Examination of Witnesses (Questions 60
- 79)
MONDAY 15 NOVEMBER 2004
Department for Work and Pensions and Department for
Education and Skills
Q60 Mr Steinberg: Like country dancing?
Mr Marston: I am sorry to be slow,
in what respect like country dancing?
Q61 Mr Steinberg: You will find the
community centres in half the country, particularly in my constituency
for example, have over 50s and 60s going to do country dancing
and now we are told that only if it is regarded as educational
can it qualify for a grant.
Mr Marston: There are two things
going on at present. One is, if you take country dancing as an
example of what traditionally—
Q62 Mr Steinberg: What I am trying
to say is that you are wasting your time on not concentrating
on where you should be and, frankly, where you are or where they
are concentration is on something that it is a total waste of
time and energy.
Mr Marston: That is why the LSC
is doing a great amount of work in trying to match its resources
to the priorities that we have. In the Skills Strategy that we
published in July 2003, we made very clear the priorities that
we have to guide investment of public funds. They include, for
example, entitlement to a first full level two training which
equates to five good GCSEs. The way the LSC are now going about
this both for adult and community learning and for their mainstream
training programmes in colleges is precisely, as I think you are
implying, recognising the need to prioritise those programmes
that will have most effect. So, we are developing skills training
for older people and indeed across the adult age range as well
as maintaining, which we promised we would do, a full range of
personal development and leisure programmes because many people
value those as well.
Mr Steinberg: I have been on this Committee
now for about four or five years and, when I listen to some of
the answers that I get, it is just pure flannel, is it not? It
is pure flannel. Never mind, let us move on. After 30 years of
being my own boss, I finish very soon and the last thing in the
world that I want to do is to go and work for somebody. I could
not do it now. I would not mind getting a job—I am being
serious now—when I finish here. How do I go about doing
that?
Mr Bacon: You set up a website, you advertise.
Mr Steinberg: What should I advertise?
Mr Bacon: You are unique!
Chairman: You could advertise skills
in interrogating permanent secretaries!
Q63 Mr Steinberg: I could become
a consultant for one and charge £700 a time.
Sir Richard Mottram: There are
businesses of that kind.
Q64 Mr Steinberg: What provision
is there for people like myself starting their own businesses?
Sir Richard Mottram: I do not
think that we offer any provision of that kind.
Mr Anderson: There is the Prime
initiative which is designed to give people support—
Sir Richard Mottram: That is the
DTI initiative.
Q65 Mr Steinberg: I have never heard
of it.
Mr Anderson: It is a DTI initiative
that I think is time limited and is due to run out in March 2006.
Sir Richard Mottram: It is being
looked at. You would go to the Small Business Service and ask
them for advice.
Q66 Mr Steinberg: What advice would
you give the over 50s or the over 60s for that matter who want
to start a business? What advice do they offer me?
Sir Richard Mottram: What advice
does Prime give to people? Basically, they will give you help.
Q67 Mr Steinberg: They will give
me help!
Sir Richard Mottram: They will
give you help. I do not know the detail because it is my direct
responsibility but there are a number of—
Q68 Mr Steinberg: So, I have never
heard of it and you have never heard of it. It does not give much
chance for anybody else, does it?
Sir Richard Mottram: There are
a number of such initiatives around the place and usually the
advice you are given is about how to write a business plan, how
to get finance and all those sorts of things. If you contact the
Small Business Service, they have a whole range of advice. I am
not an expert on it, it is not my department, but that is the
sort of thing they do. We do it for younger people—it is
not relevant here—and help younger people on things like
the Prince's Trust which we help co-finance and that would be
help on a business plan, a mentor and all sorts of things like
that.
Q69 Mr Steinberg: I should not say
this but I am going to. Can you remember when you moved on from
the Department of Transport?
Sir Richard Mottram: No, I do
not recall that. Was that a significant event?
Q70 Mr Steinberg: You said something,
if I remember rightly, a little phrase that appeared in the press.
Sir Richard Mottram: Yes.
Q71 Mr Steinberg: I think that is
how you sum up over 50s, is it not?
Sir Richard Mottram: Not in the
least, no.
Q72 Mr Steinberg: Good! Incapacity
benefit has been touched on. If you have 50% of the over-50s on
Incapacity Benefit, presumably they are supposed to—
Sir Richard Mottram: No, 50% of
those over-50s who are not working are on Incapacity Benefit.
Q73 Mr Steinberg: You give a wry
smile but, to be on Incapacity Benefit, you have to be incapacitated
to do any job, have you not?
Sir Richard Mottram: You have.
Q74 Mr Steinberg: Otherwise, you
should not be on it in the first place.
Sir Richard Mottram: Yes. You
will have been for an assessment.
Q75 Mr Steinberg: What intrigues
me is, if these people are incapacitated and cannot work, how
are you going to find them jobs or how can they find jobs if they
are supposedly incapacitated in the first place?
Sir Richard Mottram: One of the
reasons why once people get on Incapacity Benefit and have been
on it for a certain period of time and they stay on it for a long,
long time is because there is no active help encouraging people
to think about what they can do and there is no active help to
them in, for example, coping with it. For example, if they have
a medical problem, there is no targeted active help that supports
them in coping with that medical problem while getting into work.
What essentially we have created over a very long period of time
is a structure where, once people are on this benefit, they have
no contact other than to be given their benefit and we did not,
in my view, have a sufficient focus on the contribution that work
could make if people were given proper support to getting them
back into good health, for example. So, it is essentially a problem
of, once people have been through this test and they are on the
benefit, there is a great risk, particularly in areas where they
may believe that there are not employment opportunities suitable
for their skills and so on, that they will stay on it and the
State has done very little actively to target people to help them
back into work and that is what we are testing, a different approach
that gives people active support rather than asking them to show
essentially what they cannot do and then signing them on to a
benefit.
Q76 Chairman: Which is why the job
reductions must not fall on the 10,000 personal advisers and I
am sure you would agree.
Sir Richard Mottram: I do agree.
Q77 Mr Allan: Following on from that
Incapacity Benefit point, if we look at the map which is down
as figure 12 on page 22, it shows us the rate in different parts
of the country and it is quite clear that places that have the
highest rate of over-50s claiming Incapacity Benefit were former
heavy industry areas, so it is the north-west, South Wales, Glasgow,
Liverpool and South Yorkshire which I represent.
Sir Richard Mottram: Yes.
Q78 Mr Allan: There is a theory that
Incapacity Benefit was used conveniently by the previous Government
as a way of softening the blow for the massive redundancy that
took place in the heavy industrial sector in the 1970s. How much
would you give any credence to that concept that it was a deliberate
policy?
Sir Richard Mottram: I am not
in a position to comment on that.
Q79 Mr Allan: In terms of where we
are now with the people on Incapacity Benefit, do you feel it
is likely that the former industrial areas will always have a
higher rate of people claiming at a higher rate because these
people are knackered by the kind of work they have done? If you
work in steel or mines, it is very different to be redundant from
the mines at 50 than it is to be redundant from a nice office
job in this kind of environment. Do you accept that there will
always be a distinction?
Sir Richard Mottram: I think that
the underlying composition of the workforce is changing. I do
not have the numbers in front of me but the numbers of people
who are now working in the heavy industries and the nature of
the approach to things like occupational health, health and safety
and all those things, will all impact. So, I would have thought
that what we have is a changing underlying workforce and there
is absolutely no reason why, in 10-20 years time, you should have
a picture like this.
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