Select Committee on Public Accounts Minutes of Evidence


Examination of Witnesses (Questions 140 - 159)

MONDAY 15 NOVEMBER 2004

Department for Work and Pensions and Department for Education and Skills

  Q140  Mr Williams: Subject to the economic cycle?

  Sir Richard Mottram: Yes, exactly.

  Q141  Mr Williams: In 1999 the Age Positive campaign was launched to produce age diversity and to discourage discrimination. We are told that a voluntary code of practice was introduced but many employers are not aware of it.

  Sir Richard Mottram: Yes.

  Q142  Mr Williams: How can that be so five years on?

  Sir Richard Mottram: Because it is actually very difficult to communicate—

  Q143  Mr Williams: I am sorry?

  Sir Richard Mottram: Perhaps I am giving an example here. It is very difficult to communicate with, I have forgotten the total number of employers in the country but it is huge. Communicating with  small and medium sized enterprises on a comprehensive basis is very difficult.

  Q144  Mr Williams: I am sorry but it is making them aware of the fact. What it sounds like from this is a very large proportion of employers are not even aware.

  Sir Richard Mottram: I do not know what the number is.

  Q145  Mr Williams: Who is responsible for the Age Positive campaign?

  Sir Richard Mottram: We are responsible for it. We, the Department for Work and Pensions.

  Q146  Mr Williams: So this explains perhaps why it is a voluntary code of practice rather than a compulsory code of practice when you would have had to do something about it. What have you done to perpetuate it? Clearly you are making excuses for why you cannot get to that many employers in five years.

  Sir Richard Mottram: The reason why it is voluntary is because age discrimination is not yet outlawed in the way in which it will be in 2006. We have issued 150,000 copies of the guidance on the Age Positive campaign. We have a website which has 50,000 visits a month, which is a good number but not an incredible number. Our evaluation of the impact of how we have been seeking to change views is that the number of employers using age as a criterion in recruitment has reduced from 27% to 13%.

  Q147  Mr Williams: How many employers, as a ballpark figure, would there be? Approximately?

  Sir Richard Mottram: Several million I should think.

  Q148  Mr Williams: How many?

  Sir Richard Mottram: Several million.

  Q149  Mr Williams: Several million?

  Sir Richard Mottram: Yes.

  Q150  Mr Williams: And you have issued 30,000 leaflets a year?

  Sir Richard Mottram: Yes, we have issued 150,000 copies of the guidance.

  Q151  Mr Williams: You are not making a very intensive effort, are you?

  Sir Richard Mottram: For example, we have 40 newspapers across the country supporting it.

  Q152  Mr Williams: They may be supporting it but if that is all you have done as a Department, and you are the people responsible for promoting this campaign, all I can say is thank heaven you are not going to be in charge of any of our election campaigns, we would issue as many leaflets as that in the course of our elections, if not many more. That is what you have issued to several million employers over the space of five years. Where does responsibility lie in the Department? Have you got a special activist who is sitting there or do you just say to someone, "Go and write a leaflet and send out a couple a week"?

  Sir Richard Mottram: We have a website.

  Q153  Mr Williams: You have a website?

  Sir Richard Mottram: We have a website.

  Q154  Mr Williams: Oh, my God.

  Sir Richard Mottram: If we have guidance and if we are working in partnership with other people you can assume that we have got a small team of people who are working on it.

  Q155  Mr Williams: What worries me about your website is that was what was being recommended to Mr Steinberg to resolve his problems, but having seen how little impact it has had on your problems I would have to tell you, Gerry, you will be wasting your time and money having a website. As far as you are concerned, you are signed up to this Age Positive campaign inevitably or even the initiators of it. Are you the initiators?

  Sir Richard Mottram: We are the Department responsible for it, yes, on behalf of the Government as a whole.

  Q156  Mr Williams: Who initiated it, the Government?

  Sir Richard Mottram: Yes.

  Q157  Mr Williams: By golly, a really dynamic initiative. What about yourselves? This comes back to my first question; I should have started the other way round. In that case I would have expected you, as fully signed-up members, to have the most complete statistics available for the NAO and for this Committee to convince us that you at least are observing the terms of the campaign.

  Sir Richard Mottram: We as a Department, you mean?

  Q158  Mr Williams: Yes. Not you personally.

  Sir Richard Mottram: We as an employer?

  Q159  Mr Williams: Yes. Yet from your first set of answers it was highly nebulous as to what you have achieved as a result of your action in pursuit of the campaign and what has been achieved regardless of you and would have been achieved anyhow because of the economic cycle.

  Sir Richard Mottram: I am sorry, there are a number of different strands here. In relation to our PSA target and whether we have achieved it, we are confident that the two percentage point change is significant and meets the target. We have technical econometric problems which we have spent a lot of time talking about improving, but it is a significant change. That is for the whole economy, obviously. In relation to us as an employer, we have substantial numbers of people working beyond the age of 60 and we have a policy in the Department that now allows people to work beyond the age of 65. We are seeking to be a champion of the policies that we are espousing to other employers.


 
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