Welfare Reform

Jenny Willott Excerpts

Thursday 11th November 2010 Commons Chamber

[Mr Duncan Smith]

The system will assess at household level, but of course, the beauty of that is that we will understand better what household needs are. Two things that will hugely benefit women will flow from that. First, in knowing what that household should have, we will have a much higher take-up rate. Therefore, the in-work poverty that has been terrible until now will hugely be resolved. The second aspect that is really good for women is that, as the hon. Lady knows, many women who have caring responsibilities do short-hours work. The proposal will hugely benefit them because they will retain more of their income as they go into work. They will be beneficiaries, which I hope helps her.

[Jenny Willott (Cardiff Central) (LD)]

I, too, welcome today’s announcement, particularly the expected effect on poverty and especially child poverty. This is a critical reform—as the hon. Member for Aberdeen South (Miss Begg) said, some of us on the Work and Pensions Committee have been pressing for it for a number of years.

Who will run the mandatory Work programme? Will that involve third sector partners? How will the Secretary of State ensure that the programme remains distinct from the community sentence programme?

[Mr Duncan Smith]

The Work programme will start well in advance of today’s proposal—we anticipate that it will start next summer. There will be a set of contracts on a regional scale that will involve the private and voluntary sectors. Organisations will run programmes against a set of outcomes, for which we will pay them, so that as they deliver and get more people back to work, they will be paid for those results. That will be carefully balanced so that we do not pay them for dead-weight costs that might otherwise have been in the system, but it will certainly be clear.