In the Midnight Hour

On Monday night, the House of Lords sat until 1.30 am pressing the government on its ‘emergency’ Jobseekers bill. I know we don’t keep normal hours in Westminster but even by our standards that is outrageous. As someone firmly in the grip of middle age, I freely confess this is way past my bedtime. I guess Ministers hoped that we’d all give up and go home if they timetabled it so late.

But Labour peers stayed up and kept at the government right to the bitter end, pressing them to explain how the Bill would work out in practice. For example: since the rules on sanctions all changed last October, how will claimants know what applies to them? If someone wants to appeal a sanction for failing to participate in a scheme, how will they make appeals fair when they could be heard months later? Will a single mum who missed a course last September because her child had a bug be expected to provide evidence of this when her appeal is finally heard? Is the Minister happy with the way sanctions operate? Is it common practice to require a single mum to go in for a ‘compliance interview’ on a Sunday – in fact, on Mother’s Day?

And much more.

We got a fair bit of information on the record, which will help us to hold the government to account over the months ahead. But we also revealed how much is still up in the air and how ministers are in denial about the chaos in the system they created.

We tabled a series of amendments designed to ensure that appeals are robust, timely and efficient and we pushed two issues to the vote very late at night.

The first was to establish whether those affected by this Bill will have adequate access to legal advice and help. These are people, remember, who could be eligible for legal aid until 1 April but who won’t be after that, when the Coalition government abolishes all legal aid for welfare benefits cases. So even though it’s not their fault that their cases could be heard after April, they will be penalised by the incompetence of the government.

The second vote came after a debate designed to strengthen the terms of reference for the independent review of sanctions, which was one of the two concessions the Labour team achieved when the Bill was in the Commons. (The other was to guarantee full appeal rights for claimants.) We wanted, with it, to get to the bottom of the targets issue, which nobody who read LabourList last week could have failed to notice; and if you want a flavour of the debate, read Lord Freud’s speech at 12.30 am in which he tries, ever more desperately, to explain the difference between norms and targets. But the government refused to accept our amendment so we pushed it to a vote at 12.54 am.

Despite Labour colleagues packing the red benches behind me during the debate, we lost both votes when the Tories and LibDems poured out of bars and into the division lobbies. We’ll be back however, to fight the next battle – although I can’t help hoping it starts a little earlier in the evening.

Baroness Maeve Sherlock is a member of Labour’s Work and Pension team in the Lords