Margaret Hodge

Labour Party | Barking

Pathways to Work Pilots

The Minister for Employment and Welfare Reform (Margaret Hodge) : I share the pleasure of my hon. Friend the Member for Rhondda (Chris Bryant) in participating in a debate under your chairmanship, Mr. Pope. I hope that this will be the first of many such debates. I congratulate my hon. Friend on securing the debate. Throughout his time in the House, he has always shown an interest in welfare policy. Someone cleverly found his maiden speech for me, which I am sure he will not mind me quoting. He said

"The people of the Rhondda are not looking for handouts. People simply want a chance to stand on their own two feet, to build a decent life for their family and to retire in dignity. These are honourable aspirations, and my constituents still look to politicians to make a real difference by waging an all-out assault on the . . . causes of poverty."—[Official Report, 25 June 2001; Vol. 370, c. 427-428.]

That is what our policy is all about.

My hon. Friend alluded to the letter he received from the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions on the concentration of people on incapacity benefit in his constituency. I will come back to him to try to sort out which figures are right, but I have the same figures as my right hon. Friend—so that means a slight sigh of relief. As he said, they put the Rhondda 12th in the country in terms of the absolute number—not the percentage—of people on incapacity benefit.

The Rhondda was one of the first areas in which we launched a pathways to work pilot. The launch took place just over two years ago, at the end of October 2003. My hon. Friend quoted the statistics in one way. I prefer to say that there are more than 3,500 people in work who were not in work before we started the introduction of pathways to work pilot. Like him, I pay tribute to the staff, who work in a very committed way, as I was fortunate enough to see when I visited the constituency.

I shall comment on the elements of the programme that my hon. Friend said worked so well. I am interested to hear that he believes that the return to work credit is an important element of the pathways to work intervention. Clearly, want to learn what works best from the pilots as we roll out the pathways programme across the country. We are now committed—we have identified the resources—to ensuring that pathways to work is rolled out across the country by 2008, at least for new claimants and we hope increasingly for existing claimants, too. We are talking about an integral part of our programme, but we want to ensure that we get the best value for the massive investment of resources into that client group. I hope that my hon. Friend accepts that we must constantly reflect on what the most effective parts of the programme are.

I share my hon. Friend's passion about the condition management element of the programme. One thing we know from incapacity benefit claimants is that if there is no early intervention to provide support to individuals once they start on the trajectory or escalator of dependency on incapacity benefit, they quickly get locked in for the long term. We know that people who have been on the benefit for two years are more likely to die or retire without coming off it. Early condition management helps to deal with the early signs of mental illness and some of the musculoskeletal conditions that so often take people out of the labour market. That early intervention—getting access to the appropriate cognitive behavioural therapy or to a physiotherapist—is an essential component of the pathways to work intervention and has proved popular and effective in the pilots.

Equally important has been a role that my hon. Friend did not talk about in his contribution: the role of the job brokers, who link individuals' capabilities, competences and skills to the employers who need them. The job-broking role that we have defined has been important, as has the role of personal advisers in Jobcentre Plus offices. It is important that people have somebody to talk to and to work through all their problems with when they are feeling insecure and lack confidence in themselves, but want to take steps to get back into the labour market. If they build a good relationship with that personal adviser, that unlocks a lot of potential and helps to secure huge benefits.

My hon. Friend the Member for Caerphilly (Mr. David) and my hon. Friend the Member for Rhondda talked about the linking rules and trying to make the move from dependency on benefits into work easier. We have done a lot in that area. Later in this calendar year, we will introduce an automatic right to link back to one's previous level of incapacity benefit for anybody who comes off the benefit and into work over a two-year period. As we proposed in our Green Paper, we are working through what else we can do on issues such as housing benefit and council tax benefit to ensure a quick return to those benefits for those who try to shift themselves from benefit dependency, but for whom work does not work out. We are doing all we can to support individuals in making those difficult transitions in their lives and to ease their fears of poverty and destitution, which so often mean that they do not take the leap off benefits back into work.

I am pleased that pathways to work is consistently demonstrating an 8 per cent. increase in the number of people who come off benefit within the first six months of being on that benefit. We have trawled the world looking at what other countries are doing in relation to disabled people or people with a long-term illness who are locked into benefit dependency, and we believe that the combination of interventions that we have christened "pathways to work" is the most successful way that anybody has found of providing opportunities for work.

The whole of our welfare reform agenda, as set out in the Green Paper and symbolised by pathways to work, brings old Labour and new Labour very close together. The agenda is not about cutting benefits. It is entirely about making real the value that is at the heart of everything we believe—people's right to have the opportunity to work. We all know that work is the route out of poverty for those who can work. It provides a means by which one can support oneself and one's family and it provides one with a position in society that gives one self-esteem and a sense of value, purpose and belonging. It also provides important things, such as a network of friends, that enable people to participate and get the most out of their lives.

For far too long, people on incapacity benefit in particular have been left totally unsupported to spend their lives dependent on benefit, without seeing any hope for the future. As one comes to understand more about the sort of people who get locked into incapacity benefit, one of the interesting things that one observes is that four out of 10 people coming on to the benefit demonstrate a mental health condition, but six months, a year, or two years into their life on benefits, eight out of 10 say that they have a mental health condition, possibly in addition to other physical or mental conditions that prevent them from working. That makes sense—we all know that the longer someone is out of work, the more they lose confidence, so what starts off as mild anxiety can quickly become long-term depression.

Our reforms are not about cutting benefits but about providing opportunity. The Government have been successful in tackling unemployment. Now, we have to move our attention to providing intervention. Our strategy is both to prevent people moving on to incapacity benefit and to support people as they come off that benefit through programmes such as pathways to work.

I was pleased that my hon. Friend the Member for Rhondda mentioned the GP pilots, because they are part of the structure that we are trying to put in place to provide that early intervention. The first person that people go to see when they fall ill is their general practitioner. The general practitioner usually has only 10 minutes per person and the easiest thing is to write a sick note. We want to transform their culture and the culture of employers, families and individuals so that people see work as a route out of poverty into good health and well-being.