Examination of Witnesses (Questions 257-259)
9 FEBRUARY 2005
JANE KENNEDY,
DR BARBARA
BURFORD AND
MR MARK
FISHER
Q257 Chairman: Good morning, ladies and
gentlemen. May I welcome the Minister Jane Kennedy, supported
this morning by Barbara Burford, who is the DWP Director of Diversity
and Mark Fisher, who has been in front of the Committee before,
who is the Business Strategy Director of Jobcentre Plus. Minister,
lady and gentleman, we are very grateful for your appearance.
I say this all the time but it is nonetheless heartfelt, we have
had a very good assistance from the Department in the lead up
to this Inquiry. For me as the Chairman it is a learning experience,
because I come from a community that has no real ethnic dimension
to it and I find some of the issues technical and quite difficult
to understand, so I would be grateful if you could all share the
burden, as it were. The Race Relations (Amendment) Act detail
can sometimes be quite tricky. We have found in all the inquiries
we have been doing, quite a concerning dimension, in terms of
the difficulties of providing service to hard-to-reach communities.
That has been a concern to the Committee for some time, so this
inquiry is quite important to us. I would suggest that you make
a brief opening statement and then we have some questions that
we would like to go into, if we may, and we will get through it
as expeditiously as we can.
Jane Kennedy: Thank you, Chairman.
Thank you for the fortnight's grace you gave me. It allowed me
to get my voice back—although the office did say, "What
do you mean you want a sick note?"—slightly off message!
This inquiry that you have been conducting is an important one
and I know you have been engaged in it for quite some time. In
fact, I think you were expecting to interview Des, so it indicates
how long you have been engaged in it, which is quite proper. I
have also encouraged both Mark and Barbara to participate because
I am trying to answer your interest across all the services that
the Department offers. For me this has been a learning experience
too—do not feel, Chairman, that you are the only one who
has gone through a learning experience—and in the process
of coming to understand how the Department is dealing with the
question of diversity of race across its services and with its
staff, I am very encouraged and impressed by the work that has
gone on. I think there is a lot of good work, although, for us,
primarily our main areas of concern remain the employment gap
experience by not all ethnic minority groups, and we would like,
if possible, when we come to that, to explore exactly what is
happening here. There is no straightforward generality here: some
ethnic minority groups are actually performing very well in terms
of employment, so we can explore that in some depth when we get
to it. I appreciate you want to cover as wide a ground as possible,
so I will not say very much, but there are one or two things which
we may not get into today, which involves putting on the record
areas where we have been looking to develop the Department's policy
in order to influence the way in which we deal with people from
an ethnic minority background. One area which we may not touch
on today that has had quite an impact is that of the Jobcentre
Plus targets. The Ethnic Minority Task Force, which I chair, we
may well talk about today. We probably will touch on the Ethnic
Minority Outreach services, but the Experience Corps is an area
that we may not touch upon, which is a really good project. It
is a national force of 210,000, over 50s, and that 210,000 contains
60,000 with a black and ethnic minority background. We check the
take-up of Pension Credit and other products in order to help
The Pension Service develop some of its policies, particularly
through the Race to Improve project, which you will have heard
of—you should have had the DVD/Video, so hopefully you will
have seen that and had a taste of that—and, of course, we
have our Race Equality Schemes, which we will spend some time
talking about. I do not really want to say much more than that
in opening but I did want to touch upon one or two areas that
we may not get to.
Q258 Chairman: That is very helpful.
Can I ask you a single question about the Race Equality Scheme?
Some previous witnesses said it lacked focus and was not properly
worked through in terms of outcomes. What would your opening comments
on that criticism be?
Jane Kennedy: I would say, first
of all, we might have been criticised in the early days for taking
some time to develop the scheme. We originally published the first
scheme in May 2002. We published it later than perhaps was expected
but we did that because of feedback from, in particular, our own
Ethnic Minority Working Party, of which CRE are members. They
said to us, "Get it right rather than get it in on time and
rush it," so we took a little longer than we perhaps said.
Following the first scheme, we published the final scheme on 11
July 2003. We revised it last year. We monitored the progress
of it and we took into account the comments that were made. Since
the publication last year, we have not had any feedback of which
I am aware—certainly not critical feedback—so the
comments you are making are the first I have heard.
Q259 Chairman: The kind of thing that
was put to us was that you really need to have quite a bit of
insider knowledge to get the best out of the document. That is
what was put to us. If that is true, that is obviously something
we would want to express some concern about. Could you respond
to that? Do you think that is a fair criticism or not?
Dr Burford: I do not really think
it is a fair criticism because part of the work we did was to
tackle just that issue. When we first finished the draft, we thought
we had a pretty good draft of the scheme, because it was a scheme
for each business that made up DWP plus an overarching one. It
was quite complex. Our Ethnic Minority Working Group read it and
worked through it for us and really brought back to us that it
was too complicated. We were trying to say too much and we were
not, as you have said, so outcome focused. They also said that
we were not doing ourselves justice: we were not setting out where
we were already making progress and where we already had plans
that were working. We decided to take it back, and I went to the
Ministers and the top of the Department to ask for six weeks to
work this through. At the end of that, most of the people concerned
were very content with it and a group with whom we benchmark,
Race for Opportunity, actually said that it was a master class
in race equality schemes. So we felt we had got some way towards
solving some of the problems. I am sorry to hear that. We have
not had an official report back.
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