Examination of Witnesses (Questions 260-279)
9 FEBRUARY 2005
JANE KENNEDY,
DR BARBARA
BURFORD AND
MR MARK
FISHER
Q260 Mrs Humble: Could I ask you one
or two questions about the monitoring of DWP staff? We have had
some statistics given to us that show that amongst the higher
grades there does not appear to be a very high representation
for minority ethnic groups. What is the Department doing in general
terms to increase the representation for ethnic minority groups,
but especially at that higher level?
Jane Kennedy: The first thing
we have been doing is making sure we have the statistics, that
we have as far as possible the fullest detail of the ethnic minority
background of all of our staff. We have about 89% of our staff—as
opposed to 67% when we were bringing the departments together.
So there has been progress in that. There will obviously be people
who, for whatever reason, do not want to participate in such a
survey. It does depend upon the cooperation of the staff. But
we have made progress in getting the raw data. In terms of the
senior civil service, you are right, it is probably the area where
we feel there is the most work yet to be done. From the figures
that we have: in 2001 we had 2.2% of the senior civil service
are from an ethnic minority background; in September 2004, the
latest figures that we have—which I am not sure the Committee
has, you maybe have the March figures for 2002—we were on
3.3% with a 4% target. So there is still work to do with that
group, but further down the grading structure we are doing very
well against the targets.
Q261 Mrs Humble: I do not think we have
information about the lower grades. The progress report that we
have does not list minority ethnic staff in the lower administrative
grades, so if you have that information I think we would welcome
it.
Jane Kennedy: We do not have targets
set for Administrative Assistants and Administrative Officers.
The reason for that is because we were already at a level of recruitment
amongst ethnic minority groups that matches the proportion in
the wider population, so we did not set a target. But for Executive
Officers we have a target of 6% and we are on 7.9%; and for Higher
Executive Officers and Senior Executive Officers 4% and 3% respectively
and we are on 4.4% and 3.2% respectively. All of that is good.
It is good progress. Nonetheless, we do not see that that in itself
is sufficient. We firmly believe that we need to encourage and
develop staff with an ethnic minority background so that they
can move up through the organisation and move into the upper echelons
of the Civil Service.
Q262 Mrs Humble: Do you have any special
measures in place to do that?
Jane Kennedy: We do have a number.
You might have heard about, the Realising Potential scheme. I
am told in Whitehall it is an exemplary scheme as a piece of positive
action. The Diversity of Purpose strategy that we have developed
takes as its slogan: "To treat me equally, you may have to
treat me differently." So we have some action programmes
which are positive action and there are development schemes for
ethnic minority staff. The Realising Potential scheme I have mentioned
is a national scheme and over 50% of those who have been through
it have achieved at least one promotion. We have had Breaking
Through and the latest figures available for that are that 88%
of the original intake of 55 staff have achieved at least one
promotion. Then there is Accessing Ability: one of the nine participants
has been promoted. We are now working on developing a new recruitment
system for using HEO to grade 6 level and we are going to be introducing
that in two stages over the coming period.
Q263 Mrs Humble: Is the Department looking
to protect ethnic minority staff within the context of the job
cuts? Because there may be a disproportionate effect upon minority
ethnic staff in these proposals.
Jane Kennedy: As each sector of
the business has drawn up its plans, there are two things going
on. There is the Lyons' report, which will require relocation
of staff out of London, and then there is the efficiency challenge
that we face as a Department. The efficiency challenge is not
a new experience for organisations like Jobcentre Plus—and
Mark is going to talk to you in greater detail about impacts there
and elsewhere too—but, as we have been bringing the departments
together and going through this huge programme of change, there
has been throughout a requirement to do things more efficiently
and to focus on our work methods, to make sure that we are working
in the most appropriate way, and therefore the deployment of staff
has been affected. So there has been a period of turmoil, but,
throughout this, as we have been making the plans, we have been
taking account of the impact. Specifically in terms of the Lyons'
Review, as each part of the business draws up its plans—and
we did, I think, do an efficiency challenge as well—we are
doing a race impact assessment and we will publish each assessment.
