I am pleased to have the opportunity to draw Parliament's attention to the appalling and systematic genocide taking place against the Karen, Shan and Karenni minority peoples in Burma. As far as I know, this is the first debate in Parliament devoted to that genocide. The atrocities in Burma must rank among the worst in the world; yet, unlike the similar situations in Kosovo and Bosnia, the international community and the media have failed dismally to give the slaughter the coverage that it deserves.

At a recent meeting set up by the British human rights group, the Jubilee campaign, I met representatives of the Karen movement. I talked to the president of the Karen National League and saw Kwe Htoo from the Committee for Internally Displaced Karen People. They both impressed on me the systematic extermination being inflicted on the Karen, Shan and Karenni ethnic minorities. They urgently appealed for the maximum international pressure to be put on Burma's military regime to stop the genocide, and for extensive aid to stem the growing humanitarian disaster among Burma's ethnic minorities.

With an estimated 7 million people, the Karen is Burma's largest ethnic minority. More than 300,000 Karen are internally displaced as a direct result of Burmese military action. Many of them hiding in the jungle, with little or no food or medicine, and they are normally killed on sight when discovered. For example, on 27 July 1999, at least 22 internally displaced Karen people, including a baby and two children aged two and eight, were killed by Burmese troops from Infantry Battalion 101 at Kawei and Hpway Plaw villages in Mergui district. Many of the victims were literally beaten to death with rice pounders, and 19-year-old Naw Nail Naw was gang-raped by the soldiers before she was murdered.

The overall population of internally displaced people in Burma is about 2 million, which means that it has some of the worst internal displacement in the world. There is probably no other nation like Burma; hundreds of thousands of internally displaced people have to hide in the jungle in the most primitive conditions, and they are hunted and slaughtered like animals. Since 1993, more than 30,000 Karen civilians have died as a result of Burmese military action. That is one example of the atrocities routinely inflicted on the Karen by the Burmese military.

These atrocities are regularly reported by organisations such as the Jubilee campaign, the Karen National League, the Karen Human Rights Group and the Committee for Internally Displaced Karen People. They include forced labour, the systematic destruction of villages, forced relocation, widespread and persistent torture and rape, and extrajudicial executions. That regime is the policy of the so-called State Peace and Development Council, which is an Orwellian change of name from what used to be called the State Law and Order Restoration Council—SLORC—which more correctly sums up the regime. The SPDC policy in response to any form of armed resistance by ethnic minorities is what the Burmese call draining the ocean so that the fish cannot swim. In other words, it seeks to undermine the opposition, attacking the civilian population until there is no possibility of their giving any support to opposition rebels.

That is the fundamental idea behind the stated policy of the regime—the four cuts policy—which was initiated by General Ne Win in the 1970s. The idea is to cut off supplies of food, funds, recruits and intelligence to ethnic resistance groups. The direct attacks on the civilian population, characterised by forced mass relocations, destruction of villages and the village economy, extrajudicial executions and completely unsustainable levels of forced labour, have become even more prevalent in the Burmese regime's policy since the 1990s.

In their acts of violence, Burmese troops make no distinction between adults and children. For example, Burmese soldiers killed two Karen children of five and eight in Ko Reh Hta, Karen state. On seeing the children in the forest, the soldiers simply slaughtered them with a knife. Saw Ta Plah Plah and Naw Mi Mu Wah, a little boy and girl aged three and two respectively, were left behind in their village when everyone else fled and it was shelled by Burmese troops from Division 77. The SPDC soldiers found them walking around crying and threw them into their burning house, where they were burnt to death. On 15 October 1998, eight-year-old Naw Mu Lay and two-year-old Naw Dah Dah were killed when Burmese soldiers fired grenades from a rocket launcher at their house.

The widespread rape of minority women by Burmese soldiers also extends to children and youth. On 17 December 1998, Naw Tha Paw, a 17-year-old Karen girl from Maw Kee village, was ambushed by SPDC troops from Light Infantry Battalion 361, raped, then shot or stabbed to death; 14-year-old Saw Maw Dah was with her when they were ambushed, and was shot and killed. On 13 October 1998, 15-year-old Naw Maw Nyunt was raped and killed by soldiers from Infantry Battalion 59.

The Burmese army uses both children and adults for forced labour. The youngest children, who are taken for road and railway building, are usually aged eight or 10, while the others, who are taken for heavy portering duties, carrying supplies for the Burmese army, are usually 12-year-old boys and 14-year-old girls. Conditions for porters are brutal, with female porters being regularly gang-raped at the end of the day. Porters are also used as human minesweepers triggering landmines with their own bodies. In one typical case, Naw Sah Mu, a 15-year-old girl from Papun district in Karen state, stepped on a landmine while portering and had her right leg blown off. Her 16-year-old friend, Zaw Zaw Oo, was hit in the face by the shrapnel and blinded. After they return home, many children die from diseases contracted while portering, combined with exhaustion. The International Labour Organisation has rightly condemned the SPDC's widespread use of slave labour as a "crime against humanity."

The United Nations Special Rapporteur, Mr. Rajsoomer Lallah QC, has acknowledged the systematic nature of the atrocities carried out against Burma's minorities. He submitted a report to the UN General Assembly, dated 10 September 1998, entitled "Situation of Human Rights in Myanmar." Paragraph 59 of the report reads:

The Special Rapporteur is deeply concerned about the serious human rights violations that continue to be submitted by the armed forces in ethnic minority areas. The violations include extra-judicial and arbitrary executions (not sparing women and children), rape, torture, inhuman treatment, forced labour and denial of freedom of movement. These violations have been so numerous and consistent over the past years as to suggest that they are not simply isolated or the acts or individual misbehaviour by middle and lower-rank officers but are rather the result of policy at the highest level entailing political and legal responsibility.

I emphasise the words "at the highest level". They are not just individual acts of barbarism by soldiers; they are condoned at the highest level of the regime.

The Jubilee campaign, Karen National League and the Committee for Internally Displaced Karen People have told me that what is happening in the Shan and Karenni ethnic minorities in Burma is genocide. What is the international legal definition of genocide? This is where the British Government comes into the picture, so it is important to get the definition right. The international legal definition of genocide is found in the 1948 convention on the prevention and punishment of the crime of genocide, which Burma has ratified. The legal definition of the term is contained in article 2. I hope that hon. Members will forgive me for reading it out, as it is important to get the legal position absolutely right so as to understand what the Government can and cannot do.

The convention, which we have all signed, states:

In the present Convention, genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:

(a) Killing members of the group;

(b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group:

(c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;

(d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;

(e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.

Some points must be noted in relation to the legal definition of genocide. First, genocide need not be an attempt to destroy an entire ethnic group. An attempt to destroy part of an ethnic group suffices. What is happening to the Karen, Karenni and Shan minorities in Burma falls within the scenarios set out in article 2 of the convention. There can be no doubt that it constitutes

(a) Killing members of the group;

(b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;

(c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part.

Only one of the five acts set out in article 2 need apply in order for the activities in question to be considered genocide by the international community, but in the case of Burma, at least three of them apply. International law does not require a minimum number of fatalities for a situation to be defined as genocide.

Without any shadow of a doubt, what the Burmese military regime is doing to the Karen, Shan and Karenni minority peoples clearly fits the international legal definition of genocide. Article 3 of the convention on genocide states:

The following acts shall be punishable:

(a) Genocide;

(b) Conspiracy to commit genocide;

(c) Direct and public incitement to commit genocide;

(d) Attempts to commit genocide;

(e) Complicity in genocide.

That is the international law, under which genocide is a very serious crime that requires an urgent global response. Sadly, such a response has not yet materialised.

I believe that the international community should swiftly and firmly press for prosecution of the Burmese military junta and its subordinates for genocide. An international tribunal should be set up by the United Nations Security Council to try the Burmese regime, just as was done in respect of the atrocities that occurred in Bosnia.

The British Government should use their permanent seat on the UNSC to lobby for the establishment of such a tribunal; that is why I am speaking directly to the Minister—and I am pleased to see him here. The Government should also lobby the UNSC for resolutions calling on the SPDC to end the genocide against the Karen, Shan and Karenni people and for global economic sanctions, including a universal arms embargo against Burma.

Would the action that I am suggesting the British Government should take be supported by democratic forces in Burma? The answer is that it would. Aung San Suu Kyi, the legitimate democratic leader of Burma, who is part of the National League for Democracy and who won the vast majority of votes in the 1990 elections, has repeatedly urged the international community to institute economic sanctions against her country. In a statement dated 6 September 1999, she said:

Burma is like a huge prison with a military dictatorship holding the keys and locking us away from freedom. Help us open the door of our prison. Economic sanctions are necessary for the fast democratisation of Burma. We would like the European Community, the United States and the rest of the world to be aware that sanctions help the movement for democracy in Burma. Unilateral sanctions are better than on sanctions at all.

That is the verdict of the democratically elected leader of Burma.

Foreign investment, I am sorry to say, has directly caused human rights violations. For example, whatever the intentions of the company may be, the Yetagun gas pipeline operated by the British company Premier Oil has fuelled the forced displacement of many Karen and Mon minority peoples by the Burmese army, because the pipeline runs through their areas. The Burma Campaign UK reports that since oil companies first invested in Burma, with plans for piping gas across the Tenasserim division into Thailand, the Burmese military have stepped up their activity in the area. In 1990, there were 1,750 armed soldiers in the investment area, but by 1998 this had increased to 11,230 and two artillery units. Villagers have been forcibly relocated, partly to secure the division for foreign investment. There is no compensation for any houses, crops or belongings stolen or burnt by the Burmese army.

The United States Government has already banned all new investment by US companies in Burma because of the country's appalling human rights record. When I refer to the United States, which is a close ally of ours, I look at the Minister and I hope the British Government will do the same. The establishment of an international tribunal on economic sanctions would give teeth to the calls on the Burmese regime to end its genocidal activities and demonstrate the resolve of the global community to end these horrific and systematic atrocities.

I would like to know whether the British Government are willing to lead attempts to end the genocide by taking the measures that I have suggested and encouraging other nations to follow suit. Even starting to talk about this issue in terms of genocide, even holding this debate, may put some small pressure on the regime in Burma, which could well save lives. It would be tragic and irresponsible if Governments continued to wallow in indecision and ignore the plight of the Shan and Karenni peoples as they are systematically treated in this way. If there is one lesson that the world ought to have learned from the tragedies of the 20th century, it is that the only way to deter genocide is to respond to it swiftly and firmly. If we do not, this century may prove to be even bloodier that the previous one.

I want to make one last comment. We owe a debt as a nation to the Karen people. I took Field Marshal Viscount Slim's book "Defeat into Victory" out of the Library. In it, he writes about the fighting in Burma during the Second World War. He says that as the Japanese drew south in their retreat,

their way led them through the country of the Karens, a race which had remained staunchly loyal to us even in the blackest days of the Japanese occupation, and had suffered accordingly. Over a long period, in preparation for this day, we had organised a secret force, the Karen Guerrillas, based on ex-soldiers of the Burma Army for whom British officers and arms had been parachuted into the hills. It was not at all difficult to get the Karens to rise against the hated Japanese; the problem was to restrain them from rising too soon. But now the time had come, and I gave the word, "Up the Karens!".

Winston Churchill, in a debate in this House on 5 November 1947 said:

in the infliction of vengeance upon the loyal Burmese—the Burmese who were patriotically fighting with British and Indian troops to defend the soil of Burma from Japanese conquerors—great cruelties were perpetrated on those men, because they had helped us to resist the Japanese.

He said later in his speech:

Burma is an appendage of India and is likely to reproduce, though, of course, on a far smaller scale, the horrors and disasters which have overspread her great neighbour and which should ever haunt the consciences of the principal actors in this tragedy. All loyalties have been discarded and rebuffed; all faithful service has been forgotten and brushed aside. These is no assurance that the power of the new Government will be sufficient to maintain internal order: or, I might add, national independence…We stand on the threshold of another scene of misery and ruin …—[Official Report, 5 November 1947; Vol. 443, c.1848-52.]

That was 53 years ago. Nothing has changed. Misery and ruin go on under our noses in that sad country.

I look forward to the Minister giving us some hope. I spent yesterday morning thinking about this debate, after which I dealt with constituency correspondence. It contained the usual flood of small cases about the Child Support Agency and planning. Although those are important matters to our constituents, their problems pale into insignificance when we consider that hundreds of thousands of people on this planet are being moved from their homes and thousands are being murdered. Surely the House of Commons, of all places, has a moral responsibility to lead the court of world opinion and do something about the Burmese regime.

I endorse every word of the speech made by the hon. Member for Gainsborough (Mr. Leigh). I am delighted that he obtained the debate. It is pleasing to know that hon. Members on both sides of the Chamber will reinforce his points.

I shall start where the hon. Gentleman left off, with a case that relates to Field Marshal Slim's involvement in Burma. My interest in that country began with a small constituency matter. A constituent came to see me soon after I was elected in 1992 and told me his story. He fought for the British Army and had the opportunity after the war to enter Britain as a British citizen. He chose to return to his people, the Karens, to help them build their lives. Sadly, they have not been able to build their lives. Bruce Humphrey Taylor eventually came to this country and spent 50 years working here until his death last year. He came to see me about how to get his great niece out of a United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees camp on the Thai-Burmese border. That is when I learned about the atrocities to which the hon. Member for Gainsborough referred.

The atrocities are well documented. There is no doubt about the credibility of the evidence that will be presented to the House today. It is sad that a nation that is so far away and so remote from our considerations is forgotten. Burma has the most corrupt regime on the planet. We can pluck out examples of problems in other countries, but where else is there such systematic use of forced labour, destruction of villages and killing of people?

I shall refer to the atrocities in the context of the hon. Gentleman's reference to the United Nations convention on human rights to which, ironically, as he said, Burma is a signatory. An independent report published by the Karen Human Rights Group in 1998 entitled "Wholesale Destruction" has been widely circulated around the world, but no one from the Burmese regime has challenged one word of its content. The section on the destruction of villages sets out the activities of the State Law and Order Restoration Council. SLORC launched a campaign in many parts of Burma forcibly to move or wipe out all rural villages that were not under the direct physical control of an army camp.

The issue of forced of labour is also well documented. Groups of people have been forced to build roads and grow food for the army—not for the sake of the nation's infrastructure, but to improve the wretched army's ability to terrorise them. The evidence is overwhelming. One day we shall have the facility to show photographs during our debates. Photographs exist that would make right hon. and hon. Members' blood curdle—of people being burnt alive, shot, maimed and tortured by that wretched regime.

To what degree is the regime responsible? The hon. Member for Gainsborough said that he presumed that the instructions came from the highest authority. I believe that it is now clear that that is so. A book published towards the end of last year, "Voice of a Hungry Nation", has a fascinating appendix 6, which contains facsimiles of military orders. One, requiring paddy cultivation, is an invitation to the head man of a village.

Regarding the above, we want to discuss the agricultural cultivation situation with you, so everyone must come to the following meeting.

(To: pay back left over loans given for crops)

That refers to crops that people are forced to grow to sell to the regime. If they want to feed themselves they must buy them back at a much higher price. There are documents about provision of food to the army and about porter duty for the army. A minor military instruction to send porters states:

Regarding the above matter, in relation to the provision of military operations servants, the Village Tract Head must arrange for the sending of four military operations servants as outlined below, without fail.

Those are fairly blunt military instructions. They do not state directly what will happen to the people if they fail to comply, but the truth becomes clear as one reads on. A document about the "matter of voluntary labor contribution to construct a dam" states that

Ten people must come with tools for voluntary labor

to build the dam. Those people must report to a military camp. Another document is identified as an order to relocate. No one relocates voluntarily. That is clear military evidence of the beginnings of the destruction of villages. The document states:

An order has been issued to—

a village, the name of which has been deliberately deleted—

to vacate the place and move

to another village

or to any other place where the villagers have relatives…After the date of issue of this order, it is warned that the Army will go around clearing the area and should any village or small huts in the paddy fields be found still standing, they will all be dismantled and destroyed.

That is an acknowledgement by the regime that it is engaged in destroying people's homes. This country was up in arms when Ian Smith tried to do the same thing on the borders of what was then Rhodesia. Why are we not up in arms now when the exact same thing is happening in Burma?

The ultimate military order in the selection reads as follows:

Subject: Notification. As has come to light, tracts, elders and villagers of the Mehpletdoe region have all heard the KNU's notice that it will plant land mines 4 ft 6 in from the edges of roads to be set off by its enemies. While we don't intend to further increase the problems of the villagers—

joke—

we also hereby inform our village parents, brothers and sisters that we will also start to do the same thing. We have great love for you all. We cannot protect you all.

(1) We will start to lay mines and ambush as of 20/2/99.

(2) Whatever place/village we enter, absolutely don't run away.

(3) We won't accept responsibility for anyone who runs.

Those military orders provide unambiguous evidence of the approach that is being adopted and such documents provide evidence that should be submitted to the United Nations Commission on Human Rights.

There is no doubt that genocide is being committed by that regime. The destruction of villages, forced labour and murder is being authorised at the highest level. The problem is that Burma is a long way away. Television cameras go to Rangoon and, quite rightly, give coverage to the bravery of Aung San Suu Kyi, who was elected as the democratic leader of the Burmese nation, but the television cameras do not go into the remote jungles and see what is happening there, where 30,000 people have been killed in a short time, many of them in the most barbaric way.

We have a responsibility to do something, not least because British companies are seeking to invest there. To be fair to British industry, most companies have heeded the Government's warning that further investment is unacceptable. Not only has Premier Oil ignored the advice of the British Government, but its very acts have exacerbated the situation. To be fair, Britain has played a small part in trying to bring about democracy and justice in Burma, but much more needs to be done. We need to raise the matter robustly in the United Nations and the European Union. We have a serious problem with foreign policy issues and the EU. For example, if the French decide not to play ball because they have oil interests in a country, that presents difficulties for Britain as a member of the EU, but we must take a much more robust position. Small countries, such as Norway, are doing more than Britain to re-establish human rights and democracy in Burma.

I know that my hon. Friend the Minister is moved by the issues that have been raised today. I know that our good friend, the late Derek Fatchett, had started to move the debate on, and I know that the Minister of State, Foreign and Commonwealth Office, my hon. Friend the Member for Leeds, West (Mr. Battle), who is in the far east at the moment, is also very keen to see some positive action taken. One thing that the House can do is show unity of purpose and collectively asks the Government to do all that they can to bring this terrible situation to the attention of the world. I hope that the media will take this debate seriously and that the Government will use the unity of purpose in the House at least to begin to put more pressure on the authorities in the United Nations and the European Union. In memory of the thousands of people who have been killed, we must do everything that we can to restore democracy in that country.

