House of Commons
Monday 14 April 2003
The House met at half-past Two o'clock
PRAYERS
[Mr. Speaker in the Chair]
Oral Answers to Questions
WORK AND PENSIONS
The Secretary of State was asked—
Unemployment
1. Mr. Brian Jenkins (Tamworth): If he will make a statement on the most recent unemployment rate in (a) Tamworth and (b) the UK. [108704]
The Secretary of State for Work and Pensions (Mr. Andrew Smith): Since 1997, the claimant unemployment rate in Tamworth has fallen by more than 40 per cent. In February, it stood at 2.9 per cent. That compares with the national rate of 3.1 per cent.
Our policies are providing a stable economic environment that is helping more people to move into work. We are building on this by promoting flexibility with fairness in the labour market, so that it can adapt to changing circumstances and deliver high and sustainable employment for the future.
Mr. Jenkins : Would my right hon. Friend like to congratulate organisations such as the Tamworth Programme Centre, which I shall visit on Wednesday? It works with Jobcentre Plus to get people back into employment. Does he agree that active labour market reforms have produced the record high employment that we have today, at a time of world recession? That runs counter to the idea that high unemployment kept the rate of inflation down and was therefore a price worth paying.
Mr. Smith: I join my hon. Friend in congratulating the centre in his constituency that is working in partnership with Jobcentre Plus. Partnership work such as that has, in Tamworth, cut long-term unemployment by 76 per cent. and long-term youth unemployment by
82 per cent. I am sure that the centre is looking forward to my hon. Friend's visit on Wednesday. Unemployment is never a price worth paying.Intermediate Labour Markets
2. Mr. Wayne David (Caerphilly): What steps he is taking to develop intermediate labour markets. [108705]
The Minister for Work (Mr. Nicholas Brown): Intermediate labour markets work with disadvantaged people and seek to provide a supportive work environment, helping them to develop the skills needed to retain employment. They are widely used in the United Kingdom, and some are funded by new deal providers and local authorities.
The Department is investing £40 million in StepUp, a transitional work programme that will provide guaranteed jobs for up to 5,000 long-term unemployed people.
Mr. David : Does the Minister agree that the importance of intermediate labour markets was stressed by last year's report of the Select Committee on Work and Pensions? Will he give a commitment to mainstream such measures in the future work of his Department?
Mr. Brown: I have visited a number of intermediate labour market programmes, including the StepUp pilots. I am impressed by the work that they do, and particularly impressed by the enthusiasm that they seem to be able to raise in local communities—including enthusiasm from local public representatives and local providers. I can give my hon. Friend the commitment that he asks for.
Sir Archy Kirkwood (Roxburgh and Berwickshire): Does the Minister accept that intermediate labour markets are welcome because they help into productive work people who are a long way distant from the labour market? At the moment, the funding streams are very flexible and insufficiently co-ordinated. During work on its recent employment report, the Select Committee heard that some providers were struggling as they tried to make sense of 10 different funding streams. Will the Government do something to co-ordinate the funding so that it is more easily available?
Mr. Brown: The hon. Gentleman chairs the Select Committee and its point was well made. In response, we are trying to find a way—within the Department and, indeed, across Government—of co-ordinating advice that is given to providers of not only intermediate labour market programmes but programmes more generally on which the Government rely. We are also trying to find a way of having an official to co-ordinate things and to work with lead providers to ensure that the range of provision is properly scoped and that providers have full information in front of them. However, the decisions will remain with the providers. An alternative approach, which is touched on in the Select Committee's report, would be to put the funding resources, or most of them, in one place. I think that that would mean that a whole range of programmes that are important to the
Government would end up with less support. The right approach is to have better co-ordination, and we have made a start on that in the Department.
Jon Trickett (Hemsworth): I welcome what the Minister has said. There are still parts of the country where long-term unemployment problems are deeply ingrained and where the private sector has yet to penetrate. Intermediate labour markets allow people to gain the confidence to get back into work. In my constituency, there are two very successful programmes—one in Havercroft and the other doing environmental work—but the funding streams are precarious. Will my right hon. Friend therefore encourage his Department to ensure that the funding streams are more robust in future?
Mr. Brown: Where, largely for historical and geographical reasons, unemployment is high, intermediate labour markets have an important part to play. If my hon. Friend writes to me about the specific funding issues for the two intermediate labour markets that cover his constituency, I shall—without making any specific promise—see what I can do to help.
Mr. Speaker: I call Mr. Brazier.
Mr. Julian Brazier (Canterbury): I am sorry, Mr. Speaker, I was seeking to catch your eye not on this question but on Question 4.
Mr. Speaker: It seems that I do not always receive accurate information these days.
Miss Anne McIntosh (Vale of York): Precisely what assistance is given to people who have difficulty in accessing the employment market because they have no transport of their own, and what assistance is there for people to travel to Jobcentre Plus? There is not even one Jobcentre Plus in the Vale of York.
Mr. Brown: I understand what the hon. Lady says; indeed, she has raised the issue with me before. The question of how Jobcentre Plus can provide the new and exciting range of services to sparsely populated communities is an important one. A range of initiatives is under way, including subsidised transport arrangements, which will make a difference. Concentration on this issue in the Department, working with the Countryside Agency, is something that I take very seriously indeed—partly because of my former responsibilities. I acknowledge that, due to the rural nature of the hon. Lady's constituency, it is impossible to provide a Jobcentre Plus office physically within the boundaries of the Vale of York, so if there is an initiative that she thinks will help her constituency, I am more than willing to respond constructively to any specific representations she may wish to make.
