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Lord Razzall: My Lords, I support my noble friend. In doing so, having made my remarks on the amendment we are discussing, I do not propose to repeat them on the following amendment. It is obviously a matter for the noble Baroness, Lady Miller of Hendon, whether she wishes to add her remarks at this point. As my noble friend indicated, three different ways are proposed in which to amend the clause. I shall not repeat the argument other than to say that, like my noble friend, I have considerable sympathy with the noble Baroness's amendment. Indeed, I initially toyed with tabling such a provision but, having seen the amendment of the noble Baroness, Lady Turner, I decided to press the Government at this stage to see whether they were prepared to make any concessions, with the possibility of returning to an amendment to eliminate Clause 49 altogether on Third Reading. However, that is obviously a tactical matter.
I should like to add to what my noble friend said. He was untypically kind to the Government, if I may say so. To use the phrase that we hear so often from the noble Lord, Lord Wedderburn, I find it absolutely incredible that the Government should attempt to insert Clause 49 in this particular Bill. The interchange that will take place between my noble friend and the Minister will indicate why the clause is entirely inappropriate in an employment Bill. Although I know quite a lot about employment law, as, indeed, do many noble Lords who are present, I find myself completely incapable of understanding the clause. The requisite knowledge that is necessary in order to make a decent fist of understanding Clause 49 is such that it properly belongs not in the Employment Bill and not in a Bill brought forward from the DTI but in a Bill brought forward from the department of the noble
Baroness, Lady Hollis. I defy most noble Lords who have expertise on the Employment Bill to have the necessary expertise to scrutinise the clause properly.It is significant that neither the noble Lord, Lord McIntosh, nor the noble Lord, Lord Sainsbury, feels qualified to respond to Clause 49 and that a Minister from another department is brought in in order to do that. It is for that reason that I encourage my noble friend to come in our side. To say that it is an abuse of the procedure is going too far, but it is entirely inappropriate that the clause has been plucked out in the way that it has. Presumably it is on the agenda of matters that the department of the noble Baroness, Lady Hollis, wanted to introduce, and some bright civil servant spotted the fact that it could be tacked on to the Employment Bill. I do not think that that is the way to legislate.
As I say, I support the noble Baroness's amendment and I have produced my own amendment. I suspect that unless the Government are prepared to make concessions, I shall ultimately at the last ditch, or even at the last stitch, be forced to support the abolition of the clause entirely. However, I shall see how matters proceed.
6.15 p.m.
Baroness Miller of Hendon: My Lords, I support Amendments Nos. 118 and 119. I could follow the suggestion of the noble Lord, Lord Razzall, that I should at this point speak to Amendment No. 120. However, I shall not be tempted to do so simply because the Minister's response to Amendments Nos. 118 and 119 may enable me to cut short my remarks on Amendment No. 120. I do not want to keep on repeating the same remarks and I am sure that noble Lords, much as they like my remarks, do not want to hear them again and again. As I say, I most definitely support Amendments Nos. 118 and 119.
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Department for Work and Pensions (Baroness Hollis of Heigham): My Lords, I take it that there will a separate set of speeches on Amendment No. 119 as it is not grouped with Amendment No. 118; otherwise, I shall be happy to run my remarks together—
Lord Razzall: My Lords, I hope that I may assist the noble Baroness. I indicated that I had addressed my remarks to Amendment No. 118. I shall formally move Amendment No. 119 later.
Baroness Hollis of Heigham: My Lords, I was working this morning on the basis of the Marshalled List. However, perhaps I can move across the amendments. I remind your Lordships what Clause 49 does. It calls to interview after six months the partners of those on IS, JSA, IB, SDA and ICA to explore various opportunities. That is it. I hope that I do not disappoint the noble Lord too much, but as he knows my answers in advance I do not think that he will be deeply disappointed or deeply surprised when I say
that I shall not be enticed into a debate on the adequacy of benefits and the legitimacy of sanctions. I do not think that it is appropriate to do so.However, what I want to emphasise, first, is that what we are proposing is standard practice for those on JSA. More importantly, the Welfare Reform and Pensions Act 1999, approved by Parliament, already ensures that those who receive disability benefits or carer benefits attend an interview. This clause extends that call to interview to the partners of those on disability benefits or on ICA—partners who are not themselves disabled and partners who are not themselves carers. Parliament has already agreed that if someone is disabled, he or she should none the less attend a work-focused interview in order to explore the opportunities available. It cannot be sensible that the disabled person attends but a carer who is only a part-time carer because he or she is not themselves on ICA, perhaps caring for 10 or 15 hours a week, or perhaps not caring at all, who may have a far more realistic opportunity of contemplating work, should not be called to the interview. Alternatively, as we do now, we can bring in a carer who is receiving ICA and looking after an elderly parent for 35 hours a week. However, at present, we do not bring in her non-working husband, who perhaps is doing nothing at all. He may be 49 years-old, fit and well but is neither working nor caring.
My first point is that we already bring to an interview those who are furthest away from the labour market—that is, the disabled person or the full-time carer. Therefore, I am puzzled that anyone should object to our calling to an interview those who are nearer to the labour market—that is, the partners who may have no impediment whatever to entering the labour market in due course.
My second point concerns whether the work-focused interviews are of any value. I know, because I have sat in on many of them, that such interviews do help to keep people attached to the labour market. Your Lordships know that, in order to get a job, one already needs to have a job or to live with someone who has a job. Obtaining a job is not a matter of a visit to the job centre; it is about knowledge of the labour market. The more one lives among a community of unemployed people, the less likely one is to know about the existence of a job, even if it only a few streets away in a London borough.