I am happy to follow the hon. Member for Ellesmere Port and Neston (Mr. Miller). Both he and the hon. Member for Gainsborough (Mr. Leigh) have painted a tragic picture of what has been going on in Burma. My own interest, like that of others, stems partly from wartime understanding, because a number of constituents and friends in Belfast served in Burma, and one of my cousins' husband was a Japanese prisoner of war through serving in Burma. More recently, I have had contact with a young Burmese student in the Belfast Bible college. However, most of the information that I have gained has come from the campaigning bodies that seek to remind us all that one of the greatest tragedies in the world continues in Burma.

A recent report reminds me that although, as Christians and because of our British connection with the Karen and Karenni people, we have emphasised their lot, the reality is that different groups throughout Burma are affected, not only the Shan and the Mon, but the Rohingya and others. It is a desperate situation when a so-called Government seeking to govern a country terrorise and persecute their own people.

Lest some think that we are dealing only with Christian people, a report that I received today from a joint Australian-United Kingdom Christian Solidarity mission to Burma and Thailand in October 1999 makes solemn reading. The bulk of the people that the mission met were Buddhists, and the report says that it may have been because most of the Christians have already been displaced. It is a humanitarian issue of the greatest moment. It is not a religious or sectarian conflict, but a Government seeking to force their views on people by terror.

My colleagues painted the picture on the ground; I want to probe some of the issues. Although Governments have signed accords and agreements, quite often, as in Burma, they do not implement them. One problem that permeates the situation today is European Union co-operation. What representations has the Minister made to his European colleagues concerning the EU's participation in Association of South-East Asian Nations meetings at which Burma is present? I understand that the Government has taken a firm line on that, but if the Burmese Government are seeking to make their own citizens outcasts, the world at large should make them outcasts until they return to democratic practices.

There are some who claim that the Karen and Karenni are seeking to be independent. I am not convinced that that is true. They want to be able to live in their own country, perhaps as part of a proper democratic Burmese society. Is the European Union prepared to respond to Aung San Suu Kyi's views that economic sanctions should be imposed on Burma by ending all links—tourism, trade or investment by European companies—between the European Union and Burma? People will say immediately that that will put pressure on the poorest, but the harsh reality is that the State Law and Order Restoration Council, or the State Peace and Development Council—SLORC or the SPDC; it changes its initials to suit different situations— already imposes such sanctions on its own people.

For two years, the people who have been displaced and forced to live in the jungle have managed to survive. However, because of a severe drought in 1998 and the campaign by the San Tha Lone, or SSS—a particularly vicious group of terrorist soldiers, who ravage and burn villages—there is no longer sufficient food, even in the countryside, for people to exist on. It is a question not of our penalising those people, but of our starting to put pressure on those who are doing the levelling. I think that I use that term correctly: the Minister of Education in the Burmese Government has very little education, so he spends his time closing the universities in Burma. That is a form of levelling with which I do not agree, as I would prefer to level upwards, rather than downwards.

The time has come for the international community to put pressure on the Burmese authorities. I appreciate the problems faced by the Government in their dealings with the Burmese authorities. I know that the Burmese authorities can be arrogant and that, at times, they are not prepared even to answer the phone and discuss the issues with our representatives. However, if they take that line, we should mobilise international opinion to keep up the pressure on them. The issue has been given some emphasis in the European Union and in the United States, but there is a case for asking our Japanese allies to start acting effectively. The Japanese—willingly, unwillingly or simply in the natural desire to foster trade in the interests of their own people—are giving support to the Burmese Government that is keeping them going.

The concept of economic sanctions is important, and I urge the Government to maintain pressure not only on British companies, which, by and large, have abided by that concept, but also on their European counterparts. What discussions have been held with the International Monetary Fund about financial aid packages, and are they linked with reforms in Burma? There have been suggestions that this nation has moved away from its ethical foreign policy; I would not like to think that that was the case. As well as dealing with financial and material needs, the IMF should consider the ethical issues relating to policies that are impoverishing many people.

The hon. Member for Ellesmere Port and Neston referred to the campaign against landmines. People who have spoken to us about the burning of villages do not mean only the torching of a row of terraced houses; they are talking about people going from one house to another, destroying them deliberately—and destroying many of the people as well. The Burmese authorities will say that they have to take such strong action because the liberation army of the Karen people is fighting them and that it is a war of independence. I would put it in another way: it is a war of protection. In one area of Burma, about 25,000 Burmese soldiers are operating in four districts, where approximately 1,000 members of the liberation army are operating to protect their people against butchery by soldiers on behalf of a disreputable Government. I support my colleagues in bringing the issue before Parliament, the nation and the world, and saying that we stand by a persecuted people. They are persecuted simply because they face a totalitarian regime that is not prepared to play by the rules.

First, I congratulate the hon. Member for Gainsborough (Mr. Leigh), not only on securing the debate, but on his presentation of the case. He made an extremely good speech and is right to say that we have been remiss in not having this debate and not bringing the issues to Parliament's attention before.

I also welcome the speech by the hon. Member for Ellesmere Port and Neston (Mr. Miller), who spoke alarmingly about some of the military objectives. I had not heard about those before, and they shocked me greatly. The hon. Member for Belfast, South (Rev. Martin Smyth) asked the Minister some important questions about sanctions, and I hope that he will answer those directly.

I want to place on record the thanks that we all owe to the work of the Burma Campaign UK and the Burma Action Group UK, which consistently raise important issues. I have to confess that, unlike the previous three speakers, I am not an expert on the matter; it is very much new to me. I have spent the past 48 hours preparing for the debate and have been appalled to read about what has been taking place in Burma. Those groups have been extremely helpful in providing information, as have the speeches that we have just heard.

Some of the minorities that we are discussing have been fighting for independence for almost 50 years, mostly against the backdrop of a bloody civil war with a military regime. It is appropriate that we look back at the role of the Karen people, who fought bravely alongside the British in Asia during the Second World War. The Karen people assumed that they would get British assistance in the foundation of an independent state in return for their courage and actions. We have heard a number of quotes from Viscount Slim, and I will add to them: he described the Karen people as "far from fair-weather friends". However, instead of getting an independent state, which they might have expected, the Karen people, as well as other ethnic minorities, have been blatantly abused by the Burmese Government ever since.

Sadly, it is an everyday occurrence for the Karen people, as well as many other minorities, to work in forced labour camps, often for little or no pay. Worse than that, as the International Labour Organisation has pointed out, is the fact that a significant proportion of those workers are children, the elderly and disabled people. In addition, the forced labour is often in opium fields, so workers are contributing to the appallingly high heroin production in that part of the world. Such atrocities are deplorable. Quite rightly, the ILO—an agency of the United Nations—passed a virtually unprecedented resolution expelling Burma from that organisation last June.

Unfortunately, the problems do not end with forced labour. As we have heard, the Burmese Government has targeted ethnic minorities as political enemies by birth. They are constantly tortured, imprisoned, murdered and harassed by that Government. Nearly 2,000 people are imprisoned in Burma solely because of their ethnicity. The Government can get away with that, because the shadow of a judicial system that exists is not independent from the executive military junta, and almost no one receives a fair trial—especially not those from ethnic minorities.

The United Nations estimates that between 300,000 and 400,000 Burmese refugees have fled into neighbouring countries, specifically India and Thailand. Because of political affiliations there, Thailand and India find it hard to recognise those individuals as refugees. Will it be possible to make representations to India and Thailand to see what they can do to assist those refugees?

In 1990, the military Government agreed to hold democratic elections, and 82 per cent. of the seats in Parliament were won by the National League for Democracy. The fact that Burma was holding elections was seen as a promising development. However, that elected Parliament was never allowed to convene; worse than that, 78 of its Members were jailed by the Burmese Government, and two of them died during their imprisonment. Six students who took part in that election and supported the National League for Democracy await execution.

There has been a massive build-up of the military arsenal in the area and, as John Jackson of the Burma Campaign UK says, nearly 40 per cent. of Burma's gross domestic product is spent on the military. The country's active military numbers around 400.000, a figure that is double that of 20 years ago, despite the fact that Burma has no real external enemies in that part of Asia. With that spending increase, health, education and social security have all been denied to people there in the past few years. John Jackson says that spending on health and social security has dropped below 5 per cent., and education below 10 per cent., while defence remains at around 40 per cent. of GDP.

It is important to look at some of the conditions to which those policies are leading. As the United States Central Intelligence Agency has said, life expectancy at birth is only 54 years, and infant mortality stands at 76 deaths for every 1,000 born, which is higher than in Vietnam and Thailand combined. Schools have been closed down for years on end and, with the exception of the two universities in Rangoon, no higher education is available.

I want to clarify that the statistics that the hon. Gentleman is citing refer to the whole of Burma, and that they include the privileged people who are supported by the regime. The statistics in the ethnic minority areas are substantially worse than the bad statistics that he has quoted.

The hon. Gentleman makes an important point. The picture is much worse if it is narrowed down to the ethnic minorities. The education figures are dramatically reduced when they are considered for the ethnic minorities alone.

According to the 1948 convention on the prevention and punishment of the crime of genocide, in my judgment, the Burmese Government's campaign against minorities falls within the legal guideline for genocide. I agree with the hon. Member for Gainsborough that the evidence for genocide is compelling. To date, the Government has at least acknowledged that, and it is true that the Minister of State, Foreign and Commonwealth Office, the hon. Member for Leeds, West (Mr. Battle) has sent some positive messages on the matter, but the Government has so far merely noted the concerns rather than taken positive action. In opposition, the Labour party urged the Conservative Government to support a Danish-led European sanctions campaign. I want the Minister to acknowledge that the Government has perhaps not been as robust as they could have been in fulfilling their pre-election promises to impose investment sanctions.

Sanctions are never an easy option, and there are many legal issues that need to be addressed. The Government originally claimed that they could not impose sanctions against Burma because of article 73(g) of the treaty of Rome, which forbids any EU member state to impose unilateral trade sanctions separately from the Union. A number of us are calling for, not trade, but investment sanctions, which are protected under article 60.2 of the treaty of Rome, provided that there are serious political reasons and the situation is urgent. The Government and the European Commission can claim that, because the situation has been going on for such an extended period, the matter is not urgent, but it is my belief that genocide and such extensive human rights violations, no matter how long they have been going on, remain an urgent matter. Investment sanctions could be imposed and would be protected under article 60.2.

It is often argued that such sanctions hurt those most in need. However, only the upper class and the Government benefit directly from investment. It pays for their extravagant life style and for the intense military build-up. As the hon. Member for Gainsborough said, even the leader of the National League for Democracy said that such sanctions would do good. She said that the real profits from investments

do not go to the people of Burma. It is all concentrated in the hands of foreign investors or privileged people…The poor people will not suffer because of a boycott.

Obviously, the evidence points in the direction of the greater use of sanctions. The chronic abuse of human rights of the minorities of Burma, as well as the horrid overall state of affairs, requires action by the Government. Amnesty International, the National League for Democracy, the United States of America and others all endorse investment sanctions on Burma. The United States has imposed such sanctions since 1997. The matter is urgent and I hope that the Minister will set out a plan of action so that we can do more to help the people about whom we have heard this morning.

We should be grateful to my hon. Friend the Member for Gainsborough (Mr. Leigh) for introducing the debate. This is the first time that the issue has been debated in the House of Commons. I am sure that the Minister will respond aptly to the heart-rending stories and pleas from hon. Members of all parties about a forgotten act of genocide that has continued for more than 52 years. I hope that, like me, he will acknowledge the great role that has been played by Wilfred Wong of the Jubilee campaign and Dirk Patterson of Christian Solidarity, who have been bringing the act of genocide to the attention of Members of Parliament for some time. We are grateful to them for their work.

Burma was a British colony. It was part of British India until 1948, when it became independent from the Commonwealth. From 1964, it was a one-party state ruled by the Burma Socialist Programme party under General Nei Win, which was allied closely to the armed forces. In 1988, an economic collapse provoked popular unrest that threatened the position of the BSPP. Although Nei Win retired officially, he retained influence behind the scenes. At first, the unrest was put down with force, with massacres of opposition demonstrators as the military attempted to maintain its position. Since then, the country has remained in a parlous state.

Since independence, Burma has been in a state of civil war and the Burmese military has indiscriminately abused the human rights of ethnic minorities—whether they be insurgents or civilians—with widespread disappearances, extrajudical killings and torture, as well as forced labour and relocation. The points that were made by the hon. Members for Ellesmere Port and Neston (Mr. Miller), for Belfast, South (Rev. Martin Smyth) and for Winchester (Mr. Oaten) reflect a great consensus among the parties in our attitude towards the regime in Burma and what is happening to the people of that country.

The Karen people are the largest minority group in Burma, with 7 million or more people. In the past fortnight, I have met four of their representatives. They were quietly spoken and brought with them tales of horror, deprivation, murder and rape. No one could fail to have been moved by their testimony. The Karen are facing genocide at the hands of the Burmese army. Since 1993, more than 30,000 Karen civilians have died as a result of Burmese military action. Many have died of starvation and illnesses resulting from being displaced. Since 1995, the slaughter has intensified, as more extensive parts of Karen territory have come under Burmese military control. In fact, since the 1990s, the Burmese military has delilberately targeted civilians during military operations.

There are more than 300,000 internally displaced Karen people in Burma. That figure comes from the Committee for Internally Displaced Karen People, a representative of which has met me and my hon. Friends in the past 10 days. Many of those people are hiding from the Burmese army in the jungles, with little or no food and water. They are shot on sight. One of the representatives who saw me spoke perfect English. I asked him where he learned English and he replied, "I studied in the jungle. I taught myself so I could communicate." The fact that civilians are shot on sight makes Burma almost unique. There is probably no other country in the world where so many civilians are forced to hide in the jungle and are slaughtered like animals when they are found.

Counting other ethnic groups as well as the Karen, the total population of internally displaced people in the region is about 2 million—one of the highest in the world. There are about 120,000 Karen refugees in Thailand. They have been forced to flee by the atrocities of the Burmese army. The Karen, Karenni and Shan minorities are experiencing all the privations that have been described by other hon. Members, such as the systematic destruction of their villages, crops and food stores, and forcible relocation to sites of forced labour without pay or food. Those who flee the relocations are hunted down by the Burmese troops and shot on sight.

Extrajudicial executions are widespread and frequent, and the victims include women, children, babies and pregnant women. The rape of minority women is extensive. We discussed the role of women in development in this Chamber during the debate on the International Development Committee's first-class report. We know that the Serbs used rape against Bosnian Muslims as part of their ethnic cleansing policies. That has received much publicity, but not much has been said in the media about the systematic rape by the Burmese army of the women of ethnic minorities in that region.

Those atrocities have been widely documented by human rights organisations, such as the Karen Human Rights Group and EarthRights International, but they have not been extensively reported in the press. I do not believe that the average person in the street would think of Burma if asked to name the regions of the world in which the worst atrocities have been perpetrated. I hope that this debate will raise the profile of what is being done in that part of the world. It gives the Minister the opportunity to make some practical suggestions on how to proceed.

I do not want to shock anyone, but some examples of the atrocities that have been perpetrated should be put on record. The examples were given to EarthRights International by the villagers. One witness said:

In my village, there were two spinsters…The soldiers came to the house…and asked the spinsters to show them the way to a military camp. The woman staying in the house saw them talking to the soldiers and saw the spinsters go with the soldiers. The next time the villagers saw them, they were dead and lying face down on the ground. The soldiers raped and killed them. When we found them, they were lying down on the ground without any clothes on below their waists. One of the women's throats had been cut; the other had been shot.

Another witness said:

In my village, the soldiers did not try to marry with the women, but they went to the houses to sleep with the women. They did not ask. They went to sleep with them. The soldiers would go quietly to sleep with the women without asking the permission of the owner of the houses where the women lived. The girls would scream. It happened every time the soldiers came to the village. When the soldiers were in the village, they cried every night.

The Minister has a difficult task. He has to satisfy all parties in this Chamber that he will take action. There have been developments involving the Government and the European Union. I hope that he will not only answer the questions raised by the hon. Members but tell us, especially in the light of his responsibilities, what is happening at European level. We know that the European Union has observed a package of sanctions against Burma since 1996. That was set out as a common position on 28 October 1996, amended by a Council decision in October 1998 and then extended. What have those sanctions achieved? Does he have evidence that sanctions have worked in any way, shape or form, or does he believe, as I do, that it is time to review what is happening, and consider whether another strategy might be more effective?

Aid has been supplied to Burma through non-governmental organisations. I hope that the Minister will agree that there is no point in supplying aid through a Government organisation in this country. Nongovernmental organisations provide the sensible route. It appears that only limited amounts have been given to Burma, or any of the minorities, in the form of emergency assistance, including relief for flood victims—only £272,000 in 1998 and a small additional amount for a health project run by World Vision.

I hope that the Minister will tell us what further aid has been provided. Does he plan to discuss the question of aid for the region with his colleagues in the Department for International Development?

I want the hon. Lady to be absolutely clear about sanctions, as it is important to express a unified position. Is she saying that the official Opposition want to strengthen sanctions, as we did against South Africa? Would she support the channelling of aid through bordering countries to ethnic minority groups, which Norway, for example, is doing?

I believe that there is no consensus on economic sanctions in the EU or the UN Security Council. I am asking the Minister, who has access to the information, to provide an assessment of what those sanctions have achieved. What, in his judgment, would be the next step? Clearly, the sanctions regime is having little effect.

I am especially keen on the delivery of aid through NGOs. In previous debates, I have called for Government aid to Zimbabwe to be stopped and channelled through non-governmental organisations so that it reaches those who are most in need. What aid and resources have been delivered to Burma, and what future plans exist?

I want to link the regime to the international criminal court, on which the Government has hung their hat. We have talked about that a great deal and are looking forward to seeing legislation on it. Will the court's powers cover the Burmese regime? What stage has the legislation reached? What are our plans for that international institution? The perpetrators of genocide in Burma could be prime candidates to be hauled before an international criminal court.

I am grateful to my hon. Friend, but does she agree that it will take time to establish the court? We need not wait for it to be in place. Procedures exist to deal with the problem.

My hon. Friend is right. I would not want to delay the process of passing judgment on the perpetrators of such crimes, but I want to take this opportunity to press the Minister on legislation to establish the international criminal court. That has been much promised and much vaunted, but so far we have had only hot air and warm words.

There is a common purpose among us. We all want to know what the United Kingdom can do to restore the rule of law and to encourage the development of a benign Government and the restoration of civil society in Burma. Everyone who spoke made a great contribution to developing the case against the regime. If the debate moves the process forward, it will have been worthwhile. I hope that the Minister will reassure us and I look forward to hearing what he has to say.

