Select Committee on Education and Employment Minutes of Evidence


Examination of Witnesses (Questions 220 - 233)

WEDNESDAY 5 JULY 2000

MS CANDY MUNRO, MR JONATHAN BALDREY AND MR WILLIAM ROE

  220. Kay Stratton told us that the New Deal task force did not think there were many who were doing this or who were capable of doing it very quickly.
  (Mr Baldrey) There was a comment that was made in the seminar that we had on intermediaries by one of the Americans. There was a comment made which was, had the Government tried to close the intermediaries down they could not have made it more difficult for us to operate. A lot of us still exist today, despite programmes like New Deal, et cetera, et cetera. We have not put in a bid for the Innovation Fund because, to be honest, it was not worth writing a bid sum for that sum of money because there are other pots of money flying around at the moment. There is a lot of money around at the moment. I say it is not worth putting in a bid, it is another contract, another contract management, another series of claims, another series of evaluations. I would rather go for other pots of money which are easier to bid for. What may well happen with the intermediaries fund, I agree with what Candy has just said, is it is probably going to end up funding organisations that, as I said earlier, want to pretend they are intermediaries, so we will have a load of new competitors who will come into the market. I think that it will probably take a few months for those competitors to be flushed out again. I think the other thing is that you are asking for a huge amount of work for the amount of money that each bid is going to sustain. If you look at action teams, the money has just come out, which is well over £10 million, as I understand it, it has just appeared in the market without any great fuss about that money coming into the market, whereas intermediaries had a series of dancing girls going out and claiming it is coming out. It is a lot of fuss that is being made about a small pot of money.
  (Ms Munro) There is another issue here that has not cropped up under the intermediaries fund. During the discussions last year around intermediaries it was identified that there were areas in the country that were intermediary rich and areas in the country that were intermediary poor. There is a real need for best practice to be shared more evenly up and down the country. We were just discussing this before we came in this afternoon. Jonathan and I spend a lot of time talking to other organisations about the effectiveness of intermediaries. We have had discussions about should there be a school for intermediaries or some mechanism to develop and disseminate best practice. That has been a missed opportunity as well and that might be something that could be considered under the next round of intermediaries: how can more effective intermediaries help fledgling intermediaries to develop, in areas where we do not exist?
  (Mr Roe) Can I make three comments about different levels of innovation. To pick up on Candy's last point, I work with New Deals and the Zones, and all that, around the United Kingdom all of the time. It is immensely striking how poor the country is at learning quickly from the experience of others on all sorts of small things. There are lots and lots and lots of very interesting and effective practices around the country which are not getting the oxygen that they need to be transferred rapidly, applied rapidly and adapted for different circumstances.

  221. Can you tell us why?
  (Mr Roe) I will tell you why. I have thought long and hard about this, it is part of my everyday life. The tradition of large public sector organisations, and to be honest large private sector ones as well, especially national institutions, is that information and ideas and experience and results go up to the centre and the entire structure of national public services is about that. There is a command and control system which goes like that and material goes like that. That is a culture which is generations old and it is very hard to break. What you need to do to achieve rapid learning from experience close to the ground are very horizontal systems of learning. A lot of money is spent on long term evaluations of programmes, I do not knock that at all, it is an important thing to do where you get the results a year after the programme has ended or the phase has ended and then policy makers get hold of that and think and politicians get hold of it and it changes things three or five years down the line. I do not knock that a bit but as well as that long wave of evaluation and learning we need thousands of short waves which happen each week. Big bureaucracies find it very hard to put in place systems that make that happen. My own company put a proposal to the Government three years ago this week actually, this very, very week, which was around creating for the country a system which would allow that to happen. It was not going to be expensive, it was peanuts in terms of investment, and it was going to be assisted by technology and by study visits and secondments attached, all the things we know work in the horizontal thing. It was never even responded to. Maybe the proposal was not a good one. We got other people to review it and refresh it and put it in again a year later and dead as a duck. If we look at the amount of stuff that goes like that it is vast and if we look at the amount of staff that goes like that it is paultry. The second point is that at the level of significant intermediaries I think it is a question to be asked for the future about whether dependence on public sector contracts which come and go internally is the best way forward or do we not need to recognise that 20 years from now we will still need an infrastructure of labour market intermediations, so why do we not recognise this as part of a system rather than seeing it as something to get us over a problem? We would not think of primary care service as something to get us over a hump, we see it as part of the fabric of society. Why do we not see labour market intermediation as part of the fabric of society and put the systems in place rather than just programming? My last point is that we had a chance to look at all public expenditure on services for unemployed people in Lanarkshire, a very, very thorough piece of work. What we discovered was that £17 million of public money was being spent through the Employment Service or services for unemployed people, £17 million a year, £21 million of other public money was being spent on services for unemployed people from four sources. In Lanarkshire these four public authorities had no system for speaking to each other about the services they were planning, procuring, delivering, evaluating, a completely disjointed system of public investment. No-one knew that there was £38 million of public money rather than £17 million going into the labour market services in Lanarkshire. That pattern is not unusual across the UK. My last point is what I would like to see as part of the Innovation Fund is innovation at the systems level not just at the delivery level, at the systems level. We need in Lanarkshire and in East London and in Somerset a systemic change which recognises that this is not just about the New Deal and ONE, it is about a whole range of public money that is going in to target this client group and it is completely disjointed. We do not have systems in place for knowing what we are getting for our money. If you had £38 million to spend on services in Lanarkshire for unemployed people you would not deploy it that way. The £38 million for the number of unemployed people in Lanarkshire who are getting the benefit of these services, £38 million divided by that number of people comes to £12,000 a person. It would be cheaper giving them the money.

