Examination of Witnesses (Questions 80-99)
16 JUNE 2004
CLLR LAURA
WILLOUGHBY AND
MR TERRY
PATTERSON
Q80 Mr Waterson: Finally, in your written
evidence you say that fundamental evaluations of policies and
impacts are needed and you talk about the importance of external
partners but do you think the Department is making any progress
on these fundamental evaluations?
Mr Patterson: They are making
progress and the Race Equality Scheme was revised and an improved
version was issued last year. They have mainly been working up
a lot of infrastructure. They are doing a lot of internal work
with staff, staff networks and race awareness within their staffing.
That has probably been a greater focus and then the actual policy,
the race equality impact assessments, has been a learning curve
for everyone, ourselves included, and they have not really started
off doing it as fully as they might. The Department has worked
with the Commission for Racial Equality and the Home Office to
develop a better tool to do that. I know they are working through
that issue so in a sense they are making some progress on getting
the tools to do the job. The next stage would be to actually think
through these issues and say can we then review these policies
in a better way than previously, but it is going to need ethnic
monitoring as well.
Q81 Miss Begg: I want to have a look
at how you keep in contact with people from the minority ethnic
communities. The problem of DWP staff not considering the implications
of language barriers when dealing with minority ethnic clients
who have difficulty understanding English has been widely identified
in evidence to us. How do you think the DWP should be dealing
with this?
Mr Patterson: I think for your
front-line service you need to have choices about access so the
public can speak to someone or see someone who speaks their language.
The Department since 1993 has committed itself to a policy which
says that the Department accepts that it has a duty to provide
a professional interpreter if needed. It is recognised by the
Department that the ideal solution and best solution is to have
staff with language skills, secondly, to have professional interpreters
and, thirdly, their fall-back is the Language Line. Language Line
can perhaps do an initial diagnosis to identify what a language
is but people would be better served by tying in with someone
who speaks the language directly to them or they can have their
interview in person. People have a widespread preference for face-to-face
contact so you have to work out how to achieve that. On top of
direct contact with staff we need information in other languages
appropriately delivered and appropriately refined in rather straightforward
ways because there are a number of mistakes which the Department
slips into at times over its publicity materials and how it goes
about that. There is a role, as we have said, for intermediaries
and external groups, voluntary organisations and advice agencies
in customer awareness.
Q82 Miss Begg: You talked about the Department
sending letters out in English. Is the Department sophisticated
enough to be able to send out letters about the benefit entitlements
or someone's claim in the relevant language? Does that happen?
Mr Patterson: In general no, they
have a translation service which is possible for individual letters
and there are some translated materials but they are of a very
mixed standard.
Q83 Miss Begg: I am thinking of a letter
that goes directly to an individual—"your claim will
be here on so-and-so, you will be entitled to such-and-such"—the
standard letter that goes out to everybody else with the numbers
changed and the name at the top changed.
Mr Patterson: A standard letter
can be translated.
Q84 Miss Begg: It can only be translated,
it does not go out automatically. There is nothing in the technology—
Cllr Willougby: They are not being
monitored.
Mr Patterson: They do not go out
automatically, you have to commission the translation from their
unit that does that.
Cllr Willougby: If you do not
collect the right information about who they are and what language
needs they may have you do not know. The whole customer focus—another
lovely local government word—is a big thing in most local
authorities at the minute and we have been doing lots of work
on that. Some of it is not necessarily about other languages but
about putting aside a fair amount of time for somebody who might
have basic English to get them through the process and you do
not necessarily need translation. That is about time. It may be
that you are presented with somebody who also has mental health
difficulties or may be quite emotional. These are all things we
are really bad at in public bodies, absolutely everybody, and
it particularly impacts on those who do not have an advocate.
We do not tell them that they can bring somebody with them. We
do not own people's cases. They are part of a process machine.
People in public bodies do not tend to own the cases in the same
way as they should do necessarily and finding ways to make sure
that a person understands the processes they are going through.
We are working on that in Islington and other local authorities
are and actually those experiences are no different for other
public bodies.
Q85 Miss Begg: You were critical in your
evidence that the ethnic minority free lines have been scrapped
because of lack money. Is it just lack of money that is the problem
with regard to these?
Mr Patterson: I do not think so.
They were scrapped in 1996 which is some time back.
Q86 Miss Begg: Other evidence was promoting
new technologies such as Tellytalk which gives the face-to-face
interviews you were talking about but how expensive is that new
technology likely to be and how accessible is it to people from
ethnic minorities, particularly I am thinking of the elderly who
are suspicious of all new technology where even something like
a video link may act as a barrier.
