UNCORRECTED TRANSCRIPT OF ORAL EVIDENCE To be published as HC 268-i

House of COMMONS

MINUTES OF EVIDENCE

TAKEN BEFORE

WORK AND PENSIONS COMMITTEE

 

 

dwp SERVICE DELIVERY TO ETHNIC MINORITIES INQUIRY

 

 

Wednesday 9 February 2005

JANE KENNEDY MP, DR BARBARA BURFORD and MR MARK FISHER

Evidence heard in Public Questions 206 - 298

 

 

USE OF THE TRANSCRIPT

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Oral Evidence

Taken before the Work and Pensions Committee

on Wednesday 9 February 2005

Members present

Sir Archy Kirkwood, in the Chair

Miss Anne Begg

Mr Andrew Dismore

Mrs Joan Humble

Rob Marris

________________

 

Witnesses: Jane Kennedy, a Member of the House, Minister for Work, Dr Barbara Burford, Director of Diversity, DWP, and Mr Mark Fisher, Business Strategy Director of Jobcentre Plus, examined.

Q206 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 - welcome, Barbara - 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, at quite a lowish level but everywhere, 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?" - a slightly off message. This inquiry that you have been conducing 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 between not all but 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 Core 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. They 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 CD, 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.

Q207 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.

Q208 Chairman: The kind of thing that was put to us was that you really need to have quite a bit of insider knowledge really 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.

Chairman: I think it is just important to know that you are conscious of that criticism. You obviously are conscious of the criticism, and if you are aware of it then you can deal with it, so that is fine.

Q209 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 per cent of our staff - as opposed to 67 per cent 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 service. 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 per cent of the senior civil service 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 per cent with a 4 per cent 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.

Q210 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 AAs and AOs . 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 EOs we have a target of 6 per cent and we are on 7.9 per cent; and for HEOs and SEOs 4 per cent and 3 per cent respectively and we are on 4.4 per cent and 3.2 per cent 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.

Q211 Mrs Humble: Do you have any special measures in place to do that?

Jane Kennedy: We do have a number. The Realising Potential scheme, you might have heard about. I am told in Whitehall it is an exemplary scheme and it is a process 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 per cent 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 per cent 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.

Q212 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 Appeal Service and that is because they have not put their plans in place.

Mrs Humble: I know you are going to be probed further on this, but I am going to finish my questioning now. I also have to apologise to you and to colleagues that I have to leave the Committee now: some constituents of mine are waiting for me in Central Lobby, fishermen from Fleetwood, who I am taking to a meeting with the Fisheries Minister. My apologies to you, Jane, and also to my colleagues.

Chairman: Andrew Dismore has a supplementary on the same territory.

Q213 Mr Dismore: There are two issues really. The March '05 targets do not look particularly challenging to me. Where do they come from?

Jane Kennedy: March '05 targets for what?

Q214 Mr Dismore: For senior grades, in terms of BME people. You read them out earlier on: 31 March '05, senior civil service, 4 per cent; grade 6/7, 3 per cent; 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 per cent. In some of the grades, as Jane has said, we are significantly over-achieving that. Ten per cent 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 are either people in the grade or the lower grade before that or externally into Jobcentre Plus from other parts of the Department or from outside. Neither of those two 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.

Q215 Mr Dismore: March '05 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.

Q216 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 per cent of the most junior grades and 37 per cent 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, Macclesfield 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.

Q217 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.

Q218 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 is 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.

Q219 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.

Q220 Rob Marris: The 2001 census showed 7.9 per cent 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 per cent, is it not?

Dr Burford: It is just over 7 per cent, I believe, but I can send you an accurate note on that.

Rob Marris: Please.

Q221 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, and, 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 Department'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 in 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.

Q222 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.

Q223 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.

Q224 Miss Begg: And that will include income support as well?

Jane Kennedy: Yes.

Q225 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 IB, 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.

Q226 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.

Q227 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.

Q228 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.

Q229 Chairman: When that comes on stream, you will be better informed.

Dr Burford: Yes.

Chairman: Thank you. That is very helpful.

Q230 Rob Marris: Carrying on with pension credit and take up, for England and Wales the government association told us their criticism was that the Pension Service locally did not make enough use of the better quality information which local authorities already have. What sharing of information is there?

Dr Burford: I could not say about that but I will find the information and provide you with a note on that.

Jane Kennedy: Although we have lots of big data systems, not only do data protection issues arise, but sometimes the systems are not renowned for being consistent in being able to talk to each other.

Mr Fisher: Certainly we have in the Department more data than we ever had. We have a new thing called the Geographical Information Service which actually gets right down to street level and you can see street by street patterns of ethnicity and patterns of unemployment. Most of this data comes off the census. I know the Pension Service have been using that sort of data to look at differential patterns of take-up, and targeting factors, particularly the local service, on those patterns of take-up to try to improve the situation. They have been doing a lot of really innovative work, and they have been working hard with the local communities on a lot of good stuff. A lot of innovative products about how to market services, how to get the message across particularly to Bengali women and other people who would not naturally take up pension credit, and I know they have been putting a lot of effort into this. But part of this will be about getting even more data on to the main frame as well when they come through.

Dr Burford: We are aware that we already collect quite a lot of useful information, but it is really trying to use that and showing that we can use it, as we did in the Race to Improve project, where we produced projects within a year of starting which actually made a difference, that are now installed in temples and gurdwaras and which will be rolling out. The work we have done in the Pension Service is designed as a pilot. Now that we have proved it works, and we know the managers and we know the tools that help, we can roll it out across something like Jobcentre Plus. We could not test it in Jobcentre Plus because it would have been too huge to test it, but we tested it in the Pension Service.

