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My right hon. Friend asked the obvious question about timing. I cannot give her as exact a response as she would like. We are committed to making the change as soon as possible, but we are unable to commit to an exact time frame without first completing the detailed
work needed to assess the practicality and costs involved, and that requires us to consult the local authorities to ensure that the change is introduced properly and effectively. For example, changes are needed to the 380 local authority IT systems and to DWP computer systems, including those that provide the essential link with the pensioners at the point of claim. References are also made to the name in a wide range of forms and leaflets. We have already begun the process and I hope that my right hon. Friend and others will understand and accept that, as yet, we cannot set out a timetable, but the commitment is there and the work has started.
The hon. Member for Forest of Dean asked a series of questions. He is right that when we pilot and we find enough evidence that something works, we should get on with it. On the other hand, if something is not working well, we should stop and, when it is next legislatively convenient, remove the powers. That is what we have done in this case, and he will see examples in which we assess quickly and get on with rolling things out more widely.
I was interested in the exchange on amendment 16 and can conclude only that we now have all-party agreement that we need to reprioritise annually managed expenditure into departmental expenditure limits in order to fund that.
I have responded to the main questions on uprating that the hon. Gentleman asked in response to what the hon. Member for Northavon said, and I will not be drawn into commenting on carrot and sticks at this point. I urge the House to agree the amendments.
Lords amendments 3 to 27 agreed to , with Commons privileges waived in respect of Lords amendments 11, 12, 19 to 21, 23 and 25 .
Jim Knight: I beg to move, That this House agrees with Lords amendment 28.
Madam Deputy Speaker (Sylvia Heal): With this it will be convenient to discuss Lords amendments 61 to 77, 79 and 80.
Jim Knight: We estimate that around 350,000 heroin and crack cocaine users are on some form of benefit in this country. We need to help these people overcome their dependence, take control of their lives and get back into work. As the House knows, we are discussing the part of the Bill that is establishing pilots to ensure that problem drug users engage with the rehabilitation process where their drug use is a barrier to work, and do so under threat of sanction. These amendments will improve the pilot design to assist people on this journey, and address concerns raised in both Houses.
The Government will provide additional support and treatment. In return, and in order to receive benefit payments-we will pilot this approach-claimants with a drug dependency that is a barrier to employment and who are not already receiving drug treatment will be required to sign up to a rehabilitation plan that will
outline how they will engage with the help that is available to them to overcome their addiction. We are clear that doing nothing will no longer be an option.
If claimants take up treatment voluntarily, they will be offered a treatment allowance and a place on a new drug and employment support programme, which will provide integrated and personalised support for problem drug users on jobseeker's allowance or employment support allowance. That allowance will be paid to the claimant as long as they agree, via a voluntary rehabilitation plan, to maintain their treatment and take advantage of the additional support available. It will remove some of the normal conditions of entitlement for benefit in order to allow drug users the time and space to focus on their recovery. For example, it will mean that they will no longer have to tell a member of our staff once a fortnight that they are actively seeking work, when clearly they may not be doing so because of their drug problem. The allowance will be payable to the claimant for up to 12 months as long as they maintain their treatment and take advantage of the additional support available.
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If problem drug users are not already in treatment, and are neither prepared nor ready to engage with treatment services, they will be required to sign up to a rehabilitation plan that will direct them to attend a series of assessments and an educational programme, with the aim of encouraging them into treatment. However, if they fail to engage in these activities without good cause, they will be subject to benefit sanctions. It should be noted that where there are reasonable grounds for suspicion that problem drug use is an issue, claimants can also be mandated to attend these assessments.
If the individual attends the educational and motivational sessions and decides against treatment but signs that drug use is a barrier to work remain, they will be referred back to the assessment process. That ensures continuity of contact with treatment providers until such time as a person feels ready to receive treatment. It is important that those identified as problem drug users take the first steps on the journey to overcome their addiction.
If advisers have reasonable grounds to suspect that drug use is an issue, they can refer the claimant to an assessment with a treatment adviser to establish whether that is indeed the case. Should the claimant fail to attend the assessment on the grounds that they do not use drugs, prior to any sanctions being applied they will be offered the opportunity to take a drugs test to show that that is indeed the case-effectively, it would be an opportunity to clear their name in respect of their relationship with the adviser. If the test is negative, no further action will be taken. Should such individuals refuse a voluntary drugs test, and receive two consecutive sanctions for failure to attend the assessment, they will be mandated to a drugs test.
Proposed new paragraph 7A will tighten up the data-sharing powers considerably, in particular by preventing Jobcentre Plus from obtaining information about a person's medical and social work history. Amendment 67 also provides that the information provided by the police and probation service can be used only with those involved in administering the new programme.