Mr Patterson: If I may go back
to the minority ethnic free lines just for a second, the great
advantage of having a free line dedicated to a language on a national
basis is that we can do all sorts of take-up and publicity work.
It was becoming extremely successful and a lot of people were
getting confidence in the service. The telephone worked for large
numbers of people. It meant the Department could do press work
and always have contact numbers and they could work with the ethnic
minority press to get features or stories, or they could have,
given the opportunity. That is lost at present because we do not
have that sort of facility. The telephone would be much more extensively
used than the new technologies but the new technologies are important
because, first of all, although our surveys would show that ethnic
minority communities on average do not use ICT as much, the Internet
and stuff, that hides a number of important issues. Young people
love the Internet, do they not? They use it a lot and lot of young
people from ethnic minority communities would be using the Internet.
We then have information intermediaries, which is basically anybody
who facilitates access to the Internet for anyone else. It might
be an organisation, and the Greater Manchester Bangladeshi Association,
for example, has been doing this for many years and there is some
wonderful up-take of the new technologies because of that specific
type of initiative. There is also the need, of course, to put
relevant information on, make it available, and make it available
in the right way, so another development that is needed is to
put more languages on. It is slowly coming through in the advice
sector we use a multikulti web site which is good basic information
in core languages. We are always looking to the future on this
one. It is not for everyone of course—as yet.
Cllr Willougby: There are other
ways e-government can be used not by the individuals who need
to access information but by the organisation. I know the Citizens'
Advice Bureau has been talking to local authorities about how
they can circumnavigate a lot of the things. They do not have
to go in like a member of the public but instead use short-cuts
and processes which can help move somebody's case on further.
There may be ways that the systems you are putting in place for
DWP for e-government can also enable respected organisations who
work with residents on benefits and other take-up issues to go
in directly and help progress a person's case on their behalf
and speed things up because sometimes it is a fact that processes
are slow and local authorities in particular do not deal well
with paper and all of those things that let people down who feel
they have been unfairly treated.
Q87 Miss Begg: The Disability Alliance
says that the DWP should make more use of direct mailing. Is that
something that would help minority ethnic communities or is there
a language barrier because if you do not get it in the right language
in the first place then the direct mailing is likely to go in
the bin because it is not regarded as important like everything
else seems to go in the bin—or maybe that is just election
material!
Mr Patterson: If they are targeted
well they can be effective. I believe you are going to see some
people later who will be looking at examples of where translated
information has been included within direct mailings which has
brought success levels of response which are good. You have to
be very careful when you do direct mailings to make them inclusive,
and that is quite hard work. The method which we advocate strongly
is to include translated information very prominently on the front
cover of the direct mailing displayed brochure. Many of us who
set about doing take-up work include routinely information up-front
for all our main communities, and people usually—
Q88 Chairman: My eyesight! Is that yellow
panel in a language other than English?
Cllr Willougby: The yellow panel
has a long list. It is an interesting issue. It is quite easy
to do this in urban areas where you know a lot of languages are
spoken but again if it is a rural area where you have small pockets
of communities you might not be able to find them. I am aware
that the two of us here come from an urban perspective today and
that there are different challenges in rural areas most definitely.
Q89 Miss Begg: This brochure is from
Manchester?
Mr Patterson: It is just an example,
it is just to show that it is possible to integrate messages for
different communities within materials that you are sending out.
You can be more expansive or make it more succinct. Usually short,
positive, encouraging messages work best backed up by somewhere
to contact with a range of choices encouraging people to come
forward. Often mailings will not work for particular communities
anyway. As I have said, many communities prefer the spoken word
and physical outreach and going to the places where the communities
are and, again, that is the sort of experience that we have in
local government.
Q90 Miss Begg: Other technologies, text
messaging, e-mail, let's forget the language barrier, those types
of technology are just as inaccessible?
Mr Patterson: If I can go back
to the touch screen and text messaging again, these offer new
opportunities but you are probably going to have to work with
intermediaries to make them successful. They are part of the bigger
strategy of e-government and an important part. There are some
successes already with technology and technology keeps moving
on.
Cllr Willougby: I think it is
important not to dismiss it. I live on Blackstock Road which has
a huge Algerian population. It has a coffee shop every two yards
and after every coffee shop is an Internet café and every
Algerian refugee in Islington has an e-mail address and is in
on the Internet all the time so there is a community that will
use it very very heavily. It is just not the older community in
the same way.
Q91 Miss Begg: So it is a mix you are
talking about?
Cllr Willougby: Yes. We want people
to use technology anyway and we need to give them other reasons—to
access their benefits and information—because it is important.