Q231 Rob Marris: The information you gather may be more systematic than the information we gather as a Committee, but, in terms of looking at the Pension Service, one of the things which has struck me and I think all of my colleagues is that, in terms of BME take-up of pension credit and those sorts of things, a local service, with face-to-face offer to the client or the prospective taker-up, if one can use that phrase, has a particular resonance - for fairly obvious reasons, I think, in the BME communities, to do with language and so on. What is the Department doing about learning from that local practice and the face-to-face stuff, given that the patient service per se does not really have a high street presence?

Jane Kennedy: We are doing a number of things. Barbara has touched on some of them, but we are very conscious of the need to be as flexible as possible to reach into communities that actually are not easily accessible for big Government. We use the ethnic minority press and radio to a great extent. We advertise these products and target the advertising at specific groups; for example, we would target certain advertising at carers' groups. So we try to be as flexible and as subtle as we can in terms of how we contact the groups. We use the voluntary sector. We use groups that are already well-established within the communities that we are seeking to connect with.

Q232 Rob Marris: Could I turn back a little bit on the pension credit, in terms of the take-up stuff that you mentioned Mark, in terms of the data and the street-by-street stuff. The Department's progress report from last year referred to looking at take-up through using postcode. Certainly I could not get from that report, and I do not think my colleagues could, the postcodes that you are using, whether you are using all the characters or the first three or four (depending on which part of the country) and how deeply you are going into that.

Mr Fisher: I think it is fair, to say, without being hackneyed, that we are on a bit of a journey here. When we started targeting, we really only had data to do with the whole district, like the whole of Birmingham, which is not actually very useful. We then evolved an approach which is about wards, which is more useful but not wholly useful. Clearly postcodes of streets are a lot better because I think a lot of these issues are about individual streets as opposed to large chunks of Huddersfield or wherever it happens to be. We are getting better systems, and, as we get those better systems and more granular data, we will use them. I am sure the Pension Service will be using them. We certainly in Jobcentre Plus are using them to target this activity, so that when one of our visiting officers goes out or when we use Ethnic Minority Outreach we really know the streets in the wards where it is really going to pay dividends. But that is another of our systems that we are using more and more.

Q233 Rob Marris: I am trying to get a sense, particularly, in terms of pension credit and take-up, which is what I am interested in at the moment, of how far you have got along that process and how sophisticated the tools you have are for gathering the data. For example, you might or might not be able to give us a pretty accurate view of what the take-up rate is for pension credit amongst BME communities.

Jane Kennedy: I think the indications are that it reflects their position in the overall community. But the data is not hard. We do not have the hard data yet but we are working towards being able to have that. The Pension Service have developed quite a wide range of tools. They produce tapes, CDs, videos. Before they make their home visits to a certain area, they use, as I have already said, local organisations, community organisations, voluntary groups and religious groups. So we are actually using, in as subtle a way as we can, as many different entry routes into these communities, particularly if we are seeking to reach those areas which perhaps have not engaged with us yet. For example, the very elderly or people with disabilities - people who are very much less inclined to come forward and claim than other groups.

Q234 Rob Marris: I appreciate that and I appreciate the steps the Department is taking to reach out to those groups. I am trying to probe a little bit - and I will finish on this - into just how robust the information is that you have on take-up of pension credit.

Dr Burford: We recognise that looking at a postcode, looking at take-up and making a judgment about the quality of the make-up of that, is not as accurate as we would like it. We are sampling the ethnicity of take-up and once we have got a large enough sample we will match that against a local community and really begin to get a much more accurate picture.

Q235 Rob Marris: Has that sampling process started?

Dr Burford: The process has started. I am due in Glasgow on Valentine's Day - not a popular place to be for me, because I live in Yorkshire.

Q236 Chairman: I am a Glaswegian.

Dr Burford: That is not the point. It is about the fact that I am away from home.

Q237 Chairman: I am glad you made that clear!

Dr Burford: I digress. I apologise. Part of why I am due in Glasgow is for us to look at how we can take this sampled information and overlay it on the geographic system of take-up and begin to get a much more accurate picture, because even people who think they are fairly knowledgeable about the reactions of minority ethnic communities are finding that the take-up pictures are not what you expected. So we are trying to get that accurately done.

Q238 Mr Dismore: Could I go on to questions of language. I suppose the first question is: What is the procedure for obtaining interpreter services for clients when needed?

Jane Kennedy: Jobcentre Plus is probably the easiest place to start, because in the Pension Service most of that contact is over the telephone and interpreter services can be arranged and can be available to Pension Service customers. Jobcentre Plus has a more flexible approach. We use a range of different sources of language support.

Mr Fisher: The important issue for us is that we did an external survey of our approach to language and we had some reassuring evidence that they could not find an example where we had not done this process properly. Clearly, if somebody rings up or comes into an office, we have to deduce that they have an issue with language, either by them telling us or by the way they are dealing with us. We have a range of options available: translation services, Language Line. It is important that we deploy them quickly and efficiently. We did a survey just to check that that was indeed happening and we found that it was. They could not come up with an example where that had not happened as it should have happened, so it gave us some confidence that this aspect of our service is pretty robust. Obviously we have thousands and thousands of customer contacts every day, so I could not guarantee it happened every time but this did give us a degree of confidence.

Q239 Mr Dismore: What is supposed to happen? What is the process it is supposed to go through?