We are on course to publish Jobcentre Plus, I think, by the end
of the financial year; the CSA by the end of the financial year;
the DCD's first impact assessment will be published by the summer;
and The Pension Service again by the end of March. The only area
of business that has not been conducting the impact assessment
is the Appeals Service and that is because they have not put their
plans in place.
Chairman: Andrew Dismore has a supplementary
on the same territory.
Q264 Mr Dismore: There are two issues
really. The March 2005 targets do not look particularly challenging
to me. Where do they come from?
Jane Kennedy: March 2005 targets
for what?
Q265 Mr Dismore: For senior grades, in
terms of BME people. You read them out earlier on: 31 March 2005,
senior civil service, 4%; grade 6/7, 3%; and so on.
Jane Kennedy: We have set targets
which are stretching but which we hope we can achieve.
Mr Fisher: The proportion of staff
in the community at large is about 7%. In some of the grades,
as Jane has said, we are significantly over-achieving that. 10%
of the lower grades of our staff are from black and other ethnic
minority communities. As far as the senior grades are concerned,
yes, the targets do not yet reflect that parity, but they are,
as Jane has said, stretching but achievable. There is no point
in setting targets we do not have a hope of meeting. The only
way of recruiting into the senior grades is either from people
in the grade or the lower grade before that or externally into
Jobcentre Plus from other parts of the Department or from outside.
None of those instruments are instant solutions to this problem.
The first test of promotion into the higher grades has to be somebody
who can do the job you need to be done, and they have to have
certain levels of experience and relevant knowledge and all those
other good things. So it is important to set targets that are
stretching but it is also important to set targets that reflect
the populations from whom you are recruiting to fill these jobs.
It is jolly good that we have increased the senior civil service
by a percentage or more. We clearly have more to go, but we will
have to get there in stages. There is no single magic bullet solution
to do that.
Q266 Mr Dismore: March 2005 is next month.
When will you be announcing the next round of targets?
Mr Fisher: This is really Barbara's
area, looking again at the targets. I think we will probably need
to launch new targets for March `06. I am sure we will be doing
that. One of the issues here, of course, is that we are in the
middle of a significant downsizing exercise. We are not actually
recruiting large numbers of people from outside just at the moment,
for obvious reasons.
Q267 Mr Dismore: This is what I was going
to come on to next, with particular reference to the impact in
London. I understand that 48% of the most junior grades and 37%
of the executive officer grades are from BME. With a significant
downsizing and, in particular, the jobs' migration out of London,
that will significantly impact on your ability to maintain the
existing balance of the workforce, never mind achieving these
targets. What consideration are you giving to that as part of
your impact assessment?
Mr Fisher: We have an overall
efficiency challenge which is for Jobcentre Plus to achieve its
part of the targets for staff reduction set by the Chancellor.
That means change. Those changes are, in a sense, broken down
into a whole set of component parts of an overall plan to achieve
it. One part of that plan, for example, is centralising the benefit
processing work in different parts of the country. Another part
of the plan is to complete the roll-out of Jobcentre Plus itself
and ensure that we have a network of offices that serve every
community in every part of the country. We have to subject every
element of that plan to a race impact assessment to address exactly
the question you ask: How does that impact, if it does impact
differentially, on the different parts of Jobcentre Plus and the
make-up of staffing? We will go through that process and we are
going through that process and we will publish a race impact assessment.
It is important to understand that, as far as the centralisation
of benefit processing is concerned, a lot of that was done, as
far as London is concerned, in the early nineties. We made those
changes when we moved to Belfast, Makerfield and Glasgow in the
early nineties. We are not going to change the fundamental geography
of the frontline offices. There will still be frontline offices
dealing directly with customers in every single part of London
as there are now. To the extent that we are making further changes,
it will be with the backroom staff, and much of that has already
happened as far as London is concerned. But we will be putting
every single element of this plan through the proper race impact
assessment process.
