opposed to sanctions of any kind?

[Mr Byrne]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right. I am afraid that no other conclusion can be drawn from that intervention.

The Secretary of State said to us in the House a couple of weeks ago:

“That advice came to us; it was checked and it said that the regulations were fine.”—[Official Report, 11 March 2013; Vol. 560, c. 19.]

Well, either the lawyers are bad or the Secretary of State made the wrong judgment. The only conclusion that can be drawn is that there are a huge number of questions that the Secretary of State must now answer.

If this were the only recent example of such incompetence by a Government Department, we might look on it more sympathetically, but all of us clearly remember the west coast main line debacle that cost taxpayers so much money and all of us remember that the Department for Transport responded by appointing an independent reviewer to get to the bottom of exactly what went wrong and how so much public money was put at risk. That is the response we must see now from the DWP. There must be an independent inquiry into how the Department got this so badly wrong.