I am enormously grateful to the hon. Member for Gainsborough (Mr. Leigh) for giving us a unique opportunity to debate the appalling situation that faces the Karen and other Burmese ethnic minorities. The issue rightly continues to be of great concern to the House and the other place. I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Ellesmere Port and Neston (Mr. Miller), the hon. Member for Belfast, South (Rev. Martin Smyth) and the Front-Bench spokesmen, the hon. Members for Winchester (Mr. Oaten) and for Chesham and Amersham (Mrs. Gillan), for their contributions. I have not attended many debates in the House on which there has been such unanimity. Those who spoke, especially the hon. Members for Gainsborough and for Belfast, South and my hon. Friend the Member for Ellesmere Port and Neston, have a long and close interest in the matter.

Her Majesty's Government and I share the outrage expressed by many at the dreadful human rights abuses in Burma. The Burmese regime's brutal policies, including torture, rape, forced labour, forced relocations and arbitrary executions, towards ethnic minorities have led to the exodus of hundreds of thousands of people across Burma's borders into neighbouring countries.

We understand that there are 22,000 Burmese refugees in Bangladesh and, officially, 105,000 mostly Karen and Karenni in camps near the border in Thailand. Thousands of other refugees are either internally displaced in Burma or living illegally in Thailand outside the refugee camps. The appalling suffering of ethnic minorities in Burma is a symptom of a wider malaise—the subjugation of a nation by military despots who continue to ignore the people's democratic choice. While that dreadful state of affairs lasts, we shall give the regime no respite. In all the international forums, on every possible occasion, we shall continue to press it to move forward. It can expect no relaxation of the pressure and measures that have been adopted for as long as it holds out against political and economic reform.

Later, I shall explain what we are doing in greater detail, but first I should like to respond to the concerns expressed by the hon. Member for Chesham and Amersham and describe how we are helping the ethnic minorities and refugees. We use a variety of channels; we are providing direct British humanitarian assistance, and working closely with neighbouring countries on repatriation issues and safeguarding the security of refugees. The activities of our embassies in Rangoon and Bangkok are another channel of support. I pay tribute to our ambassador, John Jenkins, and to his small team in Rangoon for their dedication and perseverance in trying and difficult circumstances.

British humanitarian assistance delivers vital relief to the region. Our assistance to organisations working on the ground in Burma targets some of the poorest and most vulnerable groups. Since 1996, we have provided more than £1 million in humanitarian aid for Burmese refugees in neighbouring countries. This year alone, we have allocated £270,000 to support the excellent work of the Burma Border Consortium in providing humanitarian assistance to refugee camps in Thailand. With our EU partners, we have also supported work in repatriating and resettling Rohingya refugees from Bangladesh to Burma and ensuring their protection on arrival. We are always open to suggestions and other workable ideas on how we can alleviate the suffering of ordinary Burmese people. The hon. Member for Gainsborough told the House about his meetings with affected parties. The Minister of State, Foreign and Commonwealth Office, my hon. Friend the Member for Leeds, West (Mr. Battle), also has such experience, as, before his sad demise, did my colleague Derek Fatchett.

The large number of refugees in Thailand places a considerable burden on that country. Occasionally, the Thai authorities crack down on illegal economic migrants, a large number of whom are Burmese. We have sought and received assurances from the Thai authorities that there will be no forced repatriations of refugees. Since 1998, when the UNHCR established field offices in Thailand, there has been no evidence of such repatriations. We shall continue to pay close attention to this sensitive issue.

I am most grateful to the Minister for the way in which he is treating the debate and for his responses so far. Will he clarify one point? He has put into the region aid of some £270,000 this year and £1 million since 1996. In the light of the size of the problem, will he undertake to review that amount and to consider whether it can be revised upwards? It is a small sum and I hope that he will perceive from this debate the need for more resources to be put into the area, which is of great fragility. Will he undertake to review the amount spent on humanitarian aid, bearing in mind the number of requests that he will undoubtedly have received?

I can tell the hon. Lady and all hon. Members that my hon. Friend the Minister of State will consider all the points that have been made. We constantly monitor the situation and we will continue to do so.

Refugees must enjoy adequate security. The 1998 attacks on Wangka and Mawker refugee camps in Thailand by a splinter Karen group highlighted the acute dangers faced by Burmese refugees there. While we welcome the important role played by the Thai authorities in providing shelter for refugees, we have urged them to ensure that the camps receive adequate protection. The British embassy in Bangkok regularly visits the camps to monitor the situation. We fully support the role of UN agencies in providing protection for the Rohingya refugees in northern Rakhine State. Our ambassador travelled to the state last month to see the situation for himself. Embassy staff in Rangoon regularly monitor the work of the UN and international NGOs operating in difficult circumstances.

The plight of Burmese ethnic minorities flows from the wider political and human rights situation in Burma, which remains, as we have heard this morning, appalling. Human rights violations by the regime are among the worst in the world. In addition to the atrocities that I have mentioned, Amnesty International and the International Committee of the Red Cross estimate that there are 1,500 political prisoners in Burma. There is no democracy there, despite democratic elections in 1990.

Our policy on Burma is to press the regime to improve its human rights record and to enter into a substantive dialogue with the National League for Democracy, which was the overwhelming victor in the 1990 election, as well as with ethnic minority leaders, to find a political solution to the country's problems. On Wednesday, my hon. Friend the Minister of State will meet Dr. Sen Win, the leader of the pro-democracy movement in Burma. Our policy recognises the need to sustain the Burmese opposition and to resist the regime's efforts to wear down the international resistance to its undemocratic rule. We are determined to keep up pressure on Burma on every front, bilaterally, regionally and multinationally, in whatever forum is available.

Burma's record is an affront to the United Nations principles that it has undertaken to uphold. My hon. Friend the Member for Ellesmere Port and Neston and the hon. Member for Belfast, South asked what we were doing with our EU partners. We are working with them on a strongly worded draft resolution to be adopted at the UN Commission on Human Rights in the coming weeks. The resolution catalogues the widespread human rights violations that have resulted in the displacement of people—particularly ethnic minorities. We cosponsored a similar resolution at the United Nations General Assembly in November. It is the responsibility of the Burmese Government to respect their obligations and implement United Nations resolutions swiftly and in full. We shall maintain all pressure to ensure that they do so.

We are always ready to look for ways to inject momentum into the engagement of the United Nations with Burma. I was therefore delighted to learn this morning of the appointment of Razali Ismail as the UN Secretary-General's new special representative to Burma. Mr. Razali brings to the job a wealth of UN experience, having previously been Malaysia's permanent representative in New York. I am sure that he will carry out his role with dynamism and creativity and I am certain that Foreign Office Ministers will seek to meet him at the earliest opportunity to pass on the concerns of the Government and Members of Parliament.

As the hon. Member for Winchester said, the United Kingdom led the charge at the governing body of the International Labour Organisation in condemnation of Burma. The regime has consistently ignored the ILO's recommendations on stopping forced labour. However, I point out that it has not been expelled from the organisation. In an unprecedented move, the organisation has arranged a discussion for its June 2000 conference, which could result in an appeal to its other 174 member states to review their relationship with Burma, and to take appropriate measures to ensure that it

cannot take advantage of such relations to perpetuate or extend the system of forced compulsory labour

practised against the country's citizens. It will be the first time that such steps have been taken against an ILO member and that will be implicit recognition that Burma's behaviour in this respect is worse than any other labour issue anywhere. We are pressing hard with our EU partners to strengthen the common position on Burma when it is renewed later this month.

We have withdrawn all financial support for trade missions to Burma and we do not encourage British companies to trade or invest there; nor do we encourage tourism. After all, Burmese democratic leaders do not think that that is appropriate. We maintain very close contacts with pro-democracy groups in Burma including Mrs. Aung San Suu Kyi, the general secretary of the NLD. Embassy officials in Rangoon and visiting officials frequently meet with her and other members of the NLD. We all value this important contact. Our thoughts are with her at this difficult time, the first anniversary of her husband's tragic death. Were it not for the international support that she and her colleagues receive, they would probably have been locked away long ago.

The Government shares fully the concerns that the hon. Member for Gainsborough and other hon. Members have expressed today, about the plight of the Karen and other ethnic minority refugees in Burma. We are deeply disturbed by the continued violation of human rights by the military regime. The Government are second to none in bringing international pressure to bear on that regime to make it mend its ways. The regime has a duty to its people to implement democratic reform. The plight of the Burmese people will remain high on the list of the Government's priorities until such time as we are able, as a result of genuine change in Burma, to welcome the country back into the international fold.

The eloquent and passionate speech made by the hon. Member for Gainsborough has ensured that the focus of Parliament and, indeed, the world is on the events in Burma. He was right to say that this debate could result in the regime listening to us. It could also result in some lives being saved. I can assure him that if there is anything further that he feels that the Government can do to strengthen our already strong position, my hon. Friend the Minister of State will be happy to meet him and his delegation of Members of Parliament to discuss matters further. It would be helpful if that delegation included the Front-Bench spokesmen, the hon. Member for Chesham and Amersham and the hon. Member for Winchester, as that would demonstrate the unanimity of purpose among all the parties.

It is important that we state that the actions of this regime amount to genocide, according to the legal definition. By doing so, we will be able to persuade the United Nations and our European Union partners to take action. Will the Minister please address that point?

I understand why the hon. Gentleman raises the matter. The descriptions that he has given us are appalling, but he must know that the term "genocide" has a precise meaning in international law. To be frank, under international law and all the rights and responsibilities that bind one under that law, genocide is difficult to prove. I understand the point that the hon. Gentleman makes and I can assure him that we will keep looking at this point, but genocide is a legal term and has a particular definition. I know that he does not use the word loosely. Defining the actions of the Burmese regime as genocide is important to him and to what he hopes that the Government and the international community can do. I assure him that we have noted what he has said and will continue to monitor the situation closely.

Will the Minister give way?

I will not give way because we have nearly finished the debate.

Our message to the Burmese people is that they are not forgotten; that is demonstrated by what is being done here in the House of Commons, at the European Union, in the General Affairs Council, and through continued international contacts. We are committed more than ever to work with them and we will not rest until there is an end to human rights abuses and a return to democracy and constitutional rule. I thank the hon. Member for Gainsborough for introducing the debate and so giving Parliament an opportunity to discuss this issue and the Government an opportunity to reiterate their commitment to the people of Burma.

I am sorry that the Minister would not take an intervention from me. I understood from his speech that he does not believe that genocide is taking place in Burma. I ask the Minister to write to me and clarify the Government's position on the atrocities that have been described this morning and to inform us whether the Government believes that they fall within the definition of genocide. I think every hon. Member who has participated in the debate would find that helpful.

I have made it clear to the hon. Member for Gainsborough that genocide is a legal definition and a legal term. I will write to the hon. Lady if she would like me to.

I welcome the opportunity to introduce a debate on the Government's measures to combat housing benefit fraud. As hon. Members will know, this year approximately £12 billion will be paid out in housing benefit by local authorities to almost 5 million people in England, Scotland and Wales. Labour's 1997 manifesto overstated the case, saying that housing benefit fraud amounted to about £2 billion a year. According to Government figures at the time, fraud cost about £1 billion a year. The National Audit Office reached the same conclusion in its press notice of 8 April 1999.

The Secretary of State estimates that housing benefit fraud and error cost taxpayers around £840 million a year, but, allowing for a margin of error and differing methodology, there is no real evidence that fraud has declined very much in the past three years. The problem remains real and acute.

The Government's determination to tackle the problem is commendable. I am sure that all political parties and all hon. Members share that objective. However, we are entitled to expose Government policies to scrutiny and to hope that the ensuing debate fully and frankly reflects the realities of what is a complex issue.

The Secretary of State for Social Security told the House on 6 March:

We are completely driving fraud from the system.

If only we could be certain that that were true. The latest departmental figures that I have seen show a negligible fall, which the Department has reportedly described as not statistically significant. I understand that a third of all councils have never prosecuted anyone for housing benefit fraud and that the National Audit Office has found that 25 per cent. of councils that it visited were in on the act. The Benefit Agency's own fraud investigation unit ran out of money in September 1998 and the Government has abandoned the London organised fraud investigation team, although much organised fraud takes place in London.

Similarly, the Secretary of State's further pronouncement on 6 March that

the last Government did absolutely nothing—[Official Report, 6 March 2000; Vol. 345, c. 756.]

about benefit fraud does not advance the quality of debate. It cannot be reconciled, for instance, with the steady increase during the early 1990s in prosecutions for all benefit fraud to more than 10,000 a year in 1995–96 and 1996–97, with a 99 per cent. conviction rate. Nor can it be reconciled with the rise in total fraud savings to an average of more than £1.5 billion in each of the last two years of the previous Administration.

The truth, which the Government are reluctant to acknowledge, is that most of their policies and initiatives have evolved from ideas and measures that pre-date the 1997 general election.

In reply to my written question on 7 February at columns 52-53W, the Under-Secretary of State for Social Security, the hon. Member for Wallasey (Angela Eagle) highlighted four key points in the Government's strategy against housing benefit fraud. Since then, I have been widely seeking comment on her reply and by no means exclusively from my Labour-Liberal controlled local authority, Basingstoke and Deane borough council.

It seems that the situation on the ground may not be quite so straightforward as Government statements suggest. First, in the Minister's reply to my question, she pointed to the reform of

the anti-fraud financial incentive scheme for local authorities to ensure that they can be rewarded for detecting and prosecuting cases of fraud.

I welcome that approach and I am sure that it is the right way to set about the task. It re-expresses the principle in the 1993 and 1994 schemes, which gave local authorities a share in savings above their share of a national baseline. By 1995–96, around 90 per cent. of all local authorities—421 of them—were receiving bonus payments as a direct result of their efforts to curb fraud. That year, £28 million in extra subsidy was earned from those incentive schemes.

I have one qualification. All too often, the efforts of local authorities are undermined when it comes to prosecuting cases of fraud. They are at a disadvantage compared with the Benefits Agency and they do not have the assistance of the Department's prosecution service. Local authorities have to secure the cooperation of their local police force, which then takes benefit prosecutions using the Crown Prosecution Service.

Unfortunately, as many local authorities have learned, the police are not always willing to act on housing benefit matters and it often falls to the council's solicitors to prosecute cases. That is a labour intensive, time-consuming and costly task and, to add insult to injury, the sentences are often derisory. The solution lies in local authorities having access to the Department's prosecution service.

Secondly, the Under-Secretary of State said in reply to my question that the Government had

made an additional available £100 million over the next three years to enable councils to adopt the Verification Framework…which will help make housing benefit more secure.—[Official Report, 7 February 2000; Vol. 344, c. 53W.]

The Government tell us that they are looking for a total saving of some £1 billion during the course of this Parliament through a tighter identification regime. I hope that they succeed, but there is a downside.

My Labour-Liberal controlled local authority is certainly not alone in having discovered that, while the verification framework has been in place, there has been a detrimental impact in one key respect: the time taken to process a housing benefit claim has virtually doubled. That is a regressive step. It means that some of the most vulnerable are left exposed and in dire circumstances for longer. There are even some indications that the delay may be deterring some of them from claiming housing benefit. I therefore urge that the workings of the verification framework are kept under close scrutiny. I suspect that, ultimately, the objectives of security and speedy processing of claims are incompatible and that an acceptable balance has to be found. I fear that that balance may not have been achieved.

I wish to raise another issue, which I hope that Government will consider seriously. Administration is certainly more secure under the verification framework, but the performance of housing benefit sections nationally has suffered a severe blow. It is therefore reasonable to expect performance indicators to reflect that. When the Government talk about setting indicators that provide a faster, more accurate service that is more secure against fraud, provides value for money and takes account of the views and needs of clients, one fears that they might be living in dreamland.

Thirdly, the Under-Secretary, in reply to my question, said that the Government had invited all local authorities to participate in the Royal Mail "do not redirect" initiative, which prevents claimants from using the Royal Mail's postal redirection arrangements to make false claims for multiple addresses. As the Minister of State, who will reply to this debate, knows, that scheme was conceived by the previous Government and would have been enacted regardless of the outcome of the 1997 general election. In 1996, my right hon. Friend the Member for Hitchin and Harpenden (Mr. Lilley) initiated discussions with the Royal Mail over access to the database of redirected mail to assist in tackling multiple identity and other frauds involving false addresses.

I do not doubt that the "do not redirect" initiative has a part to play in combating housing benefit fraud, but it should be seen in its true perspective. My local authority reacted more than a little cynically to the proposition that it had been invited to participate. I have been told that there is no option but to subscribe now. However, the initiative is not proving of great value. Indeed, in the experience of Basingstoke and Deane borough council, the service has produced absolutely nothing. In the past year, only two letters have been returned to the benefit service as a result, and those two accounts had already been closed by the housing benefit section.

Even the Government's estimates make pretty uninspiring reading—256 councils identifying only 174 cases of fraud a month. Although I acknowledge that the initiative may have an unquantifiable deterrent effect, the Government's prediction that "do not redirect" can realise savings of £5.3 million a year seems on the optimistic side.

The fourth dimension in the Government's anti-fraud strategy that the Under-Secretary highlighted was the £4 million made available to install computer terminals in local authorities to provide access to the Department's benefit systems. That, of course, evolved from the housing benefit review of January 1996. The then Secretary of State, my right hon. Friend the Member for Hitchin and Harpenden, announced the creation of a national register of housing benefit and council tax benefit, with a view to matching data across local authorities against departmental fraud detection systems.

I welcome that initiative and its extension, but it has latent drawbacks and deficiencies. In the experience of my local authority, the remote access terminal, a means whereby a housing benefit section can share information about an income support claim, has strictly limited advantages, for one reason: the fact that council staff have limited access to Benefits Agency records. I gather that the Government are seeking to increase that access. I am told that it is greatly needed.

I encounter here some cynicism—and not only from my own local authority. I am told that there has been little or no consultation between the Department and local authorities about the remote access terminals. In principle, the intention to exchange information electronically and to reduce paper flow between organisations is sound, but the receiving of information from the Department and how it can be handled effectively in council offices appear not to have been thought through.

The Government claim that, as a result of remote access terminals, 20 million fewer paper notifications of benefit changes will be made. Those councils that operate a document imaging system will have an advantage over those that do not because, although the electronic transfer of information into council document imaging systems will avoid the use of paper, those councils that do not use imaging will need to put the information from the terminal on paper, and many local authorities throughout the country will find that efficiency is not increased.

