Baroness Smith of Basildon (Lab)

The noble Lord will not be surprised that I fundamentally disagree with the point he made. Every time our Government have made a commitment to defence spending, we have kept that commitment. That is an absolute commitment. The noble Lord wants to tie that in with welfare reform. I have not heard anybody say that the situation that this Government inherited on social security and welfare spending is not one that needs to change. There are many measures within that Bill that practically everybody in the other place has supported. An example is the idea that somebody who gets a PIP and is disabled who wants to try to work should not go to the back of the queue and have to go through the system again if working fails. They should be able to try work to see whether it is suitable for them. The system that we have inherited needs change, and that change will continue. The Bill has passed tonight. People agreed on the issue of reform. They now want to look at the detail. That is the process of legislation. The noble Lord was a Chief Whip in the other place. He knows how the process of legislation works. He lost enough votes himself to recognise how difficult it can be. What can never be accepted is that it is right to write some people off in the system and say that, even though they want to work, we are not going to help them to do so. Those are the measures that we are going to put in place. To link this to the Prime Minister’s comments about economic, national and social security, all these things make up what is good about life, the importance of life and the resilience we all need. Our safety, our resilience and how we treat the nation all link together, and that is how you have a healthy society that supports each other.