Steve Webb: The Minister referred to places on treatment programmes, and we are talking not only about drugs in the traditional sense, but about alcohol abuse. Certainly my local service providers say that it can be easy to find money for drugs programmes, but hard to find it for alcohol programmes. Can he say something about the resourcing of places for treatment of people with alcohol abuse problems? Is his Department funding the provision of such places and can he give some idea about numbers?
Jim Knight: As the hon. Gentleman will know from the way in which I have described the amendments, we have principally designed the provision around people with problem drug use. He is right that it could be used in respect of people with alcohol addiction problems. We plan to look at the arrangements for people on benefit who are dependent on alcohol. We have commissioned new research and will carry out an internal review with the Department of Health that will consider whether arrangements similar to those for problem drug users should be introduced to require those who are alcohol-dependent to take up support to help them get back to work, but it is only once that research has been carried out and the review held that we will be able to make a definite commitment. At that point, we would have to find the resources to do it.
In summary, all these amendments are designed to help encourage problem drug users to engage with treatment services, with the additional help and support on offer through the benefit system. They are all designed to ensure that doing nothing about a drug problem is not an option without consequent loss of benefit. I commend the amendments to the House.
Mr. Harper: The Minister will know from reading the report of the debate in Committee that we were very supportive of the Government's proposals in this area and agreed that this is a significant problem. The Minister outlined the numbers-350,000 people on out-of-work benefits who are problem drug users for whom that is a barrier to moving into work. That is clearly a problem that people expect us to deal with. We had some clear discussions in Committee and both sides agreed that it needs to be dealt with, so we welcome the proposals.
The pilots will involve only a relatively small number of problem drug users-I think, from a debate in the other place, about 10,000. Will the Minister clarify how the pilots will be allocated across the United Kingdom? We had some good debates in Committee on how they will work in England, Wales and Scotland. There are many references in the Lords amendments to the rehabilitation plans. Obviously, there is a key dependency on health services in the different parts of the UK, and health, of course, is a devolved matter. One issue that came out in Committee concerned the different priorities in England, Wales and Scotland in rehabilitation provision. I think that Ministers in Committee accepted that effectively the pilots will happen first in England, then Wales and then Scotland. Have further discussions taken place between Ministers in the Department and Members of the devolved Welsh Assembly Government and Scottish Government about the pilots and how far the planning has got? For the pilots to be successful, and to give a good indication of success, they will need to be tried in the constituent parts of the UK. That would be helpful.
Returning to a comment that I made earlier about pilots, it is important quickly to understand whether the approach laid out in the Lords amendments will be successful, and if it will, to move on at a significant pace. The hon. Member for Northavon (Steve Webb) talked about alcohol problems, which we debated in Committee. There are powers in the Bill to deal with alcohol; the Government simply made the judgment that drugs are a more significant priority and should be dealt with first. They indicated, however-and Ministers have confirmed this-that alcohol problems would be looked at. We very much support that. I simply want the Minister to lay out how the Government envisage the pilots being spread across the different constituent parts of the UK. I think that the pilots are supposed to be for three years, and so will tackle only a relatively small part of the problem. If they are successful, we will have to consider how they can be rolled out. However, we support the amendments.
Steve Webb: I regard this group of amendments as making the best of a bad job. The provisions relating to drug and alcohol addiction are offensive and authoritarian, and it would have been better to take them out of the Bill altogether. The amendments make things slightly less bad, but the pilots will prove that we have an awfully long way to go before we get an effective response to the issues of drug and alcohol abuse.
I agree with the Minister that doing nothing is not an option. However, there is an incredible paucity of services, particularly for alcohol abuse, but in many cases for drug abuse too, and a lack of support for substance abusers and their families. There is a huge proactive, positive, supportive agenda that could have been implemented first. Then we could have returned to considering what threats and sanctions to apply to those who do not comply. Returning to sticks and carrots, there is an awful lot of carrot yet to be chewed on-to mix my metaphors.
The Minister used an interesting phrase. Once again, we are guilty of weasel words: he said that those who refuse to take a voluntary drug test will be mandated to do so. That does not sound terribly voluntary. If Ministers just come clean and say, "We are going to force people to take a test, and if they do not take it, we will take money off them", that is fair enough. That is a legitimate position-it is not one that I share, but it is one that the Government take. It is always striking, however, when the Government refuse to describe accurately what they are doing, perhaps because they are embarrassed about it.
If the Government are confident in the rightness of what they are doing, they ought to call a spade a spade. They ought to be clear about what they are doing. Let us consider the idea that it would be helpful for drug addicts to have less money because they will not take a test or accept treatment. We all know the consequences of people with persistent drug addictions not having as much money as they used to. Far from being tough and effective, that will create new victims of crime and will be an entirely negative and regressive step.
