Jobseekers (Back to Work Schemes) Bill

Nick Gibb Excerpts

Tuesday 19th March 2013 Commons Chamber

[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.

[Mr Nick Gibb (Bognor Regis and Littlehampton) (Con)]

May I bring the right hon. Gentleman back to the Bill? Does he agree with its impact assessment, which states that a retrospective transfer of £130 million of

“public money to this group of claimants would represent poor value to the taxpayer and will not help those unemployed enter employment”?

Surely, in the current climate he should welcome the swift action taken by the Government. Listening to his interventions and his speech, I am not sure that he or Labour are ready to be custodians of this country’s public finances.

[Mr Byrne]

Right—so a Member of a Government who have just put at risk £130 million of public money says that we would not be safe custodians of public money.

The Secretary of State was given the judgment by the Court of Appeal on 12 February. Weeks later, there was the request for urgent legislation, please. That is highly unsatisfactory. Tests for retrospective legislation have been repeatedly set out in this House and the other place. Tomorrow, the Lords’ Constitution Committee will opine on this Bill. I suspect it will have harsh things to say about its rushed nature which, because it is retrospective and set to a fast timetable, represents the worst of all worlds.

The Secretary of State will be aware, like me, of the principles set down by the Constitution Committee in its 15th report, where it opines on fast-track legislation. There is a need to maintain clear, transparent parliamentary scrutiny, and to maintain “good law”. The right of interested parties to put forward views must be observed. There is a need to ensure that legislation is a proportionate, justified and appropriate response, and is set out so that fundamental constitutional rights are not jeopardised. Crucially, the policy-making process within Government should be transparent. I look forward to hearing how any one of those principles is honoured by the process before us. The test is all the sharper, in that the Secretary of State is in this pickle because he rushed the legislation, against the recommendation of his advisers.

The test for fast-tracked retrospective legislation is the toughest of all. It was a principle the Lords set down in their report on criminal evidence legislation in 2008, which said:

“Legislation to make lawful an action that was done without legal authority…needs to be scrutinised carefully.”

My concern is that this timetable does not deliver that.

At the heart of this debate is the question whether the programmes the Government have in place, which rest on the power the Secretary of State is seeking from us, are in any way effective.

--- Later in debate ---

[Mr Byrne]

The hon. Gentleman would do well to pay attention to the DWP’s own statistics and to the judgment of the Public Accounts Committee. They are categorical; they do not hem and haw or hedge their words; they make it clear that the Work programme today is worse than doing nothing. On the estates where unemployment is worst, the situation has got worse, not better since the Secretary of State took office. By any measure, that must be a failure.

That is why we say there has to be a different macro-economic policy. Unemployment is high because there are not enough jobs to go round. My constituency has the highest youth unemployment of any constituency in the country. There are 30 people chasing every single job. There are not enough jobs to go round, and we need a different plan for growth and jobs—an argument that my right hon. Friend the shadow Chancellor has set out with some power. We also need a different plan at the DWP. It is now Labour authorities and the Labour party nationally that are setting out the way forward for this Government. We have said that it would be wise to put a tax on bankers’ bonuses because we know we could use that money to get more than 100,000 young people back into work quickly. That is decisive action, which we hope to see from the Chancellor tomorrow. If anybody rejects an offer of a real job with real wages and real training, sure, perhaps they should face sanctions. But let us be clear: young people today deserve a real choice of a real job with real wages, but that is being denied them by this Government.

[Mr Gibb]

I am grateful to the right hon. Gentleman for giving way to me a second time. If I have read the Library briefing correctly, the JSA claimant count in his constituency fell over the last year by 6.7%.

[Mr Byrne]

That is cold comfort to a constituency with the highest youth unemployment in Britain. Does the hon. Gentleman know what people at my local jobcentre say when I visit it? Can he guess? They say, “I wish this Government would bring back the future jobs fund because it was the best programme we ever ran.” What a shame his party cancelled it, and that is why we propose its restoration.