Mr Fisher: When somebody first contacts us, the person they deal with, either through obvious language difficulty or through questioning, realises that that person is not fluent in English and has a language difficulty. Then, as I say, there is a range of options available to that person: the translation service, Language Line.

Q240 Mr Dismore: A range of options - fine - but how do you actually access them.

Mr Fisher: For example, we do national insurance number allocation interviews, and the rooms themselves have telephones on the desks with Language Line available on those telephones. If in the middle of that interview they realise there is a language issue, they can access those phones immediately and the translation service is provided there and then. That is an example, but that is the sort of thing we do.

Q241 Mr Dismore: What steps do you take to ensure that staff are able to recognise that a client may not be functioning in English?

Mr Fisher: This is part of the staff training. I think it is pretty clear to most people in conversation whether the person they are dealing with has an issue with the English language. That would be readily apparent to most of our staff. As I say, they do then have access to the relevant technology to help that situation.

Q242 Mr Dismore: What sort of training do people get to identify that? A lot of people just say, "Yes, yes, yes," without understanding what they are saying yes to, for example, without wishing to appear stupid.

Mr Fisher: It is part of a normal training for an advisor to recognise whether there are issues with language. In addition, we have just issued a diversity toolkit to all staff throughout the Department which is specifically targeted at these sorts of issues, including wider issues, cultural issues, so that they recognise that where there are particular sensitivities, dealing with particular sorts of people, those sensitivities are taken account of. So this is part of normal business.

Q243 Mr Dismore: Is there an initial payment for staff who use minority language?

Mr Fisher: We have just introduced - and this is across the whole Department - an additional payment of, I think, £500 for staff who regularly use another language as part of their own work. That is a new thing and obviously we are going to see how that goes.

Q244 Mr Dismore: One of the problems that arises from that is that I think they have to use the language for 25 per cent of the time, and there is a real difficulty in monitoring that and objectively assessing that, and that has created a lot of problems, I understand, in people accessing this particular bonus. What consideration have you given to that particular difficulty?

Mr Fisher: Barbara may be able to say more about this, but we have only just done this and we will clearly have to look at it and review it as it happens. This is completely new and we will have to review it and look at the conditions, look at the 25 per cent rule, look at the take-up.

Q245 Mr Dismore: How do staff know how to access this? Do you make efforts to identify which of your staff do speak other languages and encourage them to participate?

Mr Fisher: I am sure we will be doing that. As I understand it, 134 people have already ----

Q246 Mr Dismore: One hundred and thirty-four?

Mr Fisher: Yes.

Q247 Mr Dismore: Out of how many?

Jane Kennedy: The DWP employees number about 120,000.

Mr Fisher: Yes, so one per cent.

Q248 Chairman: Not a big number.

Mr Fisher: Not a big number yet.

Q249 Mr Dismore: It is 0.1 per cent, is it not?

Jane Kennedy: There is a long way to go, but it is early days.

Mr Fisher: I have to emphasise, this has only just started.

Q250 Mr Dismore: When did it start?

Mr Fisher: It was done as part of this year's pay round.

Q251 Mr Dismore: When did it start?

Jane Kennedy: 1 July 2004.

Mr Fisher: Before then it was £250. I am not able to say how long it existed for, but it was before July.

Dr Burford: We felt that we wanted to acknowledge the work that a lot of people were doing - not just small bits and occasional bits, but some people were spending a significant amount of time doing this, and we wanted to start there, and we have upped the ----

Q252 Mr Dismore: Where did the £500 come from? Was there an assessment of whether that was a fair payment or was this figure plucked out of the air?

Dr Burford: I do not know how this was arrived at. I can check on that.

Q253 Mr Dismore: Okay. I am going to come back to that in a minute, but, on the issue of the move from London of large numbers of jobs, going back to what we were talking about earlier on and the potential impact on the BME proportion of employment by the Department, the other side of the coin is the service to your customers. My concern is that you are potentially going to lose a lot of people who do speak other languages in this process who are based in the communities that they are serving and who speak those community languages. For example, if the Pension Service in my area moves to Glasgow, I do not think you are going to find many Tamil speakers there. How are you going to cope with that? What assessment have you made of the likely impact of that on services to customers?

Mr Fisher: The changes we are making do not generally affect the customer-facing officers. There will still be a Jobcentre Plus office in the relevant part of London providing the service. This is about backroom functions.

Q254 Mr Dismore: The Pension Service is not.

Mr Fisher: But the Pension Service moved its processing out of London in the sixties, or even before that. The London Pensions Group has been providing pension services out of Newcastle for a long time. Further changes were made a year or so back as part of the roll-out of the pension credit and the run-up to the Pension Service into those areas. Their response to the needs of the local communities is to have a local service, and that local service is going to remain in the relevant parts of London. Similarly, with Jobcentre Plus we are absolutely clear that there will be a Jobcentre Plus front-facing office in every relevant part of London providing the service to the individual customer that needs the service. Clearly we are expecting customers to ring contact centres to make the claim to benefit, and that will happen, and those contact centres will be around the country, but it is important to understand that the contact centre service is a service that was never provided before in the old Benefits Agency.

Q255 Mr Dismore: It is not provided locally, is it?

Mr Fisher: It is not a special premise to base your strategy on that the only service provided to ethnic minorities has to come from people from ethnic minorities. We cannot provide that sort of service, nor is it sensible to provide that sort of service. When somebody rings up a contact centre, we need to provide a professional service with appropriate translation services in that contact centre. It does not actually matter where that contact centre is located. I recognise fully that when you are dealing face-to-face with customers, outreaching into the communities, it is better to have people from the relevant group in those situations, but we will be providing services in those situations from those groups from offices sited in the communities and through Outreach into the communities.

