Examination of Witness (Questions 180-185)
23 JUNE 2004
MS VANESSA
DAVIS
Q180 Vera Baird: You were not?
Ms Davis: I was not surprised
in the slightest. I was saddened by it, as I always am, but I
was not surprised, because the feeling in the organisations that
are working in this field very much is that large organisations,
like the DWP, will produce something like a race equality scheme
and it is, probably with very good intention behind it all, at
the end of the day it is not going to make a difference on the
frontline. Clearly, there is a huge amount of work gone into that
report, but I will always hark back to the fact that if it does
not make a difference on the frontline if the communities that
the report is supposed to be supporting and addressing the issues
that affect them—if it has not been tested out with those
groups and the differences have not been made on the frontline,
then it was not worth the effort, the money and the time that
was spent writing it.
Vera Baird: That is pretty clear. Thank
you very much?
Q181 Chairman: I have no experience of
the case-work because I have a Scottish rural constituency, but
can I ask you a hypothetical question? If we were able to manage
the monitoring into being and we had some direct evidence that
alluded to some powerful evidence that may suggest that, for example,
the Bangladeshi community in certain circumstances in certain
areas of the benefit system is suffering, would you think it would
be acceptable for the Department to target... If it is Bangladeshi's
DLA and the monitoring showed that there were real gaps, do you
think it would be acceptable to target geographically the areas
where the Bangladeshi community live specifically as opposed to
other groups? You have to be very careful about orders, do you
not, to keep the fairness and especially to be treated fairly,
but do you think there would be a case for active discrimination
to help some of these groups if monitoring demonstrated that they
were clearly behind the pace in terms of some of these benefit
eligibility tests?
Ms Davis: I think I take issue
with the fact that you would call that active discrimination,
because I do not think it is. I know that that is probably the
phrase that works in that scenario. Yes, I do think it is acceptable.
If the DWP were a corporate business and had discovered that there
was a group in society that they were not reaching with their
promotion and marketing, they would go out and target that group.
The DWP have services which are supposed to reach everybody, there
is nobody that should be excluded from that, and if there is a
group that is being excluded, then the DWP needs to address that
in whatever way it is possible, from a financial point of view,
obviously, because things cost money, but also in terms of the
most effective way of reaching that group. It is not just about,
"Okay, we have identified that this group of Bangladeshi
people in Leeds does not have access to benefits; so now what
we are going to do is to run some kind of campaign in Leeds."
If the questions are not asked of that community, how do we reach
it? Once again it will be waste of money and a waste of time.
You have to speak to the communities that you have identified
as missing out on services and find out what is the best way to
get information to them.
Q182 Chairman: Would I be right in characterising
your earlier evidence, that the most effective way of doing that
would be some sort of out-reach work rather than going through
the writing of reports and the provoking of administrative routes?
Ms Davis: Yes, but there are a
range of other ways that you can get information out to the particular
groups. There is community radio and other forms of media, which
we did with our project: we put information in local newspapers.
Q183 Chairman: So it is going out?
Ms Davis: Yes.
Q184 Chairman: You are right, but it
is the getting it out of the door of the Department and mixing
with the....
Ms Davis: It is not expecting
people to come to you; it is going to them.
Q185 Chairman: Have we missed anything
this morning? I am not provoking you, but if there is anything
you think we have left untouched, your experience is valuable
for us. I always think of the things that I wanted to say on the
bus going home in these situations, so I do not want to press
you.
Ms Davis: No, I am reading through
my notes to see if there was anything else that I wanted to say.
I think the other thing that came up for us was that huge numbers
of disabled people are tapped into social services, doctors surgeries
and the whole medical field and community care workers, and it
is our experience that those people do not get sufficient training
in benefits. This is not necessarily for the Department to address,
but one of the things we have been fighting for, and working with
groups like occupational health therapists, is to ensure that
those people get the right kind of benefits training, because
they are in contact with many of the groups that we are talking
about, these hard to reach people. They work in day centres and
they come out to visit people at their homes, and the health visitors,
and they do not have the information that they need in order to
be able to give information. Just as an example, we have just
had some funding from the Department of Health to produce a guide
specifically for support workers, occupational health therapists
and the like, in order that they can meet their responsibilities
under the National Service Framework, which is to think about
improving people's mental health through thinking about work.
So they will have responsibilities around that, and people will
not consider work, or will not consider any kind of remunerative
employment, if you like, unless they know that their benefits
are going to be safe. So if somebody is going to be encouraging
somebody else, ie if an occupational health therapist or social
worker wants to think about somebody finding work or wants to
think about helping them claim their DLA or their attendance allowance,
they need to understand it themselves. So what we think should
happen is that benefits training needs to be included in the training
for social workers and for that whole support network.
Chairman: Thank you very much. That has
been very helpful. Thank you for your attendance this morning.
The meeting stands suspended.
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