I have another, more general, point to make under this heading. Closer working initiatives are being encouraged by the Department, to enable Benefits Agency staff and local authority benefit staff to liaise and work together more closely. However, that is not always working out in practice. Benefits Agency staff at local level is not empowered to break with protocol, and all too often they do not feel able to co-operate with councils in the way that is needed. There are too many constraints. I have no reason to believe that my local authority is alone in finding that it is proving difficult to make any gains in that regard.

I genuinely applaud the Government's commitment to combat housing benefit fraud. I do not quarrel fundamentally, or in principle, with the measures that they are introducing, although I think it unlikely that the measures will live up to the Government's claims and expectations. Most of these initiatives evolve from, or are natural expressions of, the policies that we sought to implement during the previous Parliament, but I do find fault in two key respects.

First, almost all the initiatives that the Government has introduced have a downside. They have been thought through inadequately, sometimes with insufficient prior consultation. They may be basically sound in theory—I believe that they are—but they are flawed in implementation. They have negative as well as positive implications and repercussions that had not been anticipated.

Secondly, the rhetoric and polemic that the Government often employs in presenting their case oversimplifies and overstates. These are complex issues, and they are worthy of serious debate. I hope that the Government succeeds in this policy area: benefit fraud is one of the several cancers gnawing away at today's society. However, at the moment, the evidence that the Government are succeeding is strictly limited.

I congratulate the hon. Member for Basingstoke (Mr. Hunter) on raising the important issue of housing benefit fraud. Whether the figure involved is £800 million or £1 billion, these are substantial sums that could, I suspect, be better spent by all of us, and the hon. Gentleman has done the House a great service by drawing attention to the issue today.

I shall make a relatively brief contribution. First, I shall touch on the conclusions and three of the supplementary recommendations of the Scampion report on benefit fraud, and offer a few comments on some of those as they apply to housing benefit. Secondly, I shall make a few comments on the housing Green Paper that was published yesterday, which has a section on housing benefit fraud and gives some idea of the Government's thinking on the issue.

The Scampion report recommends the idea of a common baseline application form for housing benefit for all local authorities. Although the recommendation allows for local supplements to that form to reflect local circumstances, I very much support the idea that there should be one form for what is, in large measure, still a national benefit, albeit administered locally. Clearly, when thresholds are set locally, various other aspects are determined locally, but the information needed to assess a claim is pretty standard throughout the country, and yet the quality of information that is being sought appears to vary greatly. That worries me considerably, as it has implications for counter-fraud strategy.

We had discussions in this very Room about common application forms when the Chairman of the Public Accounts Committee, the right hon. Member for Haltemprice and Howden (Mr. Davis), initiated a debate on a related issue, but I should be grateful if the Minister would tell us the Department's latest thinking on the development of a common form, which in principle I would support warmly.

Another thing that was striking in the report was the finding that local authorities did not get the opportunity to pass on information on tips and scams. If there was a common form and there was, let us say, a problem in Basingstoke, information about the problem could be passed on to Brentwood, Northavon and Birmingham.

The hon. Gentleman is absolutely right. The sharing of good practice must be encouraged, and a common form might be part of the strategy.

Scampion's second supplementary recommendation is to establish a working group to consider data matching and data protection. He considers the balance between a citizen's right to privacy and the state's need to protect public funds. In that context, I can see few reasons for preventing extensive data matching. There must be a good and effective gate-keeping arrangement, so that there cannot be easy and willy-nilly access to information on people's personal circumstances. However, when a good and grounded suspicion of fraud exists, all the information should be brought together. Different arms of government collect the information and they perhaps receive different answers from the same person at different times or answers from people using different identities. Therefore, they are sometimes unable to bring the information together. Provided that gate-keeping safeguards take account of civil liberties issues, that privacy can be protected from the gratuitous trawling for data and that certain steps are taken before data can be accessed, I would warmly support much more effective data matching.

I fondly look forward to the day when I succeed as Secretary of State for Social Security and set up one big computer to bring all such information together. On Monday, the Minister told us about another scheme that the Government had in mind and he said that the computers were not up to it. However, the pace of technological change is so fast that it is hard to believe that, in the medium term, the Government cannot set up computer systems that would facilitate data matching and have a real impact on fraud.

The third supplementary recommendation that I want to draw to the Chamber's attention is the possibility that the Department will join the credit industry's fraud avoidance scheme. I notice from today's Order Paper that the right hon. Member for Birkenhead (Mr. Field) has tabled a question to ask the Government about their plans to join the scheme. Perhaps, the Minister will anticipate the answer by telling us the Government's views on joining a private sector counter-fraud initiative. The hon. Member for Basingstoke rightly referred to incentives and the private sector has the biggest incentive to crack down on fraud, because its money is involved. I shall be interested to learn whether the Government think that they should play a part in that scheme; I think that they should.

The Green Paper that was presented yesterday has a slender chapter on housing benefit. It contains the equivalent of two sides of A4 on housing benefit fraud, but some interesting items are mentioned and it is relevant to bring them to the Chamber's attention. Paragraph 11.28 of the Green Paper appears under the heading "Tackling Fraud and Error" and it mentions the "do not redirect" scheme. There is some uncertainty about how the scheme is working in practice. The hon. Gentleman suggested that councils are effectively obliged to be part of it, but the Green Paper says that the Government have got

two-thirds of local authorities to join…and more are joining all the time.

Perhaps the two statements are not completely inconsistent, but I am puzzled why the Government did not take a much firmer line from the start and why they did not lay down the law to oblige local authorities to join the scheme. I do not know why the Child Support, Pensions and Social Security Bill, which is going through the House, could not contain a clause to oblige councils to be part of it. I see no reason why we might want to allow them not to join or why they might not want to part of it. We can argue about the scale of the savings—they may not be vast—but there are potential benefits.

If the Post Office knows that the post from a dozen or two dozen addresses is being redirected to just one address and the local authority knows that housing benefit is claimed at all those addresses, that raises questions about whether we should post so many cheques to one address. I hope that the Minister will reassure us that all local authorities will be part of the scheme. If not, I hope to know why not.

I commend the Government—I do not make a habit of that—on the proposals in paragraph 11.29 of the Green Paper. I have always thought that we needed to know—the hon. Member for Basingstoke referred to this in passing—how much benefit fraud takes place each year and the overall trend. One of the most frustrating things about Government announcements on benefit fraud crackdowns is that they always tell us how much they will save, but the scale of the fraud that remains is left unknown. We can never test the claims of how much the different measures will save, because we do not know what the starting number was. Indeed, the figures given for benefit fraud tend to be remarkably stable on the whole, despite announcements telling us every year that we will make hundreds of millions of pounds of savings. Something, somewhere does not add up.

The need for reliable, consistent information at a national and local level about the scale of fraud is vital. I welcome paragraph 11.29, which says:

We also need to be able to monitor progress in reducing levels of fraud…Previous exercises to measures levels of fraud…produced national snapshot estimates, but did not allow us to track changes over time.

That is the right approach, and I welcome it unreservedly.

The Green Paper contains a section entitled "Taking this forward", which describes the Government's thinking on housing benefit fraud. I want to make a few remarks about that. Paragraph 11.30 refers to giving local authorities the right incentives, a point that the hon. Gentleman mentioned. Incentives are central to the debate. We all have contact with our local authorities, and the hon. Gentleman has obviously researched thoroughly his local authority's approach to the issue and its views on the Government's plans. It is clear to me that local authorities have weak incentives to tackle fraud. They are extremely overstretched and their benefit departments have to cope with a hefty workload and all manner of changes to the rules that add to the system's complexity. Tackling fraud involves the expenditure of taxpayers'—and not the councils'—money. Therefore, getting the incentives right is important.

Will the hon. Gentleman extend his comments to my point about the reluctance of local authorities to prosecute? They have to use the council solicitor, and prosecution involves time and cost. That additional dimension aggravates the problem.

The hon. Gentleman is right. A council faces the costs, such as the legal and staffing costs that the hon. Gentleman mentioned, of prosecuting cases when the return to it is pretty limited. Will the Minister set out in more detail the Government's thinking about how they will reward much more substantially councils that take the issue seriously?

I have a note, which is the result of a conference, on the position in Milton Keynes and it adds force to the hon. Gentleman's argument. I have been informed that Milton Keynes saved £1 million over three years, but none of that money was returned to fraud investigation.

That comment shows the scale of benefit fraud in one authority. However, I am not sure that I necessarily want the money to be returned to fraud investigation; I want some money to go to the council to give it the incentive to pursue fraud further. It can then decide how much of that money it wants to spend on fraud investigation. Councils should feel that it is their money, but—apart from some incentive schemes at the margin—they do not. I hope that the Minister will assure us that he will beef up the incentives.

The central recommendation of John Scampion's report was an integrated approach to tackling benefit fraud. Although the Green Paper, at paragraph 11.31, mentions the report and refers to strengthening the professionalism of investigation and co-ordination of intelligence on benefit fraud, I am not convinced that the Government are going the full extra mile. I am not convinced that they have accepted the recommendation that there should be an integrated service. I hope that the Minister will clarify what is intended when he replies.

Although in many senses I am young and naive, I have quickly become cynical about the Department. I tend to assume that the volume of press releases on an issue is in inverse proportion to what is actually being done. Housing benefit fraud has seen a flurry of press releases, which makes me sceptical about whether anything is happening. I should like to be proved wrong.

It is regrettable that the Government has not set themselves measurable targets against which we can hold them to account. They tend to blame the previous lot, as it were, but they have had responsibility for these matters for three years. Three years on from the general election, we still have only a Green Paper, which in effect says, "We don't really know over time how much fraud there is." We need to know the extent of it. I know that that cannot be ascertained on day one, but, after three years, it is rather disappointing that it is now being discovered that we need to be able to measure the fraud that is taking place.

I hope the Minister will convince us when he responds that there will be a serious attempt to provide reliable estimates of the scale of the problem and measurable targets against which he can be held to account for reducing fraud. I hope that there will be a far more credible strategy than the rather weak practical steps that have been taken so far.

It is a great pleasure to be able to take up the remarks of the hon. Member for Northavon (Mr. Webb). I thought that he was kind to the Government in terms of the housing Green Paper. He said that, after three years, they seem not to have much of a clue about what to do with fraud. It would be fair to say that they do not have much of a clue about what to do with housing benefit. If they have opinions on the matter, it seems that they are not prepared to share them with the House. The hon. Gentleman said that he looked forward to becoming the Secretary of State for Social Security. I hope that the hon. Gentleman will not be offended when I say that only in a parallel universe will that honour fall to him.

I think that the hon. Member for Northavon (Mr. Webb) was announcing that he was about the cross the Floor.

That may be. If that is the case, our loss will be the Government's gain. If the Minister wants to offer some inducements, we would be prepared to turn a deaf ear.

The hon. Gentleman suggested that improvements in the computer system might be helpful. I think that computers would be helpful if he were Secretary of State. Only with computers could we keep track of the hourly changes of Liberal Democrat policy.

I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Basingstoke (Mr. Hunter) on initiating the debate and allowing us to redirect our efforts in respect of housing benefit. There was a debate in Westminster Hall in early February on the subject, and many of the points made then have been repeated. However, my hon. Friend brought an interesting perspective, if not a practitioner's eye, to some of the problems, especially the redirecting of mail. I have not come across that before, and he made a valid point. His remarks about co-operation with local authorities were most illuminating.

My hon. Friend is right to say that, for too long—this applies especially to the Government—we have been very quick to take credit and to say that things are improving without there being any evidence to show that anything has improved. That has made the Government look ridiculous, and it has given to those who seek to damage the system by fraud the false hope that we will not get on to them and will not try to stamp out their activities.

The hon. Member for Northavon referred to paragraph 11.29 of the Green Paper. He said that it was rather good that the Government is to make an attempt to try to work out exactly how much fraud is within the system. It seems that they will try to determine whether housing fraud amounts to £2 billion, or is considerably less than that. The Government will have some problems in arriving at a true estimation because fraud is endemic and deep within the system. The process of unravelling is not confined to anti-fraud measures because it will be necessary also to try to simplify the system. My hon. Friend the Member for Basingstoke outlined various figures, but the best guess is that fraud amounts to about 7 per cent. of total expenditure on housing benefit. We know also that, above that figure—probably taking it to 10 per cent.—there are discrepancies because of client or administrative error.

It is not surprising that there is a great deal of money to be saved. It is not surprising also that the Labour party in the shape of the Prime Minister, when he was Leader of the Opposition, presented a manifesto that stated:

Just as we owe it to the taxpayer to crack down on tax avoidance, so we must crack down on dishonesty in the benefit system. We will start with a clampdown on Housing Benefit fraud, estimated to cost £2 billion a year, and will maintain action against benefit frauds of all kinds.

Given the prominence of the issue in the Labour party manifesto, it is perhaps not surprising that the Secretary of State for Social Services was keen to say:

We are already beginning to see results.—[Official Report, 11 January 1999; Vol. 323, c. 8.]

My hon. Friend the Member for Basingstoke referred to various claims that have been made by the Secretary of State. I, too, was struck by a press release of 20 January, headed, "Darling welcomes successes in fighting benefit fraud", which states:

Today's figures show that our tougher anti-fraud measures are beginning to bite…we are winning the fight against fraud.

However, as my hon. Friend said, the Office for National Statistics said that the reductions to which the right hon. Gentleman was referring were not statistically significant. If that is right, I suppose that the figures could have gone either way; they could have gone down or up.

There is a problem when, at every false dawn, the Government claim a victory. My hon. Friend is right when he says that the quality of debate is not enhanced by that process.

I suggest that we need to get three things absolutely right in establishing an anti-fraud strategy. First, we must defend the gateway to benefits to ensure that fraudsters do not pass through it. However, we do not want to guard the gateway so strongly that folk who need benefit and help cannot get through. There is a fine balance to be struck. Secondly, we need to get fraud out of the system, and an important factor in so doing, as the hon. Member for Northavon suggested, is benefit simplification. Thirdly, we need to improve investigation skills and share knowledge with local authorities and the Benefits Agency.

The Audit Commission's report on tackling fraud paints a gloomy picture. As my hon. Friend the Member for Basingstoke said, the commission found that housing benefit administration was poor in 44 per cent. of councils. It also found—this should give us cause for thought—that speed, not quality, continues to be the sole target for the assessment of claims. The process is to get claims through as quickly as possible. Some simple checks are made, but the system means rushing things through.

I served for 12 years on a local authority, and I find it shocking and unacceptable that too many types of council have been experiencing fraud that has been perpetrated by officers and members of those councils. If we cannot run a ship without the crew being on the fiddle, what chance has we of commanding the confidence of the public? The lack of prosecutions of such offenders is a disgrace that besmirches those of us who are involved in local government. I do not care about the political make-up of the councils concerned: whether a council is Conservative, Liberal Democrat, Labour or hung, it is not acceptable to allow such a situation to continue.

The Audit Commission also found in one third of councils an unsatisfactory level of overpayment. Worse still, prosecutions were rare, for several practical reasons. Investigative journalism tells us that, in practice, councils are encouraged to chase only the worst offenders, so petty offenders can be confident, not only that they will never be caught, but that they will never even be investigated. At the end of January, the Government confirmed that local authority investigators ignore elaborate housing benefit fraud, because the financial incentives encourage them to hit relatively easy targets for prosecution.

The verification project is welcome, in that it systematically lays down minimum standards for verification and processing of claims. However, as my hon. Friend the Member for Basingstoke says, all is not well within the verification framework programme. The Local Government Association, of which I have the honour to be a vice-president, has accused the Department of "escaping its responsibilities" by contributing to the poor delivery of housing benefit. The LGA claims that the Department has ignored its concerns about the bureaucracy involved in the verification framework, and warns the Government that the verification framework threatens to submerge benefits staff in bureaucracy because of lack of funding. I shall quote two further LGA comments. First:

It is important that the DSS and its agencies work collaboratively with local government in taking forward a comprehensive strategy for tackling fraud.

I am sure that we all applaud that. Secondly, the LGA states:

Many of the operational difficulties associated with anti-fraud initiatives on housing benefit have arisen through a failure to fully involve the LGA and local authorities at the development stage or an unwillingness to take on board constructive proposals.

We have to work together to stamp out fraud—no one has a monopoly of knowledge.

Ignoring the experience of local authorities is not the way in which to obtain their co-operation; nor is it the best starting point for one of the three new initiatives announced by the Government, listed in paragraph 11.33 of the Green Paper, which is

Setting up new arrangements with local authority and DSS fraud investigation units to pool resources, cut down on duplication of effort, share intelligence, and targeting investigations properly across the whole social security system.

That cannot be done on the basis of the Department telling local authorities to do as they are told; there has to be acceptance of partnership. I hope that the Minister of State will tell us the exact extent to which the Department intends to co-operate with local authorities.

During an intervention on the hon. Member for Northavon, I pointed out that one of the problems is that local authorities do not share information among themselves: they all have different forms and different criteria. One authority might crack down on a specific fraudster, but another fraudster using an identical method in another area escapes. Apart from an annual conference at which information might be exchanged, there is no systematic method of sharing knowledge. Such co-operation will start only if the Department takes local councils into its confidence.

We put off much of our work on, and many of our suggestions about, dealing with fraud while we awaited the Green Paper. However, it announces only three new initiatives. We were told many times that we had only to wait—everything would be dealt with in the Green Paper, all our problems and worries would be settled by the Green Paper, and everything would be made clear. I was looking forward to the Green Paper. We had been told that it would not be published in July, so I commend the Government for having brought forward its publication, but if I had eagerly taken it home to read over the long recess, I should have been a most disappointed Member of Parliament to find only three measly measures on housing benefit fraud.

Now, we want to know the answers to the questions that we were promised would be answered by the Green Paper, but have not been. Specifically, we want to know what has happened to the housing benefit simplification project, the details of which were due to be published a year ago—in fact, I think that the anniversary of its intended publication date has passed. In addition, the Minister must explain why, if there are about 250,000 known cases of housing benefit fraud, there are only about 700 prosecutions. The simplification project would help to secure the three measures to which I referred—guarding the gateway, removing fraud from the system and improving investigation skills.

We wanted a dedicated anti-fraud agency, and the payment of benefit cheques directly to landlords to be banned. The Secretary of State said that all those matters would be dealt with in the Green Paper. However, on page 112, I find the new special arrangements for co-operation between local authorities and the DSS, which I have already mentioned, and the offer of "a national, single agency" and a "fraud hotline". So, we are to have a telephone number. I do not mock that measure—it would have looked marvellous in a list of 30 or 40 initiatives. However, it is the lead item in a list of three options. Perhaps it should be a premium line, so that we can recoup some of the money that we lose on fraud through people reporting fraud.

In addition, local authority staffs are to be allowed

on-line access to DSS systems to trace National Insurance numbers.