Q256 Mr Dismore: How much are you spending on interpretation services?

Jane Kennedy: We can get that.

Mr Fisher: I do not think I have that.

Q257 Mr Dismore: It would be useful to have those figures, I think, going back over several years so we can see how the changes are taking place. It would also be useful to know what sort of rate is being paid for the casual use of the services as well, because I suspect that the net impact of some of these changes will be dramatically to increase the bill for translation services. The next question is: Has the likely impact on the cost of translation services - which I suspect is not very cheap - been taken into account in the way that your job re-organisations are being carried out?

Jane Kennedy: What information we have available, we will get for you.

Q258 Rob Marris: On this £500 for staff, which has doubled in the last pay round, I realise the Department's budget is stretched but it seems to me ridiculously low, given that that is paid to somebody spending 25 per cent of their time working in another language. The Government rightly recognises British sign language as a separate language, and, if I get a British sign language interpreter to communicate with a constituent who wants to see me, it costs me £60 an hour - and there is a considerable deaf community in Wolverhampton because of the university and for historic reasons. That is £60 an hour. You are paying £500 a year for someone who is speaking an ethnic minority language. I have to say to you, Minister, I think that is ridiculously low.

Jane Kennedy: I hear what you say.

Q259 Mr Dismore: As I understand it, Language Line charges in the region of £50 to £55 an hour in London, so, if you are getting ten hours worth a week from your staff for £500 - which is a quarter of one working week, never mind a quarter of the working year, which is what you pay them for - it does seem a bit mean. I understand that Wessex Translation, which also operates in London, charges £140 an hour, so you would be getting three-and-a-half hours' worth - which, again, seems a bit tight-fisted. Anyway, could I ask you one or two other questions on translation services as opposed to interpretation services. What steps have you taken to increase the number of languages that you translate material into and the range of material used?

Jane Kennedy: You will appreciate that a lot of printed material is available in a range of languages: Urdu, Arabic, Punjabi, Gujarati, classical Chinese, Tamil, Bengali. That is the broad range. That translation has already taken place. I think we also translate into Welsh, for obvious reasons.

Dr Burford: We asked our ethnic working group to look at languages spoken, because we realised we needed to be a bit more fleet of foot because the language demands locally change and people are left not really being able to communicate what is needed in terms of paperwork. We have brought the language set more up-to-date, and they agreed the ones we are going to have are the ones that we needed, but they also agreed that we needed to have on tap, if you like, and begin to look at some of the eastern European languages and some of the shifts that are occurring. So we are trying to be more flexible, more fleet of foot, but we are also trying to provide more materials on touch-screens and online, so that we are not producing huge numbers of printed material in languages - because a lot of people do not actually read the languages. We produce a lot of videos, and at the moment we produce our videos in Somali, Cantonese, French and Sletti.

Q260 Rob Marris: But no sign language.

Dr Burford: I think we produced sign language as standard, but I will check that and get back to you on that.

Jane Kennedy: Across the DWP we are establishing a common approach, so that we have a common standard. The eight languages I mentioned at the beginning are the basis of that, but, if we are conducting a particular campaign, for example, we may have to translate campaign material, so we are clearly able to do that, but we do provide the basic signposting, if you want to call it that, in those eight languages.

Q261 Mr Dismore: If you know a client does not speak English in the first place, what thought is given to sending out letters to them pre-translated, rather than waiting for them to write back and say, "I can't read this, translate it for me"?

Jane Kennedy: You mean, if we know in advance that the customer does not speak English?

Q262 Mr Dismore: Yes. You should have a bit of thought for building up a database of customers, knowing that, if they are using Language Line, for example, they do not speak English. Is that logged, so that you know that client is not an English-speaker, so that the next time you communicate with them you do not try to contact them in English but you contact them in their own language? Or do you simply contact them again, find they do not speak English, go back to Language Line and start all over again?

Jane Kennedy: There are different levels of communication. If you are engaging with an individual as an ongoing part of contact with that person, whether it is through a benefit claim or a jobseeker process or pension credit claim, clearly you would become aware of that. If it is a first mail-shot, the systems we use - and the mail-shots are usually so big -----

Q263 Mr Dismore: No, I understand that but I am not talking about that. I am saying that you have made contact with your client and you now know this client does not speak English, is that logged so that further communication with that client, whether in writing or by telephone, is automatically conducted in that language?

Jane Kennedy: The point I was making is that even if we know somebody who is in receipt of IB has a language other than English as their first language, the computer systems we have, I suspect, are not sufficiently flexible, if we are doing a big mail-shot to all customers, to appreciate that, so they would just get the mail-shot in English.

Mr Fisher: If somebody rings one of our new contact centres to claim benefit under the new system and it is clear when the contact centre goes through the scripted process that that person has language difficulties, that will be notified for when they come into the office to see the financial assessor and personal advisor.

Q264 Mr Dismore: So the fact that somebody does not speak English is logged.

Jane Kennedy: Yes.

Q265 Mr Dismore: So that any direct communication with that individual from then on ----

Mr Fisher: Certainly when they have the interview in the office, when they go into the office, that discussion is had.

Q266 Mr Dismore: What happens if you write to them? Would that automatically be in English? I am not talking about the direct mail-shot, I understand the point about that.

Mr Fisher: Standard notifications on our computer systems will be in English.

Q267 Mr Dismore: Even though you know they cannot read it? It is a bit of a waste of a stamp, is it not? They are going to write then back to you and say, "Please translate this," you are then going to have to have it translated and sent back to them. It seems rather a waste of money and time to me if you already know that they do not speak English in the first place.