Q92 Vera Baird: We have been talking
about the importance of culturally appropriate staff and many,
many respondents have said that people are far more likely to
use DWP if there are those available and anecdotally you have
said quite strongly that many outreach teams do not have workers
from the communities in which they work. Is there any hard evidence
of that? It would be helpful to us if there were more than anecdotal
evidence.
Mr Patterson: The monitoring by
the Department has not yet captured data for the existing staff
who were in post before they introduced it for new staff and they
are trying to bring that data up-to-date. Certainly our feedback
is that in many places the staff force doing outreach work does
not fully yet represent the wider community they serve. In some
areas it is better, perhaps in some parts of London and one or
two other places elsewhere. They have inherited staff which leave
them with under representation. They have got aspirational targets
to turn that around. That is hard work for them to deliver in
the context of losing staff as well. They say they are committed
to it and we support them in that ambition. The consequence, you
are correct, is that it is much harder for staff to do good outreach
work or good front-line service work. You have got to involve
interpreters, you have got to involve the language facility, you
have got to overcome perhaps cultural differences. You have got
to go and talk to communities and listen to how they operate,
what individual concerns they have, what religious customs perhaps
affect your service delivery, so there is much more work to be
done which could be overcome more quickly by having staff from
those communities in greater numbers or with language skills.
Q93 Vera Baird: You have obviously recommended
that there should be culturally appropriate staff and you are
quite impressed at the response which is positive and you say
the DWP, in your view, is committed to it.
Mr Patterson: They are committed
nationally to the race equality work and they have put in place
a number of positive initiatives across their businesses. Jobcentre
Plus has a race challenge rolling out of the Jobcentre Plus offices
later this year, again to try and bring the offices slowly up
to speed on race equality issues. The Pensions Service is doing
similar work, as I have mentioned.
Q94 Vera Baird: Coming back to language,
in particular we heard from one of the unions involved and from
the chair of the Black Members Committee of the DWP that staff
who speak minority ethnic languages are often actively prevented
from using that knowledge to communicate with clients. Presumably
this is about needing a neutral interpreter or needing a qualified
interpreter to protect staff against allegations that they have
mistranslated. I do not know. Is that how it comes about?
Mr Patterson: Staff with language
skills may be called upon in offices to facilitate a service to
a customer who needs it. Many of those staff do this as a goodwill
measure because they are committed people. There have been feelings
of staff being exploited over the years and undue pressure being
placed on them in the absence of a properly organised service.
The small area of recognition that has come recently is that an
honorarium of £500 can be paid to staff who spend 25% of
their time interpreting, which is quite a long timescale, and
smaller amounts for people who do less. So the Department has
thought through this one to some extent and presumably negotiated
a deal with staff and unions. I do not know if it is an adequate
deal, it has just come in from April, but again it does not fully
meet the need for having enough staff with language skills and
appropriate cultural backgrounds, which again comes strongly through
reports like the DWP report number 201 and some of the
Ethnic Minorities and the Labour Market research an important
document in informing the wider government strategy, improving
access to employment for minority ethnic communities.
Cllr Willougby: Two things there
as well. One is you do not want to end up with lots of staff and
not paying them for the skills they have, which is a big problem
in lower income jobs and for people in the DWP as well. Recognising
the skills people have and the skills they bring is important
and also training staff in equality and how to deal and react
to people is important. We should be able as public authorities
to react to and deal with properly, anybody however they come
and present themselves, and that is looking across the board from
local government, and I think that is really important if you
are going to improve a service to everybody but in particular
to those who need it most.
Mr Patterson: Can I just mention
that parts of the Department are testing out different approaches
in a sense. For Jobcentre Plus and the Child Support Agency we
have got regional liaison officers from ethic minority communities
giving specialist advice. We have minority ethnic outreach work
in a number of parts of the country. There have been initiatives
where Jobcentre Plus has contracted out to small organisations
the business of doing outreach work with ethnic minority communities
and to promote the Welfare to Work agenda. We have now got the
flexibility fund which has come on stream for ethnic minorities
for the next two years in again a number of locations where staff
would be brought on board to try and achieve this work through
Jobcentre Plus. The problem that we come up against with these
programmes is that they are designed for quick gains. They have
got to meet targets very fast indeed—two years—and
the pressure then comes. There is a central steer given to the
local staff who are going to co-ordinate this but the steer to
the managers does not set out which staff to recruit and how to
go about doing that, so again the pressure is on direction, it
is not to say, "Look, in order to hit the ground quickly
you need to employ staff from communities with language skills
and intensively train them and support them"; it says, "Do
it as best you can," and the feedback we have had already
is that there will not be enough staff coming through those routes
from ethnic minority communities with the language skills to make
the inroads, and there is a lot of learning to be done within
each community and a lot of barriers, a lot of soft skills to
be developed and facilitated. There is English as a second language
in some communities or there is technical English which might
be much more appropriate. Making policies culturally relevant
is a hard task and again the Department is making efforts on this
front but it has a long way to go.