That is welcome. It would be useful if the Minister were kind enough to tell us how many people he estimates have two numbers, and how many duplicate numbers there are. We know that duplicate numbers exist—that someone in Blackpool can have the same national insurance number as someone in Brentwood.

I look forward to the Minister's reply, but I think that I have time to deal with a local matter connected with housing benefit fraud. During Social Security questions four weeks ago, the Secretary of State attacked Brentwood council, a Liberal Democrat council, for its record on fraud. My council officials are entirely innocent of being Liberal Democrats and run a tight ship, in my view, despite the incompetence of the administration.

I have a reply from Mrs. S. Keeble, the borough treasurer. She was astounded by the Secretary of State's charge that Brentwood council was soft on fraud. She writes:

This is simply not true. The Council has, for a number of years, had difficulty in providing one of the government's statistical returns because of the way the data was stored in its computer system. The DSS are aware of this and it has never been raised as an issue before…The Council purchased a new computer system and it was installed at the beginning of the financial year.

Mrs. Keeble explains the difficulties and states:

I am pleased to tell you that the first statistical forms were produced last week, for the third quarter of the year, and have now been sent to the DSS…I am concerned that our problems with this statistical return have been interpreted as a lack of concern over Benefit Fraud and I must refute this strongly.

She lists the steps that the council has taken, and reports that, recently, it successfully prosecuted a local resident, who was sentenced to 100 hours of community service and had to pay £120 in costs.

I trust that the Minister will pass that on to the Secretary of State, and I look forward to the poor burghers of Brentwood receiving an apology from the Secretary of State, whose remarks caused them great pain. When people are working hard to stamp out fraud, they deserve not to be part of the political football.

What do we want? A consensus is starting to form across the Chamber. The Deputy Prime Minister said that he wanted a consensus on housing benefit, and we are seeing the start of a broad coalition. We want the Government to implement the Scampion report. We do not want the Government to pick and choose, or to produce a hotline and nothing else. We want a proper, co-ordinated approach. Scampion knows what he is talking about.

The way in which the Scampion report was announced to the world could not have been less attractive. It was dumped—lodged—in the Library on a Friday evening. All Members of Parliament want to stay in the House as long as possible during the week, but Friday evening is not the time most conducive to getting wide publicity for such an important report. The Government has nothing to be ashamed of. They have made a number of commitments.

If we could take the politics out of the issue, and recognise that it will be difficult to remove fraud from the system, that it is not the Government's fault and that it is not up to the Secretary of State to deal personally with the problem, we could move towards some kind of consensus. As Scampion said, we need a single national intelligence system and a single investigatory agency. We want a proper partnership to be set up and to be given a time scale to submit proposals to the Department to deal with organised fraud.

The Minister is familiar with that and other suggestions that were offered by my hon. Friend the Member for Basingstoke and the hon. Member for Northavon. We are looking for a robust response from the Minister this morning, and I am sure that he will give it. If we were to sum up all our arguments in a single phrase, it would be: "Give us Scampion!"

I am happy to congratulate the hon. Member for Basingstoke (Mr. Hunter) on securing the debate. At the risk of upsetting the cosy little consensus, I must say that I have been listening to a load of whinges from inefficient local authorities. That may seem unfair, but as a headline, "Whinges from local authorities" would be accurate.

Hon. Members are elected to Parliament to represent their constituents, not to represent local authorities. I want to put that on the record. We want to work with local authorities, and I shall explain how we do so, but I do not accept that out there, everything is sweetness, light and massive efficiency. There is far more red tape and bureaucracy in local government than in central Government. That is my experience from my terms in the House and my short period in government.

If the Minister were not seeking consensus and co-operation from local authorities, what would his opening remarks have been?

I wanted to set the tone. We do not intend to be the punch-bag for local authorities that are not doing what they should be doing or which are merely seeking excuses.

I shall respond as best I can to the points raised in the debate. I am grateful to the hon. Member for Basingstoke for informing my Department of the matters that he would raise, arising mainly from the parliamentary answer that he received earlier in the year.

On the request "Give us Scampion!", we will indeed give the country Scampion in due course. The first step, though, is to carry through the commitment that we made when we published the Scampion report—to appoint a head of profession. The post has already been advertised. I regret that it takes a long time to consult, advertise and carry out the proper scrutiny that is necessary for public appointments. The interviews will be held fairly soon. We expect the head of profession to be in post by August or September.

By the time we return from the long recess, I expect us to be in positive mode with regard to the other Scampion recommendations accepted by the Government. We may not have implemented them all, but we will have begun to get the plan ready. However, the first step is the appointment of the head of profession.

I shall deal first with the points made by the hon. Member for Basingstoke, which encompass many of the issues raised by the other two Members in their cosy consensual representations from their local government masters. That is the last time that I shall allude to that, but I think I have made the point that the Government do not accept the whinges and criticisms from local government of what the Department has been trying to do to tackle fraud. To speak of rooting out fraud is too strong a term, because ending fraud is like searching for the holy grail—there will always be fraudsters around. Nevertheless, we do our best to tackle a serious issue.

On the verification framework, I know from my own local authority, which is the largest in England, the problems that that has caused in delay and in respect of due procedures and training. I recently met about 40 representatives of local authorities to discuss aspects of the matter. We are trying to make improvements to the scheme and to help them phase it in over two years.

In many cases, local authorities have managed the verification framework so that vulnerable groups are not put at risk. I accept that many of the people in receipt of housing benefit are members of vulnerable groups, so non-payment of housing benefit puts the home at risk. That is the bottom line. If the benefit is not paid, the home is put at risk by the debt, the arrears and the other difficulties. We do not want to cause homelessness; that is the opposite of our intention.

We have removed the requirement for people in hostels to provide a national insurance number to support their claim. For those of us who live in the world of torrid bureaucracy, the idea that people do not have ready access to their national insurance numbers is surprising. We tend to believe that everybody has a national insurance number, but that is not so in the real world. People who live in hostels constitute a mobile population. For all the reasons people become hostel dwellers, it is easy to lose such information.

We have therefore issued guidance, which states that third party information from responsible organisations can be used to support claims from people in that position. We have learned that lesson from implementing the verification framework. I do not therefore simply claim that the framework has been established, that it is working and that we have made no change. We have made changes. We appreciate that they have caused difficulties for many local authorities.

The ordinary, common or garden honest claimant and well-run local authority have nothing to fear from operating the verification framework. Local authorities are required only to ask the questions and do the checks that they, as the guardians of public money, should have done in the first place.

That picks up a theme that the hon. Member for Basingstoke introduced. He said that local authorities did not own the money or the benefits. I freely admit that there is a long-term problem unless we can get local authorities to establish some sense of ownership. They own the administration of the money, but some do not believe that they are responsible for the benefit payments. When a senior official and I were in discussion, he said that he was not responsible for the amounts of housing benefit. He was a local government assistant director, yet he claimed that he was not responsible, and that the money was not part of his department's budget. He said, "It's not my money, it's the Government's money." Yet the Department was paying the local authority considerable sums of money to administer the system on behalf of the public.

The hon. Member for Northavon (Mr. Webb) mentioned incentive. He was right: incentives are built into the rest of local authority money, because inefficiencies in spending on one responsibility mean cuts in others. Local authorities do not like telling citizens that they are making cuts. However, council tax and housing benefit are different.

The Minister mentioned ownership. Paragraph 11.39 of the Green Paper on housing considers the long-term future. It states that administration will remain the responsibility of local authorities. However, it also considers the ONE pilots and local authorities working closely with them on housing benefit administration. Is it absolutely clear that administration will remain with local authorities in the long term?

I stand by the words of the Green Paper. We have no plans to remove housing benefit administration from local authorities, but nothing lasts forever. That is not a hint or a threat. The words in the Green Paper are valid. I shall consider the ONE pilot later. If local authorities can administer housing and council tax benefit efficiently and satisfy our constituents, they will encounter no difficulties. The Green Paper makes the position clear.

We have agreed with the Audit Commission and the Accounts Commission that any performance data that they publish will state that a local authority has been involved in operating the verification framework. I am almost expressing a caveat: operating the framework may slow down performance. We do not intend that to happen, but we understand that in the real world, operating a different system which is much more rigorous and a little slower can slow down performance.

I do not want a local authority that takes the verification framework seriously, and genuinely tries to make it work, to be penalised unfairly in the Audit Commission's published charts, which we receive regularly. I do not want us to observe that our local authority has dropped below a performance line and demand to know why. Local authorities will claim that it is not fair that they do extra work, which takes time, yet the report does not refer to it. They feel that they have been penalised. I hope that those comments will be taken in the spirit in which they were meant. We also take account of implementing the framework in the subsidy to local authorities. The Government, not local authorities, pay for the verification framework.

I regret that the hon. Member for Basingstoke forgot to mention the Royal Mail "do not redirect" scheme. Again, local authorities do not pay for that; it is fully funded by the Department. It is also voluntary. There may be arguments about it. One of the first questions that I asked on my first day in the Department eight months ago was, "Why is this voluntary? It is such a good idea." However, no local authority has complained about that. Not one has claimed that we are forcing local authorities to accept a scheme that they do not want to implement.

We have asked local authorities that do not implement the scheme the reasons for that. We got some stupid answers—for example, "We're waiting for another supply of envelopes, so we can have them reprinted." We have received barmy reasons which an alert local government officer would have tackled immediately.

I am surprised by the comments of the hon. Member for Basingstoke about his local authority. He said that only two envelopes had been returned to the council and that the accounts had been closed. I whispered to my colleagues that I wondered why the local authority was sending out envelopes if the accounts had been closed. That is the obvious question. The envelopes had been redirected back, but if the accounts had been closed, why did the local authority send out the cheques? Basingstoke council must answer that question.

Given that the Government have asked local authorities to undertake so many tasks, there are good grounds for establishing some schemes on a voluntary basis. I can understand frustration about not achieving 100 per cent. implementation, and about slowness, but I expect improvements by the end of the year. The service is recommended and part of good practice. Local authorities can learn from it.

One local authority has made dramatic savings through the scheme. It reported that "do not redirect" cases accounted for 10 per cent. of its fraud investigation case load. Two cases revealed fraudulent payments of £26,000 and £18,000. It is a good scheme, but no single policy initiative can solve all the problems. We must move forward on a wide front. There is no holy grail. I would not claim that we had won the battle and that benefit fraud was under control.

The benefits system pays £2 billion a week to our fellow citizens. The scope for fraud by organised criminals is great, and we spend a lot of money on trying to close the gateways and thus make it more difficult for the wrong person to get into the system and easier to root out fraud. We prosecute approximately 200 people a week for benefit fraud—and not only housing benefit fraud, which is the subject of the debate.

The hon. Member for Basingstoke said that remote access terminals are not very useful because they offer limited access, but they are a big innovation and providing local authority officers with a computer terminal so that they have direct access to the Department of Social Security computer network for certain benefits is pretty radical. I am not claiming credit and, as he said, a lot of those initiatives have come through the system, as is the case with any change of Government. I freely admit that our computer network is not exactly blue sky technology, but we are considering widening the range of DSS benefit information available as part of the housing benefit improvement programme through the access terminals. We hope to pilot some of those improvements later this year, with a view to rolling them out nationally in 2001.

The electronic transfer of data is also an issue. We consulted local authorities about initiatives during the evaluation of the ETD programme and 20 were involved in pilots during development. One does not consult every local authority, as more than 400 deals with housing benefit and we carried out a representative pilot. Before the national roll-out of electronic data, the local authorities were consulted through the remote access terminals national user group and they attended seminars on ETD, so we have involved them. We want to work in partnership, but sometimes new ways of doing things ruffle feathers or challenge local empires. There may not always be the degree of good will that there should be, but we have put our hand out to local authorities to work with them.

The electronic transfer of data offers other benefits, even if the local authority does not have the document image processing system. For a start, it reduces the time that it takes to process housing benefit and council tax benefit claims. It increases security in terms of data protection and data transmission and should enhance customer service by improving the speed and accuracy of benefit processing. There is no question but that it contributes to reducing the scope for fraud and error, and we hope that it will lower the housing benefit and council tax benefit programme expenditure.

I should make the point that the words "benefit fraud inspectorate" did not cross the lips of any hon. Member today. The inspectorate is a service provided by my Department to local authorities to go over the systems that they use. It is not a hit squad, but a systems squad that goes into local authorities to examine how they administer housing benefit and council tax benefit. In some ways, I regret that it does not consider other benefits such as student loans. There is a great deal of scope for that, because the inspectorate is expert in studying systems.

We publish reports for each local authority, although we remove any failures as they could be invitations to commit fraud more easily, and the good practice can be shared, one local authority to another. Local authorities do not necessarily even have to pick up the phone, as they can read reports on authorities with a similar demographic and geographic background or a similar housing benefit profile to see whether they can learn something.

This year, the benefit fraud inspectorate has been asked specifically to go into the 30 local authorities with the highest housing benefit spending. One knows which they are, by and large: they are big city authorities, and my own city of Birmingham is one. They are due to be dealt with—I hope in a way that brings them up to scratch and improves the situation—and I do not deny that we have had problems in the city of Birmingham with housing benefit administration. Of about 400 local authorities, 30 spend a third of the £12 billion of housing benefit, so it is sensible to target our resources there.

On Monday, we announced the programme for the next 30 authorities into which the benefit fraud inspectorate will go. They work in co-operation and are proceeding by agreement. There are set dates and a programme of work. The inspectorate will not knock on the door one Monday morning and say, "By the way, we have come to audit your systems." That is not the way to do it. The process is helpful and the more we can extend it, the better.

May I make a straightforward point? It is right to examine the 30 highest spenders because most money will probably go to them, but they are likely to run a fairly decent show. Which authorities are not up to scratch or do not have the necessary? Would the Minister care to characterise them, but not in political terms? What kind of authority are they?

The 30 biggest spenders come mainly from the 32 metropolitan districts, so we have probably covered most of those. A point came to me when I was asked to consider which authorities would be the next 30 to be examined. These programmes are planned well in advance and I specifically asked whether there were pockets of district councils that were small in terms of local government but had a preponderance of housing tax benefit and council tax benefit claimants and were a bit different from the average; or whether there was an authority that we had not heard about for a long time, perhaps because someone had not sent forms in; or whether there was an authority that was not involved in Royal Mail "do not redirect". I wanted to consider those factors, so the next 30 are a real mixed bag. There is no set pattern, but some of those thoughts went into the programme.

Perhaps we should have a look at some authorities: we may not have heard from them for a bit, but that does not necessarily mean that everything is okay. I certainly hope that when we have considered the top 30 and the next 30, along with those that have already been examined, we shall have a good picture of the local authority performance for the rest of the country. There are lessons that we can hope to roll out in the rest of local government.

May I touch on the point about cost, which is a fair one? I came across it in my previous role at the Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food. Local authorities are basically the enforcing authority in terms of food safety, and court costs can be horrendous. A small local authority in the north of England told us that a case would cost £250,000, but all the evidence suggested that it was important for it to go to court. It rightly claimed that there was unfairness, since a bigger authority would have the resources to take the case on and more lawyers would be available.

Authorities think that that on-cost might arise, but we have provided £200,000 as a pilot for my Department's lawyers to undertake housing benefit prosecutions and to develop longer-term options to encourage local authorities to pursue prosecutions. If a change is to be made, undertaking a pilot is always worthwhile. The pilot started in November 1998—a similar one began in Scotland in June 1999—and was available to 144 local authorities. It has been extended, partly because we have not used much of the resource that we offered to local authorities. I am not here to complain about why it has not been taken up, but I assure hon. Members that the figure I saw for what we were to spend was horrendous—it was only £200,000 to start with—so we have extended the pilot, because we want to learn from it. Unless it is decent, we will not learn lessons for the future. Although access to legal services is one aspect, some local authorities lack training in bringing prosecutions because of the absence of a formal prosecutions policy.

We have built in extra payments to the existing weekly benefit savings scheme for local authorities that have prosecuted fraudulent claimants since April 1999. Many of us see sentences reported in the press every day of the week and think, "How on earth can they do that?" However, "they" are the courts—not the House, not the Government and not the local authorities. Sentencing is the role of the magistrates and the judges in the courts. We give them the maximums, but it is their job to set the sentences. Benefit fraud cases that appear in the papers occasionally cross my desk. Ministers are warned in advance so that they do not get a big shock, and I sometimes see the result later on. I had a couple on my desk this week and the amount of fraud was the same in both. The circumstances, however, must have been entirely different, because the sentences were so far apart that they could have been on separate planets. Nevertheless, that was the judgment of those who had all the evidence. I, as a Minister, did not have all the evidence. In any event, we are co-operating with local authorities as much as we can.

The verification framework was originally developed with the full input of local authorities. Someone—I think it was the hon. Member for Basingstoke—mentioned the London fraud investigation. That was a joint local authority/DSS initiative designed to tackle organised fraud, which was ended owing to serious doubts about its effectiveness.

The hon. Member for Northavon asked about the ONE project, in the context of Scampion and the common claim form. It is ludicrous that there should be more than 100 different designs for housing benefit application forms. I did not know that that applied to claims for benefit, other than national benefits; it had never crossed my mind. We have issued guidance within the verification framework and in the benefit fraud inspection report, but we are considering the overall programme in the context of the ONE project, with the aim of providing a single gateway for all state benefits. We have schemes operating throughout the country, and they have important implications.

As hon. Members will know, we recently announced, in the context of the working age client group, what is in effect a merger between a large parts of the Benefits Agency with the Employment Service. That is a major change in the machinery of government, announced by the Prime Minister less than a fortnight ago. It will mean that everyone dealing with the Government will be in one place, and it will enable us to ensure that people do not miss out on their benefits and are aware of opportunities of which they are not always aware when they make claims.

Mr. Pickles: Last month, I heard the Minister refer to the lack of stigma attaching to claims for housing benefit and council tax rebate. How, then, can he explain the fact that claims for those two benefits effectively separate clients with the ONE project?

I cannot, but the question is valid. Indeed, on Monday I drew attention to the paradox inherent in the fact that people were claiming housing benefit and council tax rebate but not claiming income support—all three being means-tested. I suggested that there should be a more friendly delivery service at the local neighbourhood office for people who did not want to go to "the social" or the Benefits Agency.

The solution to the pensions problem is to provide a freestanding, separate, brand new agency, or mini-Ministry. Planning for that has begun within the last few days, and it was announced within the last month. It will provide a one-stop shop for people wishing to discuss anything to do with pensions. It will be central, but there will be local access throughout the country. It will not involve uniformity, and it certainly will not involve the Benefits Agency.

This is probably one of the biggest changes ever to be made in the machinery of government. The jobs of tens of thousands of civil servants will be involved. Extracting the Employment Service and the Benefits Agency from the general system, enabling them to deal with a specific client group, is almost like planning a new Government Department. It will not be a five-minute job; it will take several years.