Jane Kennedy: My experience of the way in which communications are done, the standard communications that go out to all customers in a certain customer group, is that the system is so set and big, the mail-shot is going to be so big, that ----

Q268 Mr Dismore: No, I am not talking about big mail-shots. I concede that point.

Jane Kennedy: But even changing standard communication letters .... It is a fair point and something we need to look at.

Rob Marris: May I clarify? If someone comes to Jobcentre Plus for help with employment, you log them on to your system, you find that English is not their first language and that they would prefer to be communicated with in both written form and verbally in their own language - assuming they can read their own language, because that is an issue sometimes - and you get them a job. Five years later they come up to age 65. Four months before that, you are going to be sending them out a letter telling them to apply for their pension, are you not? If you have them logged on the system already as someone who would like to have written communication in, say, Punjabi, because of what you did for them five years ago to assist them to get employment, then that letter, which is a standard letter but is personalised - it is not part of a mail-shot - which they get six months before their 65^th birthday, could be in Punjabi. That is the kind of thing we are talking about.

Q269 Mr Dismore: Not even at that level. I am talking about at an even more local level, where you have an ongoing claim, where you need further communication with that client on that claim.

Mr Fisher: As Jane said, I do not think our system can work to quite that degree of finesse at the moment.

Q270 Rob Marris: We are trying to encourage them to do so.

Jane Kennedy: Yes.

Mr Fisher: As I understand it, there are also some legal issues. Some of our communications, particularly about decisions and things, have to be in English, because we have to ----

Q271 Mr Dismore: I cannot believe that.

Mr Fisher: Well, we will check the legal position.

Jane Kennedy: We will check that. I think this is a very interesting point.

Mr Dismore: Okay, fine, but you can send them out in translation at the same time. When I am communicating with minority clients in my constituency, I will send them out in English and in translation at the same time. If I send out letters, for example - as I have just done - to the Chinese community - who have communicated with me over Chinese New Year - I will write to them in English and Chinese in the same letter. It is not rocket science.

Rob Marris: Do you pay your Chinese-speaking member of staff £500 a year extra?

Mr Dismore: I am not saying I do!

Q272 Chairman: Order.

Mr Fisher: I think the point is well made.

Jane Kennedy: It is a good point.

Q273 Mr Dismore: How do you make sure the jargonese is translated in an accessible form?

Jane Kennedy: Feedback.

Dr Burford: We certainly work from feedback, but also we pass all our forms through the Plain English worker to check that we have cut them back. We take all the stuff that means something to us but would not to somebody coming through. The Disability Alliance recognised that the disability form, for instance, was so full of jargon and could be made better. We have worked on that and changed the format of it. So we are always willing to learn, to strip off some of the verbiage.

Jane Kennedy: If you start with as good an English form as you can get, then you hope the translation is going to be as good as it can get too.

Q274 Mr Dismore: There has been some criticism from community groups that you will send out translated materials to community leaders, religious groups and so forth. What outreach work do you do to make sure that that pile of leaflets or whatever actually gets down to the communities that they represent?

Jane Kennedy: Again, I think the response depends on local circumstances and different officer will use different routes. It will depend upon good networking and good relations between the local officers and the local services and the local communities they are seeking to communicate with.

Mr Fisher: We have found that as every district has had to do a local race equality scheme - one of the by-products of that has been a much greater connection between the local managers and a range of local groups. I know a number of communication issues have been talked about and discussed at that local level.

Dr Burford: It is very important to find out the patterns in each group and not to assume that all minority ethnic groups behave, as you say, to the elders. It just makes everybody throw their hands up. Certainly, for instance, with Sikhs, we found out a lot about how the temple was used and what resources were there. We found that was a very good place to leave a store of DVDs and videos, because there was media to play them there, as well as using the library to leave translated material, as well as the touch-screen, so that people could access the sort of information they want. We are trying to find out the places where people go for information, where they feel safe to ask questions, to make sure we are there with our materials and people can access it there. So we are learning those patterns. But mostly we are asking anybody we can find, particularly our staff - because that is part of having trans-culturally competent people on the staff - "Where would people go to find out about certain things? What would they ask?"

Jane Kennedy: For example, one of the things that we have learned is the Pension Service learned that in trying to communicate with elders from certain ethnic communities, particularly those who did not write their own language, did not have English but did not write their own language, the use of DVDs or audiovisual tapes were a much more effective way of communicating than sending out forms and communicating by letter. It is a process of learning as we go along.

Q275 Rob Marris: Can I tell you the evidence we had in Wolverhampton, which we visited, was that in a number of Gurdwaras, and I think there are 12 in Wolverhampton, would get piles of leaflets from the DWP about whatever the benefit or issue might be, no explanation, no contact, and the leaflets would just sit on somebody's desk in a corner and then go in the bin, whereas if the leaders of the Gurdwara were trained in that stuff a little bit and there was closer contact they could then cascade it down to their community, their congregation. Again, I say to you that you do need to do more follow-up work. It is not just a question of putting someone on the mailing list, and from the evidence we had from there that is what seems to be happening.

Dr Burford: We will certainly look at that, thank you.

