| Previous Section | Back to Table of Contents | Lords Hansard Home Page |
Lord McCarthy: My Lords, I see that in relation to pilot schemes. However, there is the restart course, the job club, the job plan workshop, training for work, jobsearch, job interview guarantee, learning for work, business start-up, community action work trial and so on. There are too many.
Lord Henley: My Lords, I simply do not agree with the noble Lord at all. There are a great many people in the country and they are all different and have different attributes. We want to try a whole range of different schemes and programmes to meet the different requirements. It is--dare I say it?--a rather centralist approach to suggest that the number of schemes should be narrowed down. We wish to continue with a whole range of schemes which operate nationwide. Some schemes prove to be highly effective and some less so. We have dropped the less effective schemes and normally, when we do that, there are howls of outrage from the party opposite. But the noble Lord should recognise that there are different schemes and approaches which can be appropriate for different people.
The noble Lord asked also why there is a difference between the workskill pilot schemes and other government programmes for the unemployed. Workskill pilots will allow people to undertake employment- related education and training under certain conditions and continue to receive JSA. It is not just work
experience or a jobsearch scheme. As I said earlier, we are providing a wide range of help to the unemployed to reflect what is in fact a wide range of needs.The noble Lord asked, in terms of contract for work, about the cost of the different schemes. I should tell the noble Lord that £100 million covers the new project work scheme which has about 100,000 places and the contract for work scheme which has about 12,000 places. The size of the private sector commission will depend on competitive tendering. We shall obviously make an appropriate decision in the light of value for money and the bids which we receive from a whole range of different providers.
The noble Lord asked why we are using the private sector and why, in relation to one pilot, we are having two Employment Service schemes and two private sector schemes. Again, I take the noble Lord back to the point about pilots. It is important to try out different schemes. If we tried only two private sector schemes without using the Employment Service, we should not know whether the outcome was as a result of it being a private sector scheme or because of the particular conditions imposed. Therefore, we are running two Employment Service schemes under the same conditions as an extra control.
I now move to the Motion in the name of my noble kinsman Lord Russell. Perhaps I may start by addressing one small but important point. I do not wish to dwell on the point but it is relevant if the noble Earl wishes to press the matter to a Division. I understand that his concern can go wider than that addressed in the Motion but it is important that the House should understand the precise effect of the Motion.
The Motion requests the Government to lay amended regulations omitting the words "cease to be payable" in Regulation 4(2) of the pilot regulations. Regulation 4(2) describes the person to whom a sanction may be applied; that is, a person who has been given or sent a notice in writing by an employment officer advising him that if he fails to participate in project work his benefit could cease to be payable or could be payable at a lower rate. Deleting the words "cease to be payable" from the regulation would merely have the effect that a person who might be liable for a sanction could not have notice sent to him advising him that his JSA could cease to be payable. It would have no effect on the sanction itself, merely his advisory letter.
I am sure that my noble kinsman accepts that that would be a very odd result. In other words, we should still be able to sanction the individual but we should not have the power, as we do at the moment, to write to him beforehand and inform him as to what was to happen.
The basic theme of the speech made by the noble Earl, Lord Russell, is one to which my noble friend Lord Mackay of Ardbrecknish and I have listened on many occasions; namely, that costs rise in other areas simply because people are denied benefit. The noble Earl will know that my noble friend and I simply do not accept that view. We believe that taxpayers are quite right when they take a view that people should not
receive benefits if they are not entitled to them. If there were no sanctions in benefits--and I was grateful to hear the noble Lord, Lord McCarthy, say that he accepts that there should be sanctions, although we might differ on where they should be--I believe that my noble kinsman would find that costs would rise even faster and far, far more as demand for what one might term "easy benefits" grew and grew.I return now to the main point. Of course I accept that my noble kinsman is really concerned more generally about our approach to sanctions in JSA. He has raised those concerns on many occasions during the passage through this House of the Jobseekers Bill and in last year's debate over the first project work pilot regulations. We believe that sanctions have always been, and should always be, an important feature of any benefit system to protect the taxpayer from subsidising people who have no good reason to be on that particular benefit or remain unemployed.
Sanctions exist to influence the behaviour of people who are claiming benefit. I should make it clear that we believe that most people claiming JSA do make every effort to take advantage of the opportunities offered to them. However, sanctions reinforce the incentives for the few who might otherwise not meet their responsibilities to take effective steps to improve their prospects of finding work.