We certainly welcome the amendments to the extent that they soften measures that ought never to have been passed into legislation in the first place, but that is about all we can say for them.
Jim Knight: With the leave of the House, I shall respond as briefly as possible to the points made.
I welcome the welcome from the hon. Member for Forest of Dean (Mr. Harper) for the amendments. He asked about the pilots. The English pilots will run for two years from October 2010 in five Jobcentre Plus districts: Cumbria and Lancashire, west Yorkshire, Merseyside, Birmingham and Solihull, and central London. The selection of pilot areas has taken into account the number of problem drug users, the geographical, urban and rural spread, and the availability and choice of treatment. He is right to raise the point that there are different arrangements in Wales and Scotland. There have been ministerial and official discussions with the Welsh Assembly Government and the Scottish Parliament about the possibility of running a pilot in Wales and Scotland, and we are continuing with those discussions.
The hon. Member for Northavon (Steve Webb) accused me of weasel words, which I found most extraordinary-it is a mammal that I admire, but not one that I seek to imitate. Drug tests will be used in two scenarios. If a claimant refuses to attend a substance-related assessment on the grounds that they are not a drug user, they will be offered a voluntary drug test to show that that is the case. A person might be required to take one or more tests, if they have been referred for a substance-related assessment with a drug treatment provider and have failed to do so without good cause on two occasions. We cannot make them take the test, but we can make them suffer a benefit sanction for refusing to do so. In the end, it will be their choice to do it or suffer the sanction if they refuse. That is reasonable, because in the end they need to address their problem drug use if they are to get back into work.
On that basis, I hope that we can agree to the amendments.
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Work and Pensions (Jonathan Shaw): I beg to move, That this House agrees with Lords amendment 30.
Madam Deputy Speaker: With this it will be convenient to take Lords amendments 31 to 49.
Jonathan Shaw: It will be useful if I address amendments 34 to 37 first. These amendments restructure clause 33 and make subsequent changes to clauses 34 and 35 to reflect the restructuring of clause 33.
During the debates in this House and the other place, we listened carefully to the broad consensus that the wording of the Bill should more clearly signal the original policy intention that we set out in the welfare reform White Paper. The original wording of clause 33 was deliberately cast broadly to ensure that we could enable trailblazers to test innovative approaches to delivering the right to control. However, we recognise that the wording could set out more clearly that disabled people are at the centre of the right-to-control provisions.
Amendments 30 to 33, amendment 38 and amendments 44 to 49 remove the exclusion of adult social care for the trailblazers and create an order-making
power with which the exclusion can be permanently removed depending on the results of a trailblazer evaluation. In the White Paper, we made clear our commitment to align adult community care services with the right to control. We also made clear our intention that disabled people will be at the centre of the right-to-control provisions. We outlined in Committee that adult community care services were originally excluded to avoid duplicating existing community care and direct payments legislation.
We have also made it clear that we deliberately cast the original wording of clause 33 broadly, to enable trailblazers to innovate and test the best ways to deliver the right to control. However, we recognise the importance of clarity in the Bill. We want the legislation to be clear, so that disabled people and local authorities know what the right to control means and what services are included. That is why we developed the amendments over the summer in co-production with Baroness Campbell of Surbiton and the Royal Association for Disability Rights to ensure that the legislation meets the needs of disabled people while retaining flexibility in delivering the right to control.
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We have also worked across government to ensure that the amendments to include the alignment with adult community care services do not compromise the existing community care legislation. We tabled the amendments in the other place, where they received cross-party support, with Lord Freud and Baroness Thomas adding their names to them. Baroness Campbell thanked the Government for the genuinely co-productive approach that we adopted in developing the amendments. I hope that support for the amendments is as universal in this House as it was in the other place.
Amendments 39 to 43 are technical amendments that are necessary to ensure that where Welsh Ministers have Executive competence over funding streams, they can make secondary legislation to bring devolved funding streams and services within the right to control. It was always our intention that Welsh Ministers would have the ability to make regulations in relation to devolved funding streams and services. Amendments 39 to 43 are necessary to ensure that the legislation accurately reflects our intention.
In summary, the amendments in the group are designed to ensure that the provisions accurately reflect our policy intention that the right to control will deliver genuine choice and control to disabled people over certain state funding that they receive. I commend the amendment to the House.
Mr. Harper: The Minister will not be surprised to know that the amendments in the group have the support of the Opposition. I am pleased that the Government accepted them in the other place and worked closely with Baroness Campbell of Surbiton on co-producing them.
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