Q276 Chairman: We still have a great deal of territory to cover, if I can try to pick up the pace a little. It was clear to me as we went through the inquiry that there are a number of service sectors where the minority ethnic communities were particularly prejudiced, it seemed to me. The thing that came through most strongly of all, perhaps, was that there were still fears that the staff training, and we have talked a bit about the toolkits that are provided, the staff race equality awareness training, was not really as up-to-date and as comprehensive as it might be. What would you say about that? How do you monitor how fit for purpose your race equality awareness training is with the staff? Is there a process that makes sure that you are as good as you can be in terms of the changing conditions, particularly as we were saying earlier about accession countries coming from Europe and languages changing? Can you reassure us, because that was a clear concern that came through to me at all stages in the course of this inquiry.

Jane Kennedy: In preparing for this set of questions this is one of the areas that we had quite a degree of discussion on. I accept that this is an area that we do have to work hard at. We are already working hard at it but we do need to keep up the effort because raising the levels of cultural competence of our staff - cultural competence is the American term for it - is going to be really important if we are going to achieve our targets and our objectives. For all of the reasons that we have just been discussing, it is being conscious as a member of staff, particularly if you are not from the same ethnic background, that there is a reluctance, for example, as we talked about there are some religious objections to having a bank account or a general reluctance to take out loans, sometimes for religious reasons. If you are not aware of that and your staff are not aware of that there is no good pushing a Social Fund loan to an individual who is resistant and you have to understand where the resistance is coming from. We are very much aware of it.

Q277 Chairman: The second thing I was going to come on to, and you prompt me neatly, was elements of the system that have got a discretionary dimension to them, like Social Fund loans, like the habitual residence test, and issues of that kind. The statistics demonstrate that ethnic minority communities seem to do consistently worse. Is that something that you are conscious of and are monitoring and addressing?

Mr Fisher: On the Social Fund, I think the truth is we do not have as much data as we would like about ethnicity in respect of the Social Fund. One thing we need to do is a mapping of the data that we are now getting about Jobcentre Plus clients as a whole and see where that is taking us in terms of access to the Social Fund and whether there is that differential impact and, if so, what it is. That is what that we need to do. That needs to be in our programme. The issue is absolutely right, as Jane said, every single one of our staff, particularly those taking discretionary decisions, need to have a degree of cultural competence, they need to understand what those issues are. We have issued this diversity toolkit which is a really good and sophisticated product that gets exactly into these issues. We will need to keep that up-to-date and we will need to make sure there is a systematic process of making sure that staff have used it. The one thing that reassures me is we do systematic surveys of Jobcentre Plus services and ethnic minorities are more pleased about the Jobcentre Plus services than the population as a whole. The change in perception about Jobcentre Plus has been better amongst staff and people of ethnic minorities than the population as a whole. Clearly we are doing quite a few things right but this is an issue that we do need to keep a focus on.

Q278 Chairman: I am happy with that reassurance as long as you understand that there is a potential difficulty because it came through quite clearly in the course of evidence. I remember this very clearly because I was struck by it on our very interesting visit to a Pension Centre in Wolverhampton. When I posed the Kirkwood Fairy Godmother question to a group of senior and very committed staff - you have to say when you go around these places you always leave impressed by the commitment and the quality of the staff - I was very struck when I said "If I can give you anything you want, what would you really, really want to have to make your job easier?" they said the ability not to have to require two pieces of proof of identification in dealing with inquiries because they say it is the biggest hurdle to them getting service delivery, particularly to ethnic communities, more than anything else. That surprised me because it is not something that I would have thought of, but as sure as anything there were a lot of heads nodding round the table when that point was made. As I said earlier on, I am a novice at this kind of stuff but if it is that important maybe there could be some discretion, a serious trained professional could make a decision about whether there really was doubt here in which case maybe a second document would be required, but if everything else was clear then one piece of information just to start the process because it is clogging up the applications. I just make that point to you because it came very strongly through in the evidence as far as I was concerned and I was not aware of it as a problem before.

Mr Fisher: We have actually taken steps over several years to tighten up the evidence of identity we ask for from people claiming benefit because obviously there are issues that people need to prove to us in some way that they are who they say they are as part of the benefit claiming process. There is a whole range of all sorts of things that they can ask for and if people do produce what is called primary evidence, like a passport, they only have to produce one form of evidence. It is only if they have not got that primary source of evidence that we ask for more than one form, like a driving licence or a rent book or some other such thing. There is a gradation in this.

Q279 Chairman: I would like to think about that.

Mr Fisher: We do need to review it, I am sure.

Q280 Chairman: The point was strongly made and I made a mental note to make sure that I passed it on to you. In the course of the things that I picked up, and Age Concern have been running a campaign about this, and I am sure you will be aware of it, the Pension Credit suspension for temporary absence abroad at the moment is up to four weeks and I think that there is pretty compelling evidence that this is a serious problem for families who go back to the Indian subcontinent for religious family events and all sorts of things. It is just not realistic to do it in the time available within that suspension limit. We picked up quite a lot of evidence that an extension would be justified. I think this may be something that is in gestation in the Department at the moment and if it is I would just encourage you to think carefully about that. I think the case was powerfully made to us in a way that I think was very compelling.

Jane Kennedy: Obviously I am aware of the campaign. I am not going to tell you that there are any plans to change the current four weeks but there is clearly some thought being given to what the implications might be if there were a change down the track.

Chairman: Okay, thank you.

Q281 Rob Marris: Carrying on briefly on the cultural sensitivity issues, of which I am sure you are aware, there are criticisms all the time, and some may be justified and some may be not, in terms of the cultural sensitivities of staff dealing with claimants or prospective claimants. One thing raised by Disability Alliance was that potential claimants of Disability Benefit from ethnic minority communities might not properly describe the severity of their disability, perhaps for cultural reasons, perhaps because it is a woman talking to a male officer or whatever. What steps is the Department taking to address that?

