Jobseekers (Back to Work Schemes) Bill (Allocation of Time)

John Bercow Excerpts

Tuesday 19th March 2013 Commons Chamber

[Mr Hoban]

The hon. Lady makes a helpful point, but the legal position is as follows. If the Supreme Court does not give us leave to appeal, the regulations will be quashed, and we would have to repay sanctions to claimants who had not participated in schemes to help them back into work. The Bill is therefore needed. Hon. Members may have received briefings from third parties saying that that was not the case, but I can assure her and others that it is.

The Department has applied for permission for leave to appeal to the Supreme Court, but there is no guarantee that that will be granted. We therefore need to expedite the Bill so that we are not in a position where we have to repay benefit sanctions to people who have neither participated nor accepted the help that we have offered them.

[Mr Speaker]

I take it that the Minister has concluded his remarks. He cannot be accused of doing so with a fanfare of trumpets, but we are grateful to him for moving the motion.

[Stephen Timms (East Ham) (Lab)]

We find ourselves in a deeply unsatisfactory situation with the Bill and, indeed, the programme motion. We do not quite know what happened between the court case and the decision that prompted the measure. My right hon. Friend the Member for Birmingham, Hodge Hill (Mr Byrne) and I were told about the problem a couple of weeks ago; there was a three-week gap when we did not know what was happening. The House of Lords Constitution Committee will, I believe, opine on the measure tomorrow, but equally we do not want to risk an additional £130 million cut to benefit spending over the period ahead, particularly not on a day on which it has emerged that the Government want to cut £2.5 billion from spending across Government, some of it doubtless from the budget of the Minister and his right hon. Friend the Secretary of State. Nor do we want to be in a position in which people who were sanctioned months ago—in many cases, well over a year ago—have to be refunded because of the appalling mess that the Government have got themselves into.

The way forward proposed by the Bill and the programme motion is deeply unsatisfactory, but it is less bad than the alternatives, and for that reason I shall not urge my hon. Friends to oppose it.

[Mr Speaker]

If no one else wishes to contribute, the debate has been pithily concluded.

Question put and agreed to.