  222. We did not make this last point in our last report but certainly the systemic lack of co-ordination of various funding streams was one of the things which we honed in upon pretty strongly. I wonder whether you would care to send us your proposal that you sent to Government three years ago? It sounds rather interesting.
  (Mr Roe) It is very out of date now of course.

  Mr Nicholls: It is very apposite.

Chairman

  223. Yes. If you would care to then we would be very glad to receive it.
  (Mr Roe) Delighted.

Mr Nicholls

  224. What you are saying leads on to the next question: what is your relationship like with the Employment Service? Do you think it could be better? Do you think there are some obstacles in the way? Do you think there is a big obstacle that you could cure and, if you could, why has it not been done already?
  (Ms Munro) At a local level our relationship with the local Job Centre is very good. We work very hard at it.

  225. Both of you?
  (Ms Munro) Yes.

  226. Them as well?
  (Ms Munro) Yes.

  227. Especially you?
  (Ms Munro) Yes, I think so. I think the change that has happened this year where Employment Service Job Centres can claim credit for jobs that are filled through partnership with intermediaries has been a positive move forward. I have seen relationships that we have developed over a number of years beginning to pop up in other areas of the city where they did not exist. I think the big issue with Employment Services is what you target is what you get.

  228. What do you mean by that?
  (Ms Munro) Well, for example, at the beginning when New Deal was introduced they were targeted to go out and get employers to sign up to New Deal.

Chairman

  229. Right.
  (Ms Munro) Not to take it any further, not active participation. That was what you got. In Glasgow we got a major issue, thousands and thousands of employers signed up and only a very small proportion were doing anything. We are trying to get hold of that intelligence to try and turn that around.

  230. That is a good point that we could do with pursuing. 77,000 companies nationally signed up, how many are doing something? Sorry, I should not have interrupted.
  (Ms Munro) Yes. I have had issues in the past where Job Centre staff have targets in respect of the number of employers they visit. We have to work quite hard to break down these barriers and work out ways that we can help them reach their targets but in actual fact we are not confusing employers. What was happening was we knew employers we were working with but then they would go and visit them as well so they would get a tick in the box. Employers were saying "What is going on here? You were out here last week and this week we have the Job Centre working with you. We do not want to work with two organisations, tell us which one". I think there is a major issue around about Employment Service targets.
  (Mr Baldrey) I think again, similar to what Candy has said, it has got better this year. The Employment Service is aware that they need to flush out a number of staff still and they are flushing out a number of staff. It ranges from excellent in some areas where we operate to an example I do not want to name. I was somewhere recently and there was a Job Centre manager who was sitting in the partnership meeting with this many people in it and we were talking about how we could take an area of very high unemployment to get more people into jobs and how we need to talk first to employers and she was saying "Well, that is what my organisation does". We were saying "With respect, you obviously are not doing it that well because you have got 38 per cent unemployment in this particular ward" and she said "Well, if that is your attitude then my organisation is the only one who will talk to employers, if you lot will create something new then I am out of here". She got up and walked out and has since refused to co-operate and has now been saying to unemployed people almost if they get a job this will spoil this woman's patch. We have found that before.

  231. Sorry, if they get a job this will—
  (Mr Baldrey) This will take this woman's job away.

Mr Nicholls

  232. She sees the spectre of full employment putting her out on the street.
  (Mr Baldrey) We have had that said about our organisation, about Talent, candidates have been told "Do not go down there because they will get you a job and where will that leave us". There is an issue here that the Government could address which is that the Employment Service senses this intermediaries' agenda is a run up to privatisation or market testing of what they do.

Chairman

  233. Right.
  (Mr Baldrey) They have seen it with schools, they have seen it with hospitals, they feel that they are next. I think we feel they are next as well. A lot of people in the market are muttering the Employment Service is next, something will happen at the local level. I think if Government said "Yes, you are going to be market tested" or "We are going to have management buy-outs on a pilot" or whatever, then I think people would feel a bit less threatened. I do feel that is an issue which has to be addressed by Government to say one way or the other are we going to market test you or are we not?

  Chairman: Some very interesting material you have given us this afternoon. Thank you very much indeed. A lot of food thought. We would like to continue the dialogue if we may. Thank you for coming. Thank you for the submissions which you made before that. On behalf of all my colleagues, thank you.







 
previous page contents

House of Commons home page Parliament home page House of Lords home page search page enquiries index

© Parliamentary copyright 2000
Prepared 4 August 2000