Jane Kennedy: Clearly it is all part of the way in which the district managers with the resources they have available in terms of staff - in particular you might be talking about the Pension Service as well - would want staff to be sufficiently trained to be conscious of the likelihood of such sensitivity and with the objective being to ensure that full entitlement is taken you would want to make sure that you approached it with that very much in mind.

Q282 Rob Marris: The sense we have got is that voluntary and community groups are already doing a lot of this stuff.

Jane Kennedy: Yes.

Q283 Rob Marris: In some cases, I have to say, rather better than your Department is and they are ahead of you on it, which is often the case with the voluntary community sector. What kind of partnership working are you doing as a Department with them on things like benefit take-up and so on and Outreach work?

Jane Kennedy: First of all, I think I would acknowledge that we are not the sole repository of wisdom in how we approach and connect with people, so with some of our hardest to help customers we appreciate we need to use other organisations with whom the customer is more comfortable. That could be a religious or faith group, it could be a disability group, it could be an ethnic group, some form of local organisation with whom the individual is already more at ease. We acknowledge that is why part of our Pathways project relies upon the voluntary and private sector, they are not big government and we are very conscious of that. In terms of our approach to race and ethnicity, precisely the same principles apply.

Q284 Rob Marris: It looks to me as if you have got some way to go on that. Would you agree?

Jane Kennedy: It probably depends upon local relationships and local networks. I am not going to sit here and say we have got it right in every district throughout the UK, clearly we do need to make sure that we have got the best connections that we can have in the local circumstances.

Q285 Rob Marris: I know Barbara wants to come in but, before she does, you have touched upon a very important point there. Are you doing any research into looking at which districts are doing it better than other districts, compare and contrast?

Mr Fisher: We are piloting ethnic minority Outreach in a number of Jobcentre Plus districts. These are special initiatives. As Jane has said, we do need other people to help us interact with these communities. We need to use the voluntary community sectors. We have had a number of contracts in a number of districts to do exactly that, to see whether they can help increase the employment rate in this example. That seems to be working but we are evaluating that. We are evaluating which of the contractors work better. Clearly some of these providers are better at this than others. We are looking at all of those issues and we will evaluate the results. This is an approach that does seem to work because it is absolutely clear that some groups just do not like dealing with the Social and they need help to interact with Government, particularly if you want to help them over that step.

Q286 Rob Marris: So you are looking at what works and what does not work?

Mr Fisher: Yes.

Dr Burford: There are a couple of ways in which we are looking at this. We have used our ethnic minority working group expert advocates, and they have been driving us and challenging us very skilfully, quite consciously to find out when we are getting it right and, more importantly, when we are getting it wrong and who they know who gets it right. We do use that and work with them. In addition to our diversity toolkit, we have started to produce a series of modules which we call Confident and the first one is called Disability Confident and contains videos and scenarios working through real life work situations and showing people getting it horribly wrong through behaving in what they would consider to be a normal way, and actually getting it right with tiny shifts. We are going to produce a series of Confident modules to add to the basic diversity knowledge so that people can see what it looks like and feels like when you are getting it wrong and how you can put it right.

Rob Marris: Thank you.

Q287 Miss Begg: I want to quickly look at minority ethnic employment rates. In the Department's Annual Report published in April 2004 you said there had been some slippage in the target of narrowing the gap between the numbers of people from ethnic minorities who are in employment as opposed to the general population, yet in your Autumn Performance Report which was published in December 2004 you said that the Department is on course to meet this target. That is in less than a year, so how come there has been such an incredible improvement in the space of those two months between one report and the next?

Jane Kennedy: There are four areas of progress that we outline in the report. We are much better at focusing our resources. We are using the geographical data that we referred to earlier and we are particularly focusing on wards. Using the information that we have and focusing the resource in that way, we are having a bigger impact in terms of getting people into work who are farthest away from the labour market. That is one area of real progress. At the same time we are encouraging greater flexibility within the districts and allowing districts to develop approaches that best match the circumstances that they face, which is really very appropriate given the range of challenges that we face and the range of ethnic minority communities that are now developing. The third area is tackling employer discrimination and we have specialist employment advisers now who work as a team through Employer Services Direct, who do an excellent job. I visited the Birmingham team and I was very impressed. This was a group who were particularly working with the Primary Care Trust who had been completely unaware that they were missing out on a local workforce that they just did not engage with. The specialist employment advisers really proved very useful to that employer, which was South Birmingham Primary Care Trust. We are also on a fourth strand of progress as we are developing new strategies to reach those groups who are the most inactive. We are going for the hardest to help and focusing our efforts on them. We are finding that in doing that it is having a beneficial effect across the whole. There has been a real concerted effort and my compliments to Jobcentre Plus who have really engaged in this with great enthusiasm.

Mr Fisher: My own view on this is that the single most important thing we have done is to change the way we deploy resources around Jobcentre Plus. We used to do this on basic districts and that could easily have been done with Birmingham, which is not a great deal of help, but by focusing on wards, that is wards where there are 272 wards across the country where there is more than three times the national average of people with ethnic minorities, and giving district managers extra points in our target system for job entries from those wards, that is clearly having a significant effect. The other thing that also helps is the Outreach people we have talked about. I think that is the single most powerful thing. We need to evaluate all of this because although it is looking good we do not know precisely which of these components is being most effective so we need to do more evaluation and be absolutely clear what is working, but it does look like this is working.