Welding that with the ONE project, and dealing with housing benefit, council tax rebates and so forth will be part of the agenda, and that means getting it right. We must not exacerbate the fraud problem by accident. Cutting out the problem in one area might open gateways for organised crime, as opposed to one-offs. We must root out error as well as fraud, because an error may later become a fraud. For instance, someone might discover an error and say nothing about it. Our central task in regard to housing and other benefits is to ensure that the benefit is right at the outset, and goes to the right person. That should be axiomatic, but the system has been such that it has not been possible.

Three years ago, when we came to office, we discovered that a horrendous number of income support payments had been wrong to start with. I do not want to initiate a debate about that; I merely say that we chopped the number by half, and will therefore be able to save £1 billion over the life of the current Parliament. I am not saying that that constituted fraud. The systems, the procedures and the training were wrong, and there was not the necessary challenge to ensure that benefits were paid to the right people. The new system will provide all the advantages, and none of the disadvantages.

I hope that I have given hon. Members some idea of where we are going. I cannot tell them all that they would like to know—for instance, how much fraud is going on. It is impossible to obtain a positive figure, by definition, although the statistics are likely to remain the same. Overall benefit fraud currently amounts to between £2 billion and £5 billion; housing benefit fraud amounts to about £800 million, which apparently is 7 per cent. of the total. Those figures are too high, and we must get them down, but there is no single magic solution: we must work on a series of fronts.

I know that I have my little dig occasionally, but I have tried—and we must continue to try—to operate on a consensual basis. That is in everyone's interest. If we do not do this, the public whose money is being spent will lose confidence in the benefits system, which will undermine the system. Rooting out fraud is in the interests of all, especially those who pay for the system in the first place.

Order. Will hon. Members not wishing to stay for the next debate please leave quietly, so that we can have a nice early start?

I welcome the opportunity to discuss the appalling experience of my constituent Mrs. Susan Cole, and what her dreadful ordeal has taught me about the need to reform the backdating of disability living allowance. Let me begin by saying that this is not part of a general whinge about the Government not doing enough for disabled people. I do not believe that to be the case; indeed, throughout the current Parliament I have fully supported the Government's strategy of providing work for those who can work, and security for those who cannot.

The new deal for disabled people is beginning to work in my constituency. The disabled persons tax credit, providing a guaranteed minimum income of £155 a week for a single disabled person who moves from benefit to full-time work on the national minimum wage, is also beginning to help disabled people in my constituency to return to work. The Government rightly made a tough decision in the Welfare Reform and Pensions Act 1999 to means-test incapacity benefit. I think that that measure was justified, in that its aim was to generate significant increases in the incomes of the disabled people most in need. For example, there has been an increase of up to £26 per week for severely disabled young people who become disabled early in life.

We are reforming pensions, in order to provide contributions for those who care for disabled people and therefore cannot make contributions throughout their working lives. I have long been concerned about that issue, and I consider the reform to be a significant step. I am also pleased that, during the current Parliament, spending on sickness and disability benefits will increase by more than £2 billion as the Government meet rising demands and do more for those in the greatest need.

I consider that to be a record of real achievement. I am not saying that the Government has got it wrong on disability benefit in general terms; far from it. I think we are beginning to bring hope, support and opportunity where previously there was none. However, I think that, on the specific issue of backdating of disability living allowance, we are simply continuing with the rules that we inherited from the last Conservative Government, and I strongly believe that we should think again.

I should like to deal with one aspect of Susan Cole's experience that highlights the need for change. Prior to 12 July 1996, Mrs. Cole had worked all her adult life, although she had for 15 years suffered from colitis. Anyone who has suffered from colitis or knows anyone who has suffered from it knows that it is a very debilitating condition. Because of the severity of her condition, Mrs. Cole sought a private medical consultation at the private Rivers hospital, in Sawbridgeworth, near my constituency of Harlow.

During the examination, without warning, the consultant performed a bowel biopsy, which caused Mrs. Cole extreme pain. Although the consultant reassured her that that was routine, only two hours after the consultation, Mrs. Cole found herself suffering from severe rectal bleeding. Later that day, she was admitted to the national health service Princess Alexandra hospital, in my constituency of Harlow, where she was put on a drip and detained in hospital for 10 days. The length of that stay is a clear indication of the severity of her condition. The significant point of the story is that, towards the end of her stay in hospital, she started suffering from the symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder—severe depression, fear, flashbacks and extreme anxiety and insecurity.

Mrs. Cole was discharged from hospital, and, very shortly afterwards, because of her symptoms and experience, was advised to claim incapacity benefit. However, despite the severity of her condition, no one at the Benefits Agency suggested that she should claim disability living allowance. One month after her stay in hospital, her general practitioner suggested that she might be suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder. That suspicion was finally confirmed in November 1997. Both before and after that date, however, over a period of three or more years, Mrs. Cole has suffered from enormous stress and anxiety and from other major problems. She has had to be admitted to hospital, occasionally for up to seven days, suffering from extreme anxiety and stress.

I think that it is incontestable that, in the whole of that period, and certainly since November 1997, Mrs. Cole should have been eligible for disability living allowance. Throughout that period, she was regularly in contact with the Benefits Agency office and regularly spoke to the agency's staff, who were well aware of her condition. When she had her first six-month renewal for incapacity benefit, because she was—to put it bluntly—in such a state, she sent some press cuttings on her ordeal at the private hospital. However, still no one at the Benefits Agency suggested that she might claim disability living allowance.

Finally, in August 1999, Mrs. Cole rang the Benefits Agency office on a different issue, to inquire about her sister's eligibility for incapacity benefit—her sister is suffering from cancer—and used her own claim as a reference point. The person at the Benefits Agency office whom she spoke to finally asked her why she was not claiming disability living allowance. The net result was that she did submit a claim successfully, and she has been successfully claiming ever since.

The crucial point is that that occurred three years after she had started claiming incapacity benefit. She had at least five renewals for incapacity benefit, and numerous discussions with Benefits Agency staff. Although it was at the very least arguable that she had been entitled to claim disability living allowance, not once in that three-year period, until August 1999, did anyone suggest that she should be claiming DLA.

It is also interesting that, in January 2000, when I took up the issue with the Benefits Agency—I have evidence of this in writing—the agency was able to check its records to assure me that there was no evidence that Mrs. Cole had made any inquiries about any other benefits to which she may have been entitled. Therefore, the agency's systems were clearly very rigorous and detailed. The agency could check to ensure that Mrs. Cole had not inquired about claiming, but it could not tell me why no one at the agency had told her about her possible eligibility for DLA, although she was clearly entitled to it.

One might ask why, for example, anyone who is in receipt of incapacity benefit does not automatically receive a leaflet on disability living allowance, informing him or her of the possibility and chance of being able to uptake that benefit.

Nevertheless, from August 1999, Mrs. Cole started claiming DLA—despite all the evidence showing that she had been eligible to receive it significantly before that date. However, according to a very tight set of criteria, backdating of DLA is allowed to a maximum of six weeks. Mrs. Cole could therefore not receive benefit backdated beyond that date. Those are the rules that we inherited from the Conservative Government.

I have pursued the issue in detailed correspondence with the Minister, and his responses have been very helpful and detailed in explaining the current system. However, it is intriguing that some of the arguments used by the Department are the same as those used by the previous Government. The first argument is that the onus is on the claimant to claim at the appropriate time. That argument was the central thrust of some of the changes introduced by the previous Government. My first response to that point is to ask why. If it can be genuinely proven that one was eligible from a prior date, but that one was simply not aware of eligibility—as opposed to choosing not to claim—there is a strong argument in principle for backdating.

The second argument against backdating in deserving cases is that it would be difficult to operate fairly. However, that is exactly what we do—on a much wider basis, and with a much longer period of backdating—in, for example, council tax benefit and housing benefit. As the Minister will know better than I, backdating may be allowed if "good cause" can be demonstrated. "Good cause" may be based on facts that, having regard to all the circumstances, including the claimant's state of health, would probably have caused a reasonable person not to claim at the time that they should have claimed. In such circumstances, based on that "good cause", one backdating—for up to 12 months—is allowed.

I contend that Mrs. Cole's state of health, with post-traumatic stress disorder, was the very specific reason why she was not aware of her eligibility to claim DLA. For council tax benefit and housing benefit, that one reason would have been sufficient justification to backdate for up to 12 months. If that is sufficiently good cause for backdating those benefits, why is it not good enough for backdating DLA?

The final argument made against backdating DLA is, according to correspondence, a straightforward rule against doing so, on the basis that

this has been regarded as the most equitable in all the circumstances.

"Equitable" means reasonable and fair. I do not think that it is reasonable and fair to deny all retrospective claims regardless of circumstances and merit—both legitimate and illegitimate—rather than conducting the necessary debate on how we should widen both the objective criteria for, and the length of, backdating. That is all that I am asking for. I am not arguing for a free for all in which any claim can be backdated if a reasonable case is made, requiring the Benefits Agency then to make a discretionary judgment. Such a system would be arbitrary, difficult to administer and, in many senses, unfair. I acknowledge that it would also be an open-ended commitment on public expenditure—which I know that not only the Treasury, but any reasonable person charged with the responsibility of managing public finances, would not wear.

I am arguing, however, that further legitimate objective criteria could be established to justify backdating. We can debate what those criteria might be. I would certainly argue that they should include written documentary evidence of a condition at a particular time, and a sworn statement from a doctor that a condition existed at a particular time, allied with the type of "good cause" reason why a claim was not made at that time. Those criteria apply in housing benefit and council tax benefit claims.

I would also certainly argue that, as with those benefits, backdating should be available for up to 12 months. I am not arguing for indefinite backdating, which clearly would be an open door to massive claims. However, a 12-month period would be reasonable.

There is a basic unfairness. I recognise that eventually it all comes down to money. I long ago became a financial realist. I know that there is only a certain sum of money allocated to the Department of Social Security and the benefits budget and if there is a huge increase in backdating we will have to limit the overall increase in benefits, spreading the money more thinly.

However, we need a specific change on the backdating of DLA compared with other benefits, because the take-up of DLA is so low. A low take-up means several things, particularly that people are not aware of their eligibility. Mrs. Cole's experience has certainly demonstrated that. On top of that lack of awareness, which might reasonably prevent people from claiming in time, DLA has the tightest backdating rules of almost any benefit. To underline that point, let us consider the evidence on take-up among the eligible population for various benefits: for income support, the figure is 70 to 80 per cent.; for housing benefit it is around 90 per cent; for jobseeker's allowance it is 70 to 80 per cent; for family credit it is 70 to 80 per cent. and we hope that the working families tax credit that replaces it will have an even higher take-up. However, only 30 to 50 per cent. of the eligible population take up the care component of disability living allowance and the figure for the mobility component is 50 to 70 per cent. Those figures come from a recent answer from the Minister in the Lords.

A lack of awareness restricts take-up. We are penalising people by not allowing backdating if they do not find out that they are eligible. In a sense, it is a double whammy and it is a serious problem. The case of my constituent has highlighted the unfairness of the current backdating rules. Susan Cole was eligible, but she did not know it. She was traumatised because of her condition and the system did not help her as it should have done. Her case demonstrates the need for change. I hope that my hon. Friend the Minister will consider my arguments and will review the backdating of DLA, focusing specifically on how we can widen the eligibility and increase the period of backdating.

I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Harlow (Mr. Rammell) on securing this debate on an important issue and making such an exemplary case on behalf of his constituent and a more general case on the need to look again at the backdating of disability living allowance and its sister benefit, attendance allowance.

I pay tribute to the enormous support that my hon. Friend gave to the range of improvements to disability benefits that the Government has been able to introduce, including the introduction of the disabled persons tax credit, the extension of the DLA higher rate mobility component to younger children aged three and four and the extension of incapacity benefit to people who are born disabled or are disabled so severely early in life that they are never able to work. Those important reforms are available to many people.

I also extend my sympathies to Mrs. Cole, who clearly suffered a terrible experience in 1996, when she went for a routine procedure at a private hospital. She claimed, and was awarded, incapacity benefit in 1996 and later, in 1999, she claimed disability living allowance and was awarded the lower rate mobility component. That award was made in respect of mobility needs arising from her experience in the hospital three years before. My hon. Friend argued powerfully that the symptoms arose from post-traumatic stress disorder, which she suffered as a result of the procedure.

Disability living allowance is not awarded because of particular symptoms or the existence of a particular disability or disease. It is awarded in respect of a disabled person's care needs or their mobility needs—the need for assistance with getting out and about. It is awarded because of a consequence of a disability rather than because of the disability itself.

I wholly accept that point. I was trying to show that the post-traumatic stress disorder led to Mrs. Cole being unable to look for benefits or be aware of them. That is what prevented her from claiming when she should have done.

I understand my hon. Friend's point. I shall refer to it later. As he has rightly pointed out, there are good cause procedures for some benefits. If someone can show good cause for not applying for the benefit earlier, they may get up to three months' backdating. A health problem that makes it difficult to apply is one such good reason.

I should explain a little more about the background to the benefit. Different people may be affected to a different extent by the same disability of the same severity. The amount of care or help with mobility that someone has as a result of a particular disease or disability may increase or decrease over time. The fact that someone has a particular mobility need in August 1999 does not necessarily establish that they had similar needs at an earlier date.

Mrs. Cole claimed disability living allowance on 2 August 1999. She was notified on 23 September that she had been awarded the benefit, but she asked for backdating. The rules on DLA and attendance allowance are clear. Unlike other benefits, they cannot be backdated. Under the present rules, the earliest date on which a claim can be paid is the date on which an inquiry was made at the Benefits Agency about the benefit. In this case, the relevant date is 2 August.

Decisions are made by adjudication officers—or, since October of last year, by decision makers in the Benefits Agency. Ministers cannot interfere in the individual decision any more than they can interfere in the decision of a court or any other judicial or quasi-judicial body. It appears that the rules were correctly applied in this case. My hon. Friend is asking whether the rules are appropriate and whether the Government should re-examine them.

One of Mrs. Cole's key complaints is that she did not know earlier than August of last year that she could claim disability living allowance. One of the fundamental rules of the benefit system is that the claimant has a responsibility to claim. My hon. Friend asked the Government to think about that. I shall think about it, but the basic reason for the rule is that the person claiming the benefit is the only one who knows about their needs—their medical or care needs if they are a disabled person, or their financial needs if they are claiming an income-related benefit. The Benefits Agency does not and cannot hold that knowledge, so it cannot have the ultimate responsibility to claim.

In a letter to me in February this year, my hon. Friend said that whether somebody knew of a benefit ought to be immaterial to a decision on whether they are entitled to it. I cannot agree with that. Only the claimant can know about their likely entitlement. The Benefits Agency does not have that knowledge.

However, I strongly agree with my hon. Friend that the Benefits Agency has a responsibility to inform the public of the existence of benefits, and to inform people how to claim them. He made a strong point about the low take-up of DLA: we ought to be able to do better with regard to take-up of DLA and attendance allowance.

We take seriously the requirement to inform the public, and spend more than £10 million a year on leaflets and posters. They are placed in post offices, doctors' surgeries and other appropriate places to try to ensure that people have the information that will enable them to decide whether they have a prima facie case and whether they should put in a claim.

My hon. Friend asked why the Benefits Agency does not send a leaflet to all those claiming incapacity benefit to advise them that they may be entitled to disability living allowance. In fact, it does: I have a copy of the claim pack used in 1996, when Mrs. Cole made her claim for incapacity benefit. The pack has changed slightly since then, but that does not affect the point that I want to make.

The claim pack contains a leaflet entitled "Notes About Incapacity Benefit", which contains advice about other benefits. The first of the other benefits mentioned in the section headed "Other help" is disability living allowance. It states that DLA is a

Social Security benefit for people with an illness of disability for people who need…help with getting around or…help with personal care or…help with both of these.

If you want to find out more about this, get leaflet DS 704 Disability Living Allowance—you could benefit from any Social Security office.

I do not think that it is enough for the Benefits Agency to say that it need do nothing else because that information is in the claim pack, but I hope that I have answered my hon. Friend's point. The wording has been amended slightly since 1996, but the information is still prominent.

My hon. Friend asked why we do not invite all people who claim incapacity benefit also to put in a claim for disability living allowance. I think that that would be a mistake. Only one third of people in receipt of incapacity benefit also receive DLA. The entitlement conditions are different, and it is not immediately obvious to people in a Benefits Agency office that a person entitled to one benefit should be entitled to the other.

Both benefits are, of course, awarded in relation to a medical condition, but they have different purposes and tests of entitlement. Therefore, entitlement to one does not necessarily mean entitlement to the other. If everyone claiming IB were invited to claim DLA, two thirds of those so invited probably would not be entitled to it.

As my hon. Friend knows, the Benefits Agency already experiences considerable difficulty in processing the volume of DLA claims. We want to encourage more claims from people likely to be entitled to the benefit, to ensure that the low take-up rate is raised, but we do not want to gum up the works with a lot of claims from people who are not entitled.

We therefore need to focus our publicity very carefully. We are introducing a number of new measures that I think will help with the problem identified by my hon. Friend. For example, we are piloting a new claims service for benefits for people of working age called "The ONE Service". It will bring together the work of the employment service and of the Benefits Agency. As a result, people claiming any working-age benefit, including incapacity benefit, will get counselling and advice about training and searching for available jobs, given that a million people on incapacity benefit say that they would like to work.

In addition, the new service will give advice about the full range of benefits, including DLA. That was not the case in 1996, before the general election, when Mrs. Cole applied for incapacity benefit. Had the new system been in place then, she would have been advised, in a one-to-one interview with a personal adviser, that other benefits were available. I hope that that will help to avoid unfortunate circumstances such as those that my hon. Friend has brought to the attention of the House.

A benefits inquiry line—on 0800 88 22 00—has also been established, and is a source of advice for thousands of people every day. In addition, we publish a wide range of leaflets and posters.

The Department has been working with a range of bodies representing disabled people to examine how to improve the gateway to disability living allowance. That working group of voluntary bodies has brought forward proposals for new tests of eligibility that it calls "Activities of Managing Life". In some ways, the tests are closer to those used in the personal capability assessment, which is the test of entitlement to incapacity benefit.

The proposed tests are not the same as the present IB entitlement tests, so it would not be possible for a person to undergo a single examination. However, they may facilitate better co-ordination of the benefits in future. I hope that we will be able to test the AML tests in small- scale pilot studies later this year, but any change would have to be fully debated in Parliament as it would require primary legislation.