Q268 Mr Dismore: How many staff are you
planning to move out of London?
Jane Kennedy: That is about 4,000.
Mr Fisher: As Jane has said, the
Lyons' Review, which is London and the south east, means moving
about 4,000.
Q269 Mr Dismore: How many of those are
going to be in junior clerical grades and how many in EO grades?
Mr Fisher: I think there will
be a mixture of staff in all grades affected by these changes.
We are in the middle of doing the process of race impact assessment.
Clearly, as part of that process, we have to identify exactly
the numbers and the grades affected and the mix at various levels
within the organisation affected by those changes.
Jane Kennedy: We will be publishing
that shortly.
Mr Fisher: We will be publishing
all of those things
Jane Kennedy: I have mentioned
already the intention to develop proactively the ethnic minority
staff we already employ. As staff leave the organisation, we have
agreed a process with the trade unions—they share our concerns
and the concerns that you are expressing—to monitor the
ethnicity of those who leave. So we will carefully follow and
track the impact of this as we go through the process. We have
also commissioned our internal occupational psychology division
to carry out an in-depth analysis of the selection criteria that
are going to be used when we are selecting staff for early release
or redundancy, either voluntary or any other form of redundancy.
We hope this will identify whether any aspects of the criteria
that we are using, albeit jointly agreed, creates any bias against
any particular group. We are watching it carefully. We are aware
that there is the possibility that this process could impact adversely
on groups that are already at a disadvantage.
Q270 Mr Dismore: This is a slightly separate
issue. You want to make sure that any job cuts are done fairly,
I understand that, but my concern is that the jobs that are migrating
out of London will be replaced by people who live elsewhere who
are less likely, I suspect, to be in BME groups, and therefore
the prospects of you meeting your targets and, indeed, maintaining
the present ethnic balance will be significantly affected.
Jane Kennedy: That is possible.
I cannot deny it.
Q271 Rob Marris: The 2001 census showed
7.9% of the population is BME. What is the percentage for the
working population when we talk about staffing?
Dr Burford: The Labour market
working age population we thought was . . .
Jane Kennedy: I do not have that
figure.
Mr Fisher: It is about 7%, is
it not?
Dr Burford: It is just over 7%,
I believe, but I can send you an accurate note on that.
Rob Marris: Please.
Q272 Miss Begg: I would like to move
on to ethnic monitoring of DWP customers. We have heard, from
a number of our witnesses, criticism of the Department's failure
to conduct any ethnic monitoring of the customers. There is no
standard monitoring across all the DWP agencies. Why has it taken
so long for the DWP to carry out that kind of ethnic monitoring?
Can you update us as to what progress has been made in making
sure you know what the ethnic mix is of your customer base?
Jane Kennedy: As far as Jobcentre
Plus is concerned, we have been collecting the ethnicity data
on our customers. It has only been happening since the New Deals
were introduced, which, actually, is quite a long time now. We
have been collecting the data in that area. That information is
held within Jobcentre Plus and whether it is in an area where
Jobcentre Plus has been ruled out or not.
Mr Fisher: As far as people of
working age are concerned, as Jane has said, we have always, since
the New Deal started, collected data on the ethnicity of JSA customers,
the people on New Deals. As Jobcentre Plus is rolled out and is
beginning to deal with people on Incapacity Benefit and lone parents,
we are also collecting data on those customers. By the finish
of roll-out, which will be 2006, we will collect ethnicity data
on all of the Jobcentre Plus's customers of working age. The Pension
Service, I know, have plans to do that, but they have had issues.