Child Support Agency
3. Mr. Andrew Turner (Isle of Wight): If he will make a statement on the speed with which assessments are made by the Child Support Agency. [108706]
13. Mr. Alistair Carmichael (Orkney and Shetland): If he will make a statement on the Child Support Agency reforms. [108717]
The Secretary of State for Work and Pensions (Mr. Andrew Smith): In 2001–02, about half the cases took less than 20 weeks to reach full assessment, but one in six took more than a year.
As the House is aware, the new scheme started on 3 March, and early indications are that both clients and staff are responding positively. By the end of the first year of operation of the new scheme, I expect the CSA to have arrangements for maintenance payment in place, on average, within six weeks from the first contact with the non-resident parent.
Mr. Turner : I thank the Secretary of State especially for that target. Is he aware that when his hon. Friend the Member for Normanton (Mr. O'Brien), whom I am delighted to see in the Chamber, asked him when he last met the chief executive of the CSA
- "to discuss progress on county court judgments, committal proceedings and the withdrawal of driving licences for non-payment of maintenance",
- "Ministers have regular meetings with the Chief Executive."—[Official Report, 30 January 2003; Vol. 398, c. 996W.]
Mr. Smith: We are in the process of setting demanding targets for the future operation of the CSA. The House will be aware that cash compliance is already up to 68 per cent. and that case compliance is up to 71 per cent. In the new system, we are setting targets of 78 per cent. for case compliance and of 75 per cent. for cash compliance. In place of the chaos and the huge backlogs that built up when the first scheme started, we have been making progress, and we are more ambitious for the future.
Mr. Carmichael : Figures from the Library indicate that the delay in introducing reforms to the CSA will cost lone parents about £90 million. What plans do the Government have to compensate lone parents for those losses?
Mr. Smith: Compensation would not be payable for the delay in introducing the new system, as the hon. Gentleman knows. It would have served lone parents and other recipients of maintenance badly if we had introduced the system when the IT was not ready. That would have risked repeating the chaos that occurred when the CSA first came into operation. It is good that
we have got things right and that we set up the system only when the IT was capable of delivering an effective service. As much as anyone in the House, I look forward to the recipients of benefit also receiving, under the reforms that we have introduced, the child maintenance premium of up to £10 a week, which they have not received previously.
Mr. Bill O'Brien (Normanton): I thank my right hon. Friend for his efforts to make the CSA more transparent, more fair and more accessible to people in need of child support. In addition to speeding up the claims, will he take into consideration the accuracy of the claims and reducing the amount of paperwork that parents with care and even absent parents receive from the CSA, as it is difficult to understand and follow? In making the issue transparent, will he take action to ensure that the assessments are clear and correct, and to try to reduce the amount of paperwork involved in making assessments?
Mr. Smith: Very much so, and I pay tribute to the long-standing and informed interest that my hon. Friend has taken in improving the CSA's performance. The new system is very much simpler; it cuts dramatically the amount of information that has to be collected and the number of calculations that have to be made. That should build confidence in its provisions among not only parents with care but non-resident parents as well. It is an opportunity to start a new era of much more effective child support and its payment, which is the critical thing.
Rev. Martin Smyth (Belfast, South): I appreciate the opportunity to press the Minister and to welcome the improvements, but how long will it take to deal with the backlog of parents who have been wrongly assessed, as they have been told that that will not happen for some time until new applicants have been dealt with?
Mr. Smith: The introduction of the new system for new cases should make it much more straightforward and easier to get such things right first time. As the hon. Gentleman suggests, one of the great disadvantages of the old system was that it was so complicated, because of all the factors that had to be taken into account, that barely had the initial assessment been made before new information became available and the assessment had to be adjusted—in many cases to the point where neither the parent with care nor the non-resident parent ever really knew where they stood. That accounts for the extent to which the backlog has built up, and of course we will do everything that we can further to clear it.
Andrew Selous (South-West Bedfordshire): Is the Secretary of State aware that, of the 384,000 parents with care entitled to receive child maintenance, 193,000 receive less than their entitlement and 79,000 receive nothing at all—that is £250 million in unpaid child support? May I suggest to the Secretary of State that he enable every Member to suggest three child support cases in his or her constituency in which the sanction that the Secretary of State has to remove driving licences could be applied to those non-resident parents who
deliberately and consistently evade their responsibilities, many of whom enjoy much higher standards of living than the parents to whom the money should go?
Mr. Smith: First, I acknowledge the close interest that the hon. Gentleman takes in such things and his contribution to the Select Committee on Work and Pensions. It is perhaps unfortunate that we cannot allow a universal system to be dictated by whoever is top of an MP's list for action. We can use the sanctions that we have at our disposal, but the threat of those sanctions is more important. At the end of the day, what is important is not taking driving licences off people, but how many people pay because they fear that their driving licences would have been taken away. As I said, we have been improving both cash and case compliance, and our targets for the future are more ambitious, as I told the hon. Member for Isle of Wight (Mr. Turner). I will certainly do all that I can to ensure that sanctions are used where appropriate.
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