Finally, we will be piloting shortly an exercise called "Keeping in Touch", under which officials from the Benefits Agency will contact people on incapacity benefit periodically to review their entitlement to that benefit, and to others. That is an attempt to improve take-up and the accuracy of the benefits being paid.

In the few minutes remaining, I want to talk about the problems that the Government would face if we were to allow DLA to be backdated, as are some other benefits. DLA is already the most complicated benefit of all, and it is also the most subjective. That is why so many applications for it are turned down.

For jobseeker's allowance, for example, it is fairly simple to determine whether a person is in work or not. Similarly, it is fairly easy to determine a person's income or level of savings when deciding a claim for income support. However, determining how much help a person needs, by day or by night, to cope with a disabling condition or a chronic illness is a matter of subjective judgment by a doctor.

A determination on DLA requires judgments from a number of doctors. Evidence will be submitted by a person's general practitioner, and also probably by a specialist. In certain cases, the Department's doctors will also submit evidence, and the decision will be made accordingly. However, it is hard for the person making the decision always to make the right one. We are trying to improve that, and to get decisions right first time, but nevertheless a high rate of decisions are being overturned on appeal—usually because new evidence is submitted at that stage.

It is hard to get such decisions right where there is contemporary medical evidence. It would be even harder if a doctor's feelings about a person's care needs six months or a year before were sought. Because of the difficulty in getting accurate evidence that would be an appropriate guide to decision making, the backdating for DLA that my hon. Friend suggests has never been considered possible.

Some conditions make it easier to make assumptions about past needs. For example, a rule in disability living allowance states that double amputees qualify for the higher rate mobility component without having to demonstrate mobility needs. For a person who underwent a double amputation a year before making a DLA claim, the prima facie case is that, had that person applied earlier, he or she would have been entitled to DLA.

However, that is not true for all conditions. For example, it would be extremely difficult in relation to mental health conditions—

I accept that the matter is extremely difficult, but should not the Government continue to consult—with people from the medical profession, and others—to see whether it would be possible to allow a limited extra backdating in accordance with a certain set of objective criteria? I am asking only that we keep looking at the problem.

I most certainly will keep looking at it. Some of the disability organisations already accuse us of unfairness, in that an amputee will automatically be entitled to DLA, but a person with a sensory disability, say, is much less likely to qualify.

I shall explore some other connected issues in correspondence with my hon. Friend. He has raised some very important matters, which have given the Government reason to pause. We will stop and think about what he has said, and I will reflect on his proposals with my officials. I shall write to my hon. Friend with a more detailed response.

The reason for this debate is to focus on the importance of volunteering and the voluntary sector and to provide some new thinking, in particular on time banks and the role that they can play not merely in promoting volunteering and assisting the voluntary, public and private sectors, but in rebuilding our communities.

There are a variety of volunteers and volunteering tasks, from the scouts, guides, girls and boys brigades, to hospital friends and those who go into schools to help children to read. I am sure that the Minister of State, the right hon. Member for Brent, South (Mr. Boateng), will agree that the volunteers in his constituency are as valuable to its life and vibrancy as volunteers are to mine. We need to celebrate them.

The borough of Kingston is blessed with volunteers—local organisations and community groups totalling more than 300. I take this opportunity to thank everyone who is involved with all those organisations because they have played such a key role in the royal borough. They are key in our area because, as the Minister will probably not be surprised to hear, we suffer from some underfunding. We are seen as a leafy borough. That means that such groups often struggle for funding, both from the local authority and the national lottery. We do not get our share of national lottery funding in Kingston, Mr. McWilliam, and therefore many of our groups struggle.

An umbrella body, Kingston Voluntary Action, tries to pull the groups together to assist them to develop. Unfortunately, it is strapped for cash, too. It is a shame that a certain political party in Kingston—the local Conservatives, who have a minority administration on Kingston council—has tried to cut the budgets of those struggling organisations. This year, it proposed a cut of £56,000. The Minister will probably be pleased to know that the Liberal Democrats, working with the Labour group on Kingston council, managed to restore those cuts and those much-needed funds for our voluntary groups.

Kingston churches are a strong source of volunteering. Kingston Churches Action on Homelessness plays a vital role in tackling our severe housing problems.

A superb network of people works for the local citizens advice bureau. I could not do my job as a Member of Parliament properly if I did not have the back up and support of the citizens advice bureau throughout Kingston. It does a fabulous job and has helped me on many occasions with the casework that I undertake for my constituents.

There are many social volunteers in Kingston. In mental health, we have MIND—National Association for Mental Health—and mental aid projects that undertake fabulous work. We have groups that focus on volunteering and promoting volunteers for senior citizens. CARE is a group in Chessington that brings people together to shop for, and talk to, each other and for house visits, and it does a fabulous job. We also have Age Concern and Milaap, which provide meals for elderly people from ethnic groups. There are voluntary organisations to help families. Welcare looks after families with financial problems and lone parents who need support.

We also have charities and voluntary groups that focus on those with disabilities, such as Kingston Association for Disabled People and Scope; on individuals in distress, such as Kaleidoscope, which is a cutting-edge drugs project, Kingston Bereavement Service and Victim Support; and on the needs of ethnic minorities, such as Kingston Racial Equality Council and Refugee Action. We have many such groups and they do a fabulous job. The challenge for us as politicians is to ensure that we value those groups, give them the support that they deserve, and encourage them to grow, so that more people volunteer and support the groups and more groups start up.

Time banks could play a role, not merely through the traditional form of volunteering, but through a new complementary form. Time banks move away slightly from the traditional notion of volunteering because a degree of mutuality is involved. People pledge time, for example to support someone by visiting them, shopping for them or giving them a lift, and receive a credit in the time bank. They can draw down on that credit for help from someone else. That is not the usual form of volunteering. Sometimes, people expect something back.

Interestingly, Mr. McWilliam, when the time banks are set up—

Order. Personally, I do not mind that form of address—I have been Mr. McWilliam for a long time. However, the House has directed that, for the purposes of this Chamber, I am Mr. Deputy Speaker.

Thank you for bringing me to order, Mr. Deputy Speaker.

In practice, although the time banks are based on mutuality, people often do not claim the credits that they have gained—they give them to other people or back to the time bank. However, they like the notion of being given time credits because it is recognition for the work that they have done for others. While some people believe that the banks are a totally different form of voluntary action, I believe that they are a way of getting people to volunteer who would otherwise not do so. That is their significant role: they help to build communities.

For that reason, time banks have a profound message on how we approach many areas of public policy and how we rebuild our communities. Indeed, the guru of time banks, an American, Edgar Cahn, described them as:

a tool for rebuilding community.

That is the core message that I would draw to the attention of the Chamber today.

Government policy on volunteering has been rather good. In recent weeks, the Prime Minister and the Chancellor of the Exchequer have made speeches supporting the voluntary sector. That is a welcome development. New Labour, unlike old Labour, does not appear to have any doubts about the important role that the sector plays, and that is welcome. The Prime Minister's speech at the Active Community convention and his idea for a paid day off for employees—he is to take the lead on that—are welcome, as is the millennium volunteers scheme and so forth.

Those ideas are important because it is clear from various surveys—the 1997 national survey on volunteering, for example—that volunteering is dropping off to some extent, in particular among young people. If we are to promote it and to ensure that it plays a central role, as it should, we must ensure that more people volunteer. That is where time banks have a role to play.

The time banks that I am describing are very different from the national time bank that was launched recently. That idea came from Comic Relief charity work. It is a good idea—a link between the BBC and the Government—getting people to visit a website and pledge their time to voluntary action and putting them in touch with people in their local community. I am talking about community-based, local time banks, which will be built, and participated in, by the people themselves.

I have given hon. Members a rough idea of what time banks are, but I will quote Edgar Cahn to give them a clearer notion. He described them as working like a blood bank or a baby sitting club. He wrote:

Help a neighbour and then when you need it, a neighbour, most likely a different one, will help you.

The system is based on equality. One hour of help means one time dollar, whether the task is grocery shopping or making out a tax return. In the Edgar Cahn scheme, the credits are kept in individual accounts in a bank or personal computer. Credits and debits are tallied regularly. In America, some of the time banks provide monthly balance statements, to record the flow of good deeds.

Time is the unit of currency. The idea is similar to the local exchange trading systems—LETS schemes—but is simpler because it focuses simply on hours of time, which buy things that money cannot buy, such as friendship, neighbourliness, community and people helping each other.

It is time spent visiting people or on small tasks, small DIY, childcare, caring for carers and listening to people. Therefore, it is a powerful currency. Time banks are a good way to organise our individual time for the collective good to make our community a better place. They can work on housing estates to do things that the council and housing associations would never do, or in general practitioner's practices—a prescription written for someone's time, what a marvellous idea. There can be time banks in a community centre, a prison, a school or a village. They can be turned to a variety of needs. They could be focused on the needs of education and training. People could provide courses for others as part of their volunteering. In schools, older pupils might mentor younger pupils and help them with their homework. Time banks can be applied to healthy living; they can break down the barriers between people and could, I believe, do marvellous things when it comes to the improvement of mental health. In addition, of course, time banks can be used to help the elderly.

Let me be clear on what is involved in making time banks work. They are very simple. A little technology helps, but basically they can be run by one person who would be paid as the broker of people's time. That person might need a small room, a telephone, a refurbished computer on which to run a small piece of software to manage the bank and produce the statements of the debits and credits that people have accrued over a month or a quarter. The person running the bank and some of those helping might need training on vetting and monitoring people, and on how to run the software. Getting time banks up and running requires only tiny amounts of money. Those tiny amounts of money can lever in huge amounts of time.

There are many working examples of the system in the United States. Seventeen inner-city schools in Chicago have a type of time bank system. Children mentoring others earn time dollars, which they can use to buy refurbished computers. What is amazing is that not only are computers recycled, but also the grades in the schools go up and bullying is reduced. We see a virtuous circle in schools that were previously failing.

Health insurance companies in Brooklyn use the system to improve health care facilities for their members. In Sentara hospital in Richmond, Virginia, the costs of dealing with asthma fell by 70 per cent. because of volunteers counselling people whose children and families were suffering from asthma.

I know of 11 projects in Britain that are using the time bank idea. There are two in Newcastle, and one was recently set up in Lewisham, in the Rushey Green doctors' practice, which is taking tremendous strides in promoting primary care. There is an hour bank in Peckham, a time swap in Watford and six fair share schemes in Gloucestershire, which promote a real sense of community in local villages and towns.

These projects are working now, providing huge social benefits. They are meeting some of the Government's key goals in rebuilding communities and putting people back to useful work. I think that they could be an adjunct to the new deal. There could be involvement with the sure start scheme. They could even be linked to the individual learning accounts.

I conclude by asking the Government to do five things to take time banks on to the next stage and build on the success that we have already seen. First, will the Minister be a strong advocate of time banks within the Government? I should like him to tell the Prime Minister about time banks.

Secondly, will the Minister ensure that people in the Government's policy units and task forces are told about the system so that they can study it in depth to see how it could be used to our benefit? Will the social exclusion unit, in particular, study time banks? Could time banks be built into the neighbourhood renewal strategy that is due to be published?

Thirdly, I should like the Minister to sort out a problem with the benefits system. In Newcastle, the social services departments are assessing time credits earned as income, and withdrawing benefit from those who earn them. I think that that is wrong, and I hope that the Minister will undertake to look into that problem.

Fourthly, can time banks play a proactive role in the Government's various modernisation programmes in education, health and crime?

Finally, the Minister will not be surprised to know that I want his assurance that he will ask the Chancellor to provide some money to promote time banks. I am not talking about huge amounts of money—billions of pounds, say—but a few million pounds. Only a tiny amount is required to establish and run time banks. If a few million pounds—a pot of money—could be found in the forthcoming comprehensive spending review, possibly through the social investment task force that the Chancellor announced recently, and local communities and organisations could make bids for money to set up their own time bank, that would greatly encourage this development.

I believe that the Government should be sympathetic to this idea. They have certainly made sympathetic noises so far. This surely is the third way that we have heard about from new Labour thinkers, and I hope that the Minister will embrace it.

I am delighted to respond to the debate. The hon. Member for Kingston and Surbiton (Mr. Davey) is to be congratulated on choosing this topic. The voluntary sector and volunteering play a crucial part in the local infrastructure of our communities. The hon. Gentleman has shared with us a useful insight into the 300 or so groups in his constituency. As he took us on a Cook's tour of some of the highlights of the voluntary sector in his constituency, I was, with my hon. Friend the Member for High Peak (Mr. Levitt), reflecting on how each of us, in our own constituency, could engage in a similar exercise and how the community life of our constituencies and our work is enriched by the experience, wisdom and activity encapsulated by volunteers.

It made absolute sense, therefore, for the Government to take forward an agenda that the Prime Minister has initiated and described as supporting active communities and the Chancellor has characterised as an exhibition of civic patriotism. It made sense that we should take forward a body of work—across government but led by the Home Office and its active community unit—to highlight and deliver a step change in the contribution of volunteering to the development of strong and sustainable communities. Therefore, we are looking, in this year, to see an increase in the number of people who are giving of their time, efforts and energy to voluntary activities.

The latest survey available to us showed that 29 per cent. of adults gave time regularly to such activity at least once a month and that 74 per cent. of adults have taken part in informal voluntary activity during the past year. That effort is vital to the success of our communities, and we want to see it stepped up. However, it is not part of the Government's role to preach or moralise. We need to inspire, support and create a context in which it is possible to have that explosion of giving of which the Prime Minister has spoken.

Volunteering is at the heart of strong, successful communities, and we want it to stay that way. We recognise what individuals can contribute to their communities, as well as the potential that they can unlock in themselves through voluntary activity. The life skills, experience and sense of common purpose that the hon. Gentleman has described in his constituency are engendered by volunteering.

We need to bring together voluntary organisations, business, the media and others to ensure that an active community strategy takes root to rebuild and refurbish that sense of community throughout the country. That is part of the role of the working group led by my noble Friend Lord Warner. We need to base that strategy on the experience of groups such as the one in the constituency of the hon. Member for Kingston and Surbiton. I assure him that I shall feed back into that process the experience of the time bank in Kingston and Surbiton and the value that he attaches to it.

There is no time bank in Kingston and Surbiton, although I hope that we shall create one. The experience is in other areas; I know of 11 such groups.

We shall draw on the experience to which the hon. Gentleman refers in order to ensure that, as the Government's strategy is developed and rolled out, it acknowledges the role of time banks. We have not lost sight of their contribution. Indeed, our funding aims to help about 120 time banks get started by March 2003. The hon. Gentleman's constituency may be a beneficiary of that funding. I shall be happy to ensure that the active community unit informs him of the opportunities for support that are available for the time bank group in his constituency.

We must ensure that communities are enabled and empowered to determine how best to meet their local needs through the voluntary sector. The last thing that we want to do is to apply top-down solutions to local community issues. One of the great strengths of the voluntary sector is its independence and its closeness to the grass roots.

Sometimes, Liberal Democrats make the error of suggesting that new Labour has only just discovered the voluntary sector and that the grass roots are the sole preserve of the Liberal Democrats. I have news for the hon. Gentleman. We were, and are, the grass roots in the communities that we represent. We represent a good handful more constituents than the Liberal Democrats—

Ten times more.

My hon. Friend is right.

We well understand the importance of grass-roots community activity; the voluntary sector is an strong manifestation of that. I shall highlight several strands of the work on volunteering in the wider community on which we are engaged. In 1999–2000, the active community unit distributed about £17.1 million in grants to the voluntary and community sectors. In the current financial year, there will be £17.5 million. Resources are being made available. The time bank concept is important.

The report of policy action team 9 on community self-help provided about 33 recommendations to increase community activity and informal mutual support in our poorer neighbourhoods. A key plank of the strategy is to raise such activity in all neighbourhoods, not only in deprived ones. We do not want a stereotypical view of the voluntary sector as largely the preserve of the leafy suburbs—as the hon. Gentleman characterises his constituency. The sector has an important role to play in rural areas and in urban centres. It takes different forms in different places, but its value everywhere is that it binds communities together and is a reflection of them.

The strategy on which we have embarked is important. It is not about the provision of quick-fix solutions—there are none. It is a strategy for active communities over a five or 10-year period. The building blocks are being put in place. The hon. Gentleman referred to several of the Government's initiatives—for older volunteers, for young people and for black and minority ethnic communities—and to the millennium volunteer scheme. Those projects are rooted in community experience. Furthermore, we work with employers in large, medium and small businesses, to stress the value to them of promoting and supporting volunteering in the local communities that they serve. We can undertake such work together; it is about partnership and about unlocking community resources. We must do all that we can to make it possible.

The hon. Gentleman referred to the initiatives announced by the Chancellor in the Budget. We have taken steps to ensure that the Inland Revenue does not regard the benefits of time banks as taxable. I note the concerns expressed by the hon. Gentleman about the Department of Social Security. The Department is already considering benefits issues. It will be important for local offices to reflect in their approach to volunteers and volunteering the support that the Government has shown for the activities of the voluntary sector. I shall speak to the Under-Secretary of State for Social Security, my hon. Friend the Member for Wallasey (Angela Eagle) about the problem in Newcastle to which the hon. Gentleman referred. We want to ensure that there is joined-up thinking in this matter.

It is a good news story, although we should not be complacent. We shall introduce new initiatives. My commitment to the hon. Gentleman is that we shall ensure that the example of good practice set by his community is taken on board. We shall celebrate together the work of the voluntary sector in building strong and effective communities. We have a real opportunity to mark the new millennium so that the spirit of the voluntary sector remains intact and is strengthened through what we do in the House and in Government but, above all, through what we do out there in the wider community

I am pleased to have the opportunity to raise the issue of pay for non-pay review body national health service staff. It is particularly appropriate that the issue should be discussed in the House today, when many Members are receiving visits from constituents as part of the lobby of Parliament by MSF—the Manufacturing Science and Finance Union—for fair pay for all NHS professionals.

By way of introduction, I should explain who is covered by the label "non-pay review body staff." When the NHS is mentioned, people mostly think of the important work of doctors and nurses, without which the NHS could not function. Those and many other direct patient clinical professions are covered by pay review bodies, which independently review salaries each year and make recommendations to Government, but in addition to the 600,000 staff who are covered by pay review bodies, there are another 300,000 to 400,000 staff without whom the NHS could not function.

Those staff are not covered by pay review bodies and do not receive the same recognition as is given to those who are traditionally seen as front-line staff. They include laboratory technicians who analyse specimens, pharmacists, hospital physicists, speech and language therapists, as well as ambulance, estates, domestic and administrative staff and others. All those people together make up the NHS. All of them are vital to the end product of quality patient care.