Q95 Vera Baird: Presumably progress is
impeded by the fact that ethnic minority employees in the Department
themselves are concentrated at the lowest levels of work?
Mr Patterson: Yes, and across
the board there is under-representation for a lot of the higher
grades and again I am sure the Commission for Racial Equality
would be the best people to advise you on the way they are moving
forward and if they are going to achieve their goals. I hope they
do.
Cllr Willougby: A local authority
aspect of the Race Relations (Amendment) Act should be looking
at career progression and things like that within the local authority.
I know the NHS in their new big job scheme and new NHS University
will look at how you can help retrain people at lower grades to
move them up. I think that is the key because people get stuck
in low-paid jobs and their skills are not developed and that does
not help with other ambitions we may have.
Q96 Mr Dismore: Just one short question
going back to the leaflet. I only saw it after we had moved on.
It is a good leaflet but one thing this predicates is that the
target audience for this is functionally literate in their own
language and certainly work that I have done with minority ethnic
communities in my own patch, with the pensioner age group, shows
that older people are less likely to read their own language anyway.
How do you overcome that with leaflets like this that make the
assumption that they can read?
Mr Patterson: That leaflet is
only one of what would be a range of materials.
Q97 Mr Dismore: It is a general point.
I picked on that leaflet but it is a general point.
Mr Patterson: Sure. We have said
that people prefer face-to-face contact. In many communities they
need direct personal contact, they need outreach work, and the
Department needs to be doing a range of advice services. They
should be doing this by going to where the people are, which is
to the mosques and to the schools and going to libraries and working
with people in the communities to provide the access, or working
with the voluntary groups who can open up doors.
Cllr Willougby: We always talk
about people being hard to reach but in many cases there are so
many agencies working with them, you are paying rent or agencies
are working with you, and you can find people. We never cross
over organisational boundaries to make sure we are getting to
the right people.
Mr Patterson: A lot of people
listen to the ethnic minority radio stations and media and the
work that the Department does at that level is generally devolved
down to regional and local levels and it is ad hoc. A concerted
effort would be a very useful way forward because you have to
win their confidence, do you not, and a concerted effort would
be very, very helpful and also bring some results.
Q98 Mr Dismore: Does the DWP do a lot
of their own advertising on minority ethnic radio stations or
is that done by local authorities effectively on a take-up campaign?
Mr Patterson: The Department does
some but not a great deal and not with a great deal of visible
effect or impact. It could do a lot more and it could do it a
lot better. It has been one of the issues for the last four years.
We had the minimum income guarantee and a lot was promised in
terms of activity on ethnic minority take-up by the Department
but for the minimum income guarantee, in particular, it has not
been delivered. The pension credit improved because we have these
Pensions Service local teams where take-up is written into their
core objectives and going and setting up more advice sessions
and contacts in certain communities but they have still got a
long way to go. One good thing has been that the Department has
turned around in the last few years to respect that the promotion
of take-up of benefits and tax credits is important. The Local
Government Association has pushed this for many years and I know
that the Social Security Committee as well has done the same and
we have tried to encourage the Department to do the take-up work
and make it holistic. Again a recommendation from the Social Security
Committee in 2000 was that work with disability benefits should
be integrated with work for minimum income guarantee take-up and
we find that not happening as much as it should and we even find
that the Department on disability benefits is saying things like,
"We cannot possibly work out how many people might be entitled
to disability benefits so we cannot have a take-up assessment
and we cannot have the target," and we need to move on from
that to try and get better integrated and co-ordinated take-up
work.
Q99 Chairman: We could spend the rest
of the morning on this, I am sure, and the evidence that you have
given us is in written form is already very valuable and you have
added to it and expanded that very helpfully. We are slightly
in injury time but is there anything that you think that we have
missed that you would like to suggest in the last remaining moment
or two or have we pretty much covered the ground?
Cllr Willougby: The one thing
we are finding in local government is it helps having strong leadership
on the ground and somebody in authority driving it forward and
that should not be any different to any other organisation.
Mr Patterson: There has to be
a sustained effort to win trust and confidence and build it up.
It is in for the long term. It needs thought through community-by-community
as well in terms of the approaches made. This needs to be worked
carefully at local level in partnership with ourselves and the
voluntary sector. Ultimately the work will be judged by its outcomes
which is a key focus.
Chairman: Can I thank you both for your
appearance this morning. That will be extremely useful in the
development of the recommendations which I hope will be positive
recommendations in the report that it makes. Thank you.
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