To do this properly requires not just customer consent but major
changes to IT systems, so it is an issue to do with how you fit
these into the programmes. They very much wanted in The Pension
Service to do this as they began to do Pension Credit, but they
were not able to make the changes to the IT, so they have had
to do a lot of other work using census data and other things to
try to work out exactly how it was impacting on different parts
of the community without collecting it routinely. But, as I say,
as far as Jobcentre Plus is concerned, we will soon be in a position,
which is really helpful, of understanding the ethnicity in some
detail of all our customers.
Q273 Miss Begg: I accept your explanation
as to why the opportunity has been missed with regard to Pension
Credit and the roll-out of Pension Credit, but do they have a
time scale now? Will they be doing this monitoring in The Pension
Service, do you know?
Mr Fisher: As soon as they have
the space or the computer systems to put this in is when they
will want to do it. But they do actually have reasonably robust
data from census and other monitoring of how the Pension Credit
is working in this dimension.
Dr Burford: What we have done
with The Pension Service is to use what we have. There is a great
deal of information, not collected operationally but collected
almost on a project basis. We have used what we have to make sure
it helps us to inform the services and The Pension Service, but
we have to wait until we install the proper large databases before
we can collect that information operationally. In the meantime,
we are trying to learn what you do with the information, because
it is not just good enough to collect it and tick the box; we
have to learn how we turn that information into the knowledge
to act. That is part of what we are doing with The Pension Service
now.
Q274 Miss Begg: You acknowledge that
in your progress report, because you say in it that ethnic monitoring
is very difficult and requires "an ambitious programme of
data linking for ethnic minority customers, and cross-departmental
working to align the IT necessary to monitor all their staff functions."
Are you managing to do that? Or is it proving just too difficult
to get all these different bits of information and make sense
of it rather than just a data collection service?
Dr Burford: As you say, it is
difficult technically to do and we are working away at that, but
it is just as difficult technically to use the information and
to learn how to use it and for it to affect decisions, and that
is part of the other half of the work that we are doing now.
Jane Kennedy: For our working
age customers we are on course to meet the 2006 deadline for the
full range of data.
Q275 Miss Begg: And that will include
income support as well?
Jane Kennedy: Yes.
Q276 Miss Begg: Not only those who are
on New Deal.
Mr Fisher: All the people who
come into Jobcentre Plus, which obviously now is everybody on
Income Support and Incapacity Benefit, as well as people on Jobseeker's
Allowance. But, just to build on what Barbara has said, we are
beginning to use this data actively to monitor our performance—which
I think is the important point. We know a lot about the differential
impact of the New Deal programmes: we have looked at the New Deal
programmes to see which components of the programmes are working
better for different groups and we have changed the programme
as a result of that sort of work. Of course we have put a lot
of effort into changing the whole basis on which Jobcentre Plus
does its resourcing, to focus resources on the wards where we
know the populations of ethnic minority people are greater. That
has been in response to this sort of customer data, which basically
showed we had a problem.
Q277 Miss Begg: Are you doing all that
in-house or are you using external contractors?
Mr Fisher: We have used some external
consultants, particularly a firm called ECOTEC to review some
of our approaches, but most of this has been done in-house, and
with help from other colleagues in the Department, particularly
in Barbara's team.
Q278 Chairman: Barbara, if I understood
you correctly, you said you were extracting some data from projects
and bits and pieces of work that were being done, and you said
some further progress would have to wait until some new data systems
came on stream. The customer management service or customer information
service and some of these databases that are being worked up,
will they provide that functionality for you in future? Are you
able to look forward and say that in a number of months or years
you will be able to get a more consistent computer or technology-driven
access to some of the information you are looking for?
Dr Burford: That is the approach
we are taking. Part of the approach is actually to make sure technically
we can collect this information routinely, but also we need to
know what you can turn this data into and we need to make sure
our systems are geared to produce the kind of input that will
make a difference to decisions.
Q279 Chairman: That is important and
I understand that is an aspiration but I am really asking you
a separate question, which is: Is something being worked on at
the moment that will do that for you, do you know?
Dr Burford: The Pensions Transformation
Service does contain that functionality.
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