It is a basic objective of JSA to underline the conditional nature of unemployment benefits. Jobseekers should be left in no doubt at all about their responsibilities. In the case of project work, and any other mandatory programme, every jobseeker has the conditions of participation fully explained to him or her before being referred to the course or placement. If people fail to take up the offer of a place without good cause--and there are good causes that allow them to do so and there is the appropriate appeal regime--they will obviously lose JSA for two weeks in the first instance. There should be no confusion, no unfairness. JSA sanctions are designed to be a clear and effective mechanism to ensure that jobseekers take the opportunities put before them. But, nevertheless, we believe that it is still essential to provide a safety net for claimants who need special protection. We have made it clear on a number of occasions that we accept that there is a need to continue to pay benefit to claimants whose circumstances, or those of their dependants, mean that they are particularly vulnerable to hardship. But, I repeat, what we do not accept is that there should be an automatic right to these payments, irrespective of the claimants' actions or, rather, inactions.
Where a sanction is applied and hardship would result because of this, vulnerable groups are eligible for hardship payments. We have looked carefully at who should be included within those groups and we believe that those who are vulnerable will fall within the safety net. That means that claimants with families, or claimants or their partners who are pregnant or disabled, or who have a chronic medical condition or are caring for someone will be able to claim JSA on the grounds of hardship. We believe that we have struck the right balance.
The aim of project work is to help people who have been unemployed for a long time to move off benefits and back to work. Experience tells us that people who have been out of work for a long time may be left behind by the economic recovery that we know is taking place, unless we provide extra help. We also know that very long-term unemployed people can become demotivated. Project work provides an intensive period of jobsearch help and, for people who need it, a period of mandatory work experience. The arrangements for sanctions under JSA are applied to people who are eligible for project work. If someone is referred to project work and fails to attend as required without good cause, his case will be referred, as I said, to independent adjudication and he may lose some or all of his benefit for a period of time. After any sanction period has ended, the client will normally be re-referred to work experience to complete the balance of attendance up to 13 weeks.
We believe that most unemployed people are trying hard to find work and that this programme can help them to do so. But project work may also make it difficult for the minority who do not want to work, or may already be working while claiming benefit, to continue cheating the system in the same way. As I said earlier, I believe that taxpayers are entitled to expect that their money is used to fund benefits only for those who are truly entitled to them.
I hope that the noble Earl would accept that it would be wise for him not to press the Motion. The only advice that I can offer to the House, should he wish to press the Motion to a Division, is that we should reject it.
7.55 p.m.
Earl Russell: My Lords, I thank the Minister for his reply. I agree with the noble Lord in what he said about pilot schemes. They are essential, but enthusiasm for piloting can be overdone. I am reminded of the Emperor Frederick II Hohenstaufen who once got two people and gave them an extremely large lunch. He left one of them to sleep it off and sent the other out hunting. Then, he cut them both open to find out which had digested better. That is a pilot pursued with excessive enthusiasm.
I shall return to the Minister's arguments in a few moments but, first, I should like to thank the noble Lord, Lord McCarthy, for a large part of what he said. The noble Lord dealt with many points specifically on the Government's jobsearch programmes, which I should have made but did not because I did not want to prolong the course of the debate. In his description of searchfare, I was reminded of the remark that the noble Lord made when the Jobseekers Bill was before the House. On that occasion, the noble Lord asked whether the widow's pension was about to be renamed the spouse-seeker's allowance. That question seems even more pertinent today than it did at the time.
Of course, I expected the noble Lord to say what he said about regulations and I shall not argue about that now, save only to say that, warmly though I welcome the constitutional declaration which his party and mine have put out, it still leaves us with plenty to debate within the field of constitutional reform.
The key point mentioned by the noble Lord, Lord McCarthy, was what you do with refusal to co-operate. The House will have noticed that my Motion does allow for the possibility of a benefit penalty. We will understand this better if we think that what we are getting here in compulsory training programmes and compulsory work programmes is, in effect, a peacetime reintroduction of conscription. There are, of course, cases where peacetime conscription is perfectly justifiable. However, I am not so sure whether this is one of them. But, in principle, it is admissible.
However, there are three points that one must make about the model of conscription. First, when we had it, the sanction employed was not total disentitlement to right to income; it was imprisonment. I believe that that is the more appropriate and less cruel sanction of the two. Secondly, when we had conscription, it was covered by a right of conscientious objection. I believe that to be of some importance. Let us imagine Mr. Daniel Hooper, alias Swampy, being required as a condition of continuing eligibility to work for a road building firm.
Next Section
Back to Table of Contents
Lords Hansard Home Page