At the work-focused interviews at which I have been present, they not only discuss work opportunities but benefits; for example, housing benefits and some of the linking rules. They discuss the relevance of voluntary organisations, which might be helpful, for example, if someone is caring for a person with Alzheimer's disease. They might talk about pension prospects and the state second pension. But they also talk about training opportunities—for example, the right to learn IT skills free of charge at the local college in order to improve one's prospects of obtaining a job.
They also discuss job opportunities, help with interview skills, guidance on childcare facilities, and the better-off calculation, taking into account the new
tax credits. If someone learns that, as a result of going into work, they may be £80 a week better off than when receiving benefit, I believe that we would consider that to be a useful piece of information. Given the inevitable complexity of tax credits, it is not the type of calculation that people can make for themselves on the back of an envelope. If they could, they would already be employable by the financial services industry. Most people do not have that knowledge-base. In a work-focused interview, they can obtain that type of information and it will help to inform their choices. The interviews are positive, helpful and unthreatening.I do not know whether any of your Lordships have visited one of the new jobcentre plus offices which are being rolled out across the country next year. I can assure noble Lords that they are full of stripped-pine floors, comfortable sofas in navy and deep red and pleasantly angled desks. They are a cross between a building society and an airport executive lounge. Lone parents and disabled people have invariably said to me—noble Lords may say, "Well, they would, wouldn't they"—how helpful the interviews were. They have said that, even if they do not wish to return to work straight away, it is helpful to know how to set about doing so when they are ready.
That brings me to my third point. These are opportunity interviews. No one—not even the fit and well non-working husband of a carer—is required to work following the interviews. They are not receiving JSA. But we know that most people want to work when they feel they are ready, and the interviews help them to make informed choices. They may help them to overcome the barriers that they perceive to stand in their way.
In that case, one might ask: why make such interviews compulsory? Three years ago, I held the same view. I believed that they should be voluntary and I opposed compulsory interviews backed by sanctions. I have changed my mind on the basis of evidence, as I believe I should. The same difficulties that inhibit people in finding a job often inhibit them in taking the first step, which is to attend an interview.
Quite simply, when interviews are voluntary, the people to whom we most want to reach out in order to help do not come. When we first piloted the ONE scheme, people thought that the interviews were compulsory and a condition of benefit, and they turned up. When they learnt that the interviews were voluntary, the numbers fell away dramatically and they did not attend.
Obviously if interviews are to be compulsory, they must have a modest sanction. A compulsory interview without a sanction is not compulsory; it is voluntary. But the sanction is proportional and modest. Pace the noble Earl, Lord Russell, it is 20 per cent of the single person's allowance. That means that if a person did not have children but was receiving IB and the average housing benefit, he would have a total income of, say, £202.45. At 20 per cent of the single adult allowance, the sanction would be £10.79, or just over 5 per cent of that person's household income.
Of course, the sanction would end the moment the person walked through the office door. And it would not be applied until at least three attempts had been made to contact the person and until after personal contact with him had been made by telephone or through a home visit to ensure that letters were not being delivered to an empty house. Equally—I can enlarge on the matter if your Lordships wish—there is a shopping list of decent and reasonable good cause.
Thus far, I have no evidence that deferring a work-focused interview on the grounds of good cause has been a problem among our client groups. I believe that your Lordships will have gathered, as my noble friend said, that calling people to work-focused interviews not to make them work but to enable them to have the information that they need to make informed choices is helpful and benign. It is a matter of information and the knowledge network. Many people on benefits do not have that knowledge and therefore cannot make the necessary choices.
That brings me, finally, to the point of Amendment No. 118. The amendment seeks to ensure that a person is not called to an interview unless the interviewer already knows that suitable jobs are available. But how on earth does anyone know that? The personal adviser or the interviewer will not know, and it is probable that the person attending the interview will not know either. We are not talking here about lawyers and doctors, who have a fairly clear idea of what their job will be; we are talking about men and also, largely, women who have all types of skills but often not much work experience.
I remember talking to one woman who was receiving ICA and who had cared for her elderly mother for years but had little formal education. Her mother died. The woman was isolated, lonely, depressed and poor. She believed that she was unemployable until, at a work-focused interview, it was pointed out that she had precisely the type of experience and skills appropriate to working in a residential care home. She is now the assistant manager of a care home and says that we have helped her into a new life. Yet, until the work-focused interview, she considered that she was unemployable.
I also met a man who had had a fairly skilled heavy-manufacturing job. The jobs had gone. He was 52 years-old and resigned to being unemployed for the rest of his life. He wondered whether somehow—this is why he came to the interview—he could receive higher benefits, possibly by providing evidence of a disability. However, like most men, he had a driving licence. We paid for his driving lessons as an HGV driver. He is now busy, happy, employed and very appreciative of the help that he received.
The point is that, while many noble Lords may indeed have stayed in the same type of job all their lives and know what is out there in the marketplace, that is not true of many people who receive benefit. Without such an interview, they will not know where the skills that they have could take them—that is particularly true for women—or, as with IT, what new skills they could acquire if they so chose.
A man to whom I was close had, during his lifetime, worked as a poacher, part-time; a farm labourer, full-time; a fish seller when young; a bus driver on Saturdays; a gardener on Sundays; an unskilled builder when temporarily unemployed; a professional drummer most evenings; a trades union official when his mates were sacked; a parish councillor to extract playing fields from the farmers; a special constable to help out the police; and an MoD van driver in order to obtain a pension. On the basis of the amendment, in advance of meeting him and discussing options with him, how could any interviewer decide whether or not certain types of employment might be available for my father?
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