It is only through all those groups of people working together that we produce good-quality patient care, yet successive Governments have failed to regard all NHS staff as full members of one team, pulling together for patient care. Instead, staff have been divided into the categories of pay review and non-pay review bodies, leading the latter group to feel like second-class citizens in the NHS. There should be an end to that division, which has a particularly negative impact on pay and morale for those staff.

The debate follows recent ones led by the hon. Members for Twickenham (Dr. Cable) and for Winchester (Mr. Oaten), who raised issues on biomedical scientists and pathology services. However, I should like to address the issue of pay as it affects all non-pay review body staff: the pharmacists without whom we could not use medicines in the NHS, the estates and domestic staff who keep patients fed and housed in as good an environment as possible and, yes, those often maligned administrative staff in the NHS, without whom it could not function either.

Doctors and nurses together are the biggest group of staff in the NHS and do a fantastic job, but the NHS is much more than doctors and nurses. I hope that the debate goes some way towards recognising that.

The Government deserves congratulation on the work that they have already done on pay. They have recognised many of the problems. They have awarded significant pay rises to many staff in the NHS and are addressing many of the issues that lead to a decline in morale. In its pay strategy "Agenda for Change" the Government set out their vision for replacing the incredibly complex current pay system.

With the current system, suitcases would be needed to carry all the books covering the terms and conditions of staff. The Government want to replace that system with three national pay spines: one for doctors and dentists, one for staff currently covered by the nurses pay review body and one for other staff not covered by pay review bodies.

That simplification is welcome and must be the way forward, but the three pay spines still leave non-pay review body staff vulnerable to continuing to be left behind, with the consequent loss in recognition, pay and morale. I hope that we will hear from the Government today a guarantee that that will not happen.

The concerns of non-pay review body staff are real. Since 1984, pay increases for staff covered by PRBs have been around 30 per cent. higher than awards to non-pay review body staff.

That has left, even after this year's pay offer, a graduate trainee medical laboratory scientific officer starting work on £9,400, compared with a nurse starting on £14,400. The comparisons with graduate salaries outside the NHS are even starker, but it is not only graduates who receive low pay. Many in the NHS work tirelessly for patients, both in direct patient care and behind the scenes, for very low pay. The Government need to take action to ensure that all NHS staff feel supported and rewarded in their roles.

The current division into pay review body and non-pay review body staff demoralises staff in the second group. It adds to the bad feeling created under the previous Government. Under their proposals for private finance initiative schemes, staff were divided into core and non-core staff. The latter were offered out to private sector contractors, giving the staff affected a feeling that they were peripheral to the NHS, when they clearly were not.

Again, the Government are to be congratulated on the fact that, while getting on and building hospitals under the PFI to see what they can deliver for patients, they have found a way to ensure that future PFIs do not have to classify staff as either core or non-core staff in that divisive way. However, I urge the Government to go further.

Staff pay can be affected by whether the service that they provide is done in-house or by a private contractor. Although the Government say that doctors and nurses are safeguarded from being transferred to private contractors, the Minister of State, Department of Health, my hon. Friend the Member for Southampton, Itchen (Mr. Denham), tells me that the Government are not dogmatic when it comes to support services, and that pay and conditions for those staff could be set by private contractors, who would be able to take over contracts for support services where they can offer greater value to patients. That again sounds like one rule and one lot of pay and conditions for one lot of NHS staff, and another rule for another group of staff.

Someone once described the NHS to me as a perfect illustration of the British class system, where groups are divided into categories whose members ostensibly live and work in the same world, but which actually do much to ensure that the dividing lines between them remain in place. Doctors defend their separate dining rooms with the utmost vigour and porters do not feel that they can make suggestions for improvements to services because they will not be listened to. Those attitudes are changing, but they can still be found in parts of the NHS. It is only by changing those attitudes that we will maximise the benefits for patients.

I turn to some specifics of this year's and next year's pay rounds. Although the Government improved their original offer, the 3.25 per cent. award, with a pledge for next year of at least 0.5 per cent. above inflation, will not solve the problems of recruitment and retention for some groups of scientific and laboratory workers in particular.

I recognise that some of the worst paid staff benefited from much higher increases, but they affect only a small number of non-pay review body staff and still do not go far enough towards solving the significant recruitment and morale problems.

In my constituency of South Swindon, our hospital has 12 vacancies out of a complement of 50 lab staff. The resulting pressure on the remaining staff is unsustainable in the long term. The Government must therefore not allow pay awards for non-pay review body staff to fall further behind those of the review bodies.

Swindon is not unusual in that respect. The pressure in its labs exists in many other areas. That is why the MSF is lobbying Parliament today. It thinks that the proposed pay awards are inadequate and will not have a big enough impact on those problems. Those concerns are shared by many Members. There are 92 signatories to early-day motion 461 on the issue.

The Government must listen. A further deterioration in the situation must be prevented. In a sense, it seems unfair that, in three years, the Government are being asked to put right 18 years of the knocking down of public services by their Tory predecessors—it is unrealistic to ask for all the problems to be solved overnight, but the issue of low pay in particular for non-pay review body staff is a real one. There is a risk that, unless more can be done, the Government will alienate a loyal and long-serving staff from the NHS for good, with the consequent reduction in quality services for patients.

NHS staff who are not visible in the delivery of front-line care find it harder to attract media attention and to generate public sympathy for their cause. Their position is not as well understood. Subsequently, the pressure on Government to deliver change is considerably less, but pay awards should be decided on their own merits, not on staff's ability to command a high public profile, or to attract media attention. That is unlikely to be achieved if all NHS staff are not covered by the same pay review arrangements.

I recognise that the Government are working with the National Advisory Group for Scientists and Technicians to develop an employment environment that is attractive to and supportive of these staff, but that is a promise of jam tomorrow for them. Until more is delivered, many non-pay review body staff will not have the confidence that their needs will be met.

The recruitment and retention problems to which low pay contributes have serious implications in terms of costs to the NHS. Not only are vital services understaffed and overstretched, but an exorbitant amount is spent on agency staff. For example, a medical laboratory scientific officer at the top of the scale receives £360 a week, and a locum to fill a vacancy at that level costs £603 a week—a difference of about £13,000 a year. Such figures show that if a larger pay award were made to NHS staff, the NHS would have to rely less on agency staff, and that a larger award would be cheaper for the NHS than a lower one.

I know that in my constituency the spending on agency staff in laboratories is high, and hard-working NHS staff cannot understand why greater funds cannot go into recruiting and retaining NHS staff. They also find it ironic that while all UK staff have to be registered, overseas agency staff do not go through that process, so more is being spent on possibly less well-trained staff. It cannot make sense for so many trusts to be relying on agency staff to run labs when a better pay award would attract more NHS staff to the profession as trainees and full-time staff.

As the Government rightly point out when announcing pay awards, in the face of what sometimes seems like opposition by the Tories, there is not a straight trade-off between paying staff less and having more money for patient services. Of course there may be an element of that, but there is also a win-win element because paying staff fairly reaps huge benefits in increased commitment and less stress and sickness, and that leads to better patient services.

I have already mentioned the positive improvements to the pay system that the Government set out in "Agenda for Change". They state that

modern forms of health care rely on flexible teams of staff working across traditional skill boundaries.

That strengthens the argument for going further than the document outlines and creating a single pay spine and a single pay review body for all NHS staff, facilitating and encompassing that extra flexibility.

Progress on pay should be matched by progress on harmonisation of conditions of service; it is illogical to address one without the other. One example would be to reduce the working week of ancillary staff.

It is essential that avoidable divisions in the work force do not undermine the Government's vision for a united, modern NHS. Different pay arrangements for different groups of workers cannot achieve that as effectively. NHS staff should not be made to feel that some are more important than others and some more dispensable than others. Every cog, however small, is necessary to ensure that this huge machine works well. I remember Frank Dobson describing the NHS as an oil tanker that needed to be turned around. Well, it is the staff who will turn that tanker around, and they are doing so. However, unless they pull together we will not turn it around quickly. Staff should not be set one against the other so that they pull in different directions and fight among themselves.

In spite of the divisions in the pay structure, there are many examples of staff in the NHS working well together in teams, and it is those smooth-running teams that produce the best patient care. However, to get those teams working better and to replicate that work throughout the NHS, we need an end to the divisive pay structure in the NHS.

Ultimately the aim is to deliver high-quality patient care, and that is what the Government want to achieve. Good progress has been made on NHS pay. The Labour Government are putting right many of the problems created by the Tories, and staff and unions recognise and welcome that. However, as negotiations for new pay levels draw to a conclusion in the coming months, it is essential that the Government demonstrate their commitment to the vital staff outside the scope of the pay review bodies.

We know that problems cannot be solved overnight, but we need to know what steps will be taken to tackle the problems of recruitment, retention, low morale and inadequate pay, now and in the future. One united system bringing together all the staff in the NHS would send out the clear message of admiration and respect that all NHS workers deserve.

Order. I did not want to break the hon. Lady's flow, but, before I call the Minister, I must point out that the former Secretary of State for Health should be referred to in this Chamber as the right hon. Member for Holborn and St. Pancras (Mr. Dobson).

I apologise, Mr. Deputy Speaker.

I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for South Swindon (Ms Drown) on being successful in the ballot for this debate and on deciding to raise the matter of remuneration for non-review body staff in the NHS. As my hon. Friend said, this is a very important group of staff, numbering more than 300,000.

NHS staff whose pay is not determined by the doctors and dentists review body or the nurses review body are a diverse and wide-ranging group covering many different occupations. As my hon. Friend said, it is often too easy to give the impression that it is only doctors and nurses who run the NHS. Non-review body staff play a vital role in delivering high quality health care to patients.

The largest of those groups is administrative and clerical staffs who provide essential secretarial and management support and look after medical records and computers. Ancillary workers including cooks, cleaners, porters and maintenance staff such as electricians are essential to the successful running of every hospital. Ambulance staff, including paramedics and those working in the control room, directly contribute to saving countless lives each year.

Clinical psychologists, speech and language therapists and health care pharmacists directly provide specialised patient care. NHS scientists and other scientific and technical staff make a crucial contribution to patient care through their work on diagnostic techniques and treatment, playing vital roles in the treatment of people with life-threatening conditions such as cancer and coronary heart disease. I, too, want to begin by emphasising the importance of the work done by those different staff groups, all of whom deserve fair and affordable pay awards.

As my hon. Friend recognised, we have made a strong commitment to all non-review body staff groups. For the first time in the history of the NHS, we have been able to guarantee above-inflation rises not just for one year, but for three years.

In January, we offered all non-review body staff an innovative above-inflation three-year deal that gives special help to the lowest paid. We have made some progress, at least, because from this year no adult worker in the NHS on a national contract will earn less than £4 an hour. That is the first longer-term deal of its kind in the public sector. I believe that it does give staff the security of real-terms increases for the whole of that period. Last year's increase has resulted in a real-terms increase of 1.4 per cent. We project that by the end of our three-year deal, pay increases will amount to at least 9.25 per cent. against projected inflation of 6.5 per cent.

Those figures should be compared with the increases awarded by the previous Government. During their last five years in office, rises ranged from below the rate of inflation to a meagre 0.4 per cent. above inflation.

In January, staff were offered increases of 3 per cent. or £250, whichever was greater, from April 1999, 3.25 per cent. or £300 from April 2000 and a minimum of the underlying rate of inflation plus 0.5 per cent. for next year. As a result some 75,000 of the lowest-paid staff working in the NHS will benefit, including porters, messengers, storekeepers and domestic staff. They will receive an average 3.2 per cent. in year 1 and 3.7 per cent. in year 2.

In addition, as part of the long-term deal, our pay offer for April 1999–2000 makes special provision for some of the scientific, professional and technical groups. Junior health care pharmacists received increases of up to 12 per cent. All scientists have been offered at least 3 per cent., and about half of all biomedical scientists—some 6,000 in the lower grades—have been offered 7 per cent. to address special recruitment problems.

Trainee biomedical scientists have been offered a particular deal, too. There are about 1,000 of them altogether, and around 100 at the bottom end of the scale have been offered 26 per cent., and we have offered the rest increases ranging from 7 to 22 per cent. by restructuring their pay scale. In addition, we have offered to increase London weighting by 13.5 per cent. to restore it to 1995 values.

I do think that that is a fair offer in the current circumstances. We needed to target funds where the need was demonstrably greatest—to address recruitment and retention problems that would have damaged patient care. There is a problem in recruiting staff at the bottom end of the biomedical scientist scale, including medical laboratory scientific officers and path lab staff. We recognised that, and have offered larger increases to staff in that part of the profession. That means that some pathology staff will be getting more than many review body staff; biomedical scientists are receiving a rise of up to 7 per cent., and trainees up to 26 per cent. That compares favourably with the 4.7 per cent. awarded to most nurses in 1999-2000.

The current position is that unions representing about 75 per cent. of non-review body staff have now accepted our offer. Advance letters instructing employers to implement the pay increases have now been issued for administrative, clerical, ancillary and ambulance staff. I look forward to the remaining groups being able to benefit from this long-awaited award in the near future.

The offers have been made within the context of the current pay system, and it is worth pointing out that that system allows considerable flexibility to address the needs of key groups of staff. There is, for instance, the provision within Whitley to restructure on-call and call-out payments to suit local service organisation. This and similar action has been taken by a number of NHS employers in order to pay staff more attractively to ensure that key services are provided when they are needed. One example that is local to my constituency is the Winchester and Eastleigh Healthcare Trust, where staff working in biochemistry and haematology may have their annual pay increased by £3,744 for providing on-call services twice a month.

More widely, there is also provision to offer local pay supplements of up to 30 per cent. in the London area and 20 per cent. elsewhere, specifically to address recruitment and retention issues where management considers that proven problems could be redressed by pay enhancement. That is one way of addressing the reliance on agency staff to which my hon. Friend referred.

I have set out the current offer and the flexibility that exists, but everyone accepts the need to modernise the NHS pay system, which is outdated and has become a barrier to modernising working practices. Too often, services have to be organised around the barriers created by the pay system rather than around the needs of patients. My hon. Friend rightly spoke of the importance of teamwork in the NHS involving different professional and occupational groups and across traditional barriers.

As part of its modernisation, we intend to make a substantial investment in the NHS to enable services to be more patient-centred. Staffs need to be encouraged to work effectively in fluid and flexible teams to provide seamless care. They need to break down professional demarcation lines and work in partnership across professional and other occupational groups.

The problem with the current pay system is that it reinforces the barriers and the inflexible ways of working that the current system promotes by tying staff incomes to ways of working that go against team working and patient-centred care. It is also frustrating for staff because it is not always clear to them how the responsibilities of their jobs and the competences that they develop are actually rewarded in their pay at present.

Over the next five years, the Government intend to modernise the care system—health and social care alike—from head to toe. Modernisation of the system is necessary to secure a lasting improvement in people's health and to tackle inequalities.

Hon. Members will be aware that last week's Budget announced substantial injections of funding into the NHS—an extra £1.4 billion for the NHS in England plus additional revenue from taxation on tobacco. Those extra resources represent a huge opportunity to modernise the NHS and improve patient care. We must not waste that opportunity. No one should be in any doubt about what the public expect us to do with the money. If we fail to produce improvements in patient care where they are most needed to tackle ill health and inequalities in health care, we will be judged to have failed to deliver the changes the public and NHS staff expect and deserve.

We need to make sure that we can continue to make fair and affordable pay offers, to address recruitment and retention and—fundamentally—to invest in a pay system which rewards new and better ways of working. That is why on 15 February last year we published "Agenda for Change", which outlines our proposals for modernising the NHS pay system. We want a new system that is based on efficiency, fairness, flexibility and partnership and gives all staff better career progression and fairer rewards for taking on extended roles, widening their skills and working in teams. We want to give all staff modern conditions of service. My hon. Friend mentioned working hours and other issues that will inevitably arise in negotiations.

We also want to provide a fair basis for pay rises in the security of a national pay system. That will entail substantial changes to the current system in which staff are often defined by a combination of their titles, their pay and how they are trained rather than by what they do for patients. It means changing the existing conditions of service, with their range of arcane allowances which too often distort working patterns.

Over the past year, we have had positive and constructive discussions with trade unions, NHS health professionals and NHS staff on the proposals set out in "Agenda for Change". I genuinely believe that we are working in a real partnership with all the recognised unions to make sure that the concerns of all staff groups are properly represented.

"Agenda for Change" proposes three pay spines for doctors and dentists, an expanded healthcare professional group and a single negotiating council for staff groups whose skills are attractive to employers outside the NHS. Although we propose different mechanisms for pay uplift for those three groups, it is essential—and it is recognised in the agreements that we have reached so far—that there should be a means to ensure that future pay increases on the three spines do not result in different rates of pay for jobs of equal value which could not be justified under the relevant legislation.

We also recognise that, for various reasons—often rooted in history—some smaller groups of highly qualified health professionals are outside the remit of the nursing pay review body. Those groups could well be included, although it is not intended that there should be any change to the fundamentally professional character of the coverage of the NPRB. As I have said in several debates over the past two or three months, it is too early in the negotiations to be specific about proposals for particular staff groups, but the matter is under discussion. I am confident that pay modernisation will bring benefits to all NHS staff, whether or not they are covered by a review body.

We have the opportunity to change the pay system for the better so that staff can be rewarded fairly for the work that they do rather than the title that they hold. We need the flexibility to design jobs within the security of a national pay system, to offer better career progression and modern terms and conditions for all staff and crucially, to allow managers and staff to deliver the quality of services that everyone wants. A national system of job evaluation will allow creative approaches to job design to match exactly the redesigned care processes that are so important to patients. If our negotiations continue to be successful, I hope that we will have an agreed package by the summer so that we can move ahead to implement locally and nationally to an agreed time scale over the coming years.

Although pay is important, it is not the only thing that matters to NHS staff. The quality of their working lives is also important. My hon. Friend mentioned people not being listened to and feeling that their views were not of value because they did not belong to the right profession or group of staff. She will know that, over the past year or so, we have undertaken an extensive exercise on staff participation within the NHS and I hope that we shall be able to publish a report and the Government's response to the staff participation proposals in the very near future.

We recognised from the outset that it is important that all staff in the NHS should have the ability to contribute their views about how services should be run and the right to expect those views to be listened to and taken seriously.

We are not prepared to leave good employment practice to chance. We are developing more supportive, flexible and family-friendly working practices; we are extending and improving investment in lifelong learning and professional development: we are tackling violence and racism in the workplace and we are insisting that employers make those changes happen by setting clear priorities and targets to improve employment practice.

My hon. Friend has raised some important issues, some of which we have been able to address in the offers that we have made recently and others which we shall need to address in the context of wider change, but I am sure that we shall continue to make progress.