Baroness Smith of Basildon (Lab)

I am grateful to my noble friend for her question, because it gets to the nub of many of the issues. Support is already being given to young people to start in these new guaranteed jobs, and those jobs are being taken up now as we speak. If you can reshape the system so that people do not feel they are being written off, and there is money available for employers to take on apprentices, with jobs available at the end of that system, then that is what matters. We are not just waiting for the Milburn review; there is work ongoing already on some of the things that Alan Milburn has said in his conclusions, such as increasing face-to-face assessments, providing personalised work programmes and providing employment support, with £3.5 billion for employers taking on those who want to work. People have dismissed this Government too quickly in saying we have done nothing on welfare reform, but an important thing that we have done is providing a right to try work for people with disabilities. Too often, it had been assumed that people with disabilities could not work, and if they could, they had to give up any benefits and simply leave those, and if it did not work out for them, they would have to apply again. Now, there is a gap where they can apply to work, can try to work and get the opportunity to do so. When it comes to these types of issues, we need to pay for success rather than keep paying for failure, which is what happened over the last 10 years.