Select Committee on Work and Pensions Minutes of Evidence


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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