Q288 Miss Begg: Is there not a danger that in constituencies like those of the Chairman and myself, where we do not have such a concentration of people from minority ethnic groups, they will lose out because I suspect that they are probably facing greater barriers of discrimination because there is not the volume of people from their own ethnic group?

Mr Fisher: We are careful that we target this when we use geography. Once we have selected one of these wards then you get the points whether you are from a minority ethnic group or white. We are very careful that this is not direct individual discrimination, which is obviously illegal. The other thing is we have done this and we believe it is working but we are very careful about it because we recognise the point that this is a zero sum gain. If we take the money from one part of Jobcentre Plus to give to another we have to be absolutely sure that is delivering the priorities that are being set for it because if you are living in Swindon, say, you need the service. We need to be very careful, which is why we are proceeding with care rather than just doing this randomly.

Jane Kennedy: This is where drilling down into the data becomes really important. The Ethnic Minority Task Force that I am chairing has been looking at the experiences of different ethnic groups. The employment rate for the white population is 76.4 across the whole of the UK and if you look at the experience of the Indian community it is 63.6 per cent, but the Bangladeshi community is 43.8 per cent. These figures are quite stark and it is therefore sensible to say we have a problem here that is particularly chronic within certain groups and that is where we need to start if we are really going to make a big difference, so let us focus our resources where they are needed most.

Dr Burford: I think you were saying that isolated low numbers of minority ethnic people in areas where there are not loads might miss out on some of this, was that the point you were trying to make?

Q289 Miss Begg: Yes.

Dr Burford: I believe that part of our general work with our front of house staff is to enable them to understand this, and obviously they understand their local job market and will be aware of the issues for isolated pockets to ensure that what we learn from those areas where we are doing intensive work can be employed, those methods and those ways of working can be employed locally.

Q290 Miss Begg: I suppose this leads on to the next question. In your Race Equality Scheme Progress Report you said that the aim is to make sure that all race equality is mainstreamed across all DWP functions and policies. Have you already started on that? How has it been carried out? How are you going to monitor it? Is the CRE involved in contributing to making sure that you are effective in your mainstreaming?

Jane Kennedy: The Race Equality Schemes were tough to develop and they are even tougher to implement, but that is the job. We have an implementation group that works through the promises and the plans we have made and we have just published our first report on the progress and impact of those Race Equality Schemes, so we are monitoring the impact that work has on it.

Q291 Miss Begg: What are the early indications? Is it working? Is it a long, slow, hard slog?

Dr Burford: I think it is a long, slow change. I can certainly ensure that you get a copy of the first report.

Miss Begg: Thank you.

Q292 Mr Dismore: Can I ask you questions about refugees. There has been some criticism about a gap between refugees when they move from the Asylum Support Service, having gained refugee status, to the good offices of the DWP. What are you doing to try to improve that gap in relationships and provision to make sure it is a bit more seamless?

Jane Kennedy: It takes a long time to get things right. We acknowledge that we have work to do here. We have been doing some research and testing and listening to the experience of refugees as they come through and become our customers. We have a refugee employment strategy that we have been in the process of developing. We have developed it not just with Government but with voluntary sector partners as well, principally through the National Refugee Integration Forum, through their sub-group on employment. They are an external group, they advise us and report back to us through the main forum. They are going to monitor the progress of the report once we have published it. Basically it is a piece of work that we are conscious needs to be done.

Q293 Mr Dismore: That brings me to my next question which is when are you going to publish it?

Jane Kennedy: Certainly we hope to publish it shortly, as soon as ---- I cannot tell you anything more specific.

Q294 Mr Dismore: It is a bit like the draft Corporate Manslaughter Bill which has been shortly, as I recall, for the last two or three years.

Jane Kennedy: The intention is there. I am hoping that we will be able to publish it very shortly.

Mr Dismore: Very shortly.

Rob Marris: I think that means within a year.

Q295 Mr Dismore: My last question on this subject really is problems with National Insurance Number allocations was a problem that turned up last year. What progress has been made in making sure that refugees are able to get NI numbers easily?

Jane Kennedy: There has been a development. There is a backlog.

Mr Fisher: When Jobcentre Plus was first set up we inherited quite a significant backlog which we dealt with but, unfortunately, those backlogs are creeping back up and we need to deal with them again, and we will do. We have been working particularly closely with the Home Office on the whole issue of refugees and asylum seekers. Clearly we get into a slightly curious bureaucratic tangle where they put people through a two hour interview to assess their identity and then move them across to us and we do it all over again, which clearly is a nonsense. We are working particularly closely with the Home Office to see whether as part of their processing of the identity they can do the National Insurance Number allocation, it makes a lot of sense and we are working hard with them to try to achieve that. We recognise that as it stands this is not an entirely sensible piece of Government business. We are looking closely at that and I am sure that will be a big improvement. Also, we are working with the Home Office on the issue of the ID card and how that will impact on our services. Once somebody has got an ID card then our own processes become a lot easier.

Q296 Chairman: Do you have any hopes for any of the new information technology systems that are coming in? We have talked a bit about the transformation service for the pensions system and there are some hopes that might help, but are there any expectations that as the customer management system and some of these other things develop they will be more conscious of the needs of ethnic minority communities in future? Is there any help at hand that you can see easily, other than the transformation service in the pensions field, that will give you some better ability, functionality, data, to try and address some of these questions a bit more coherently in the future?

Mr Fisher: I think it is important to understand that there are quite a lot of things happening already. As I have said, by 2006 we will know the ethnicity of every single customer who uses a Jobcentre Plus service. Also, in April 2004 we started putting a refugee tag on the system so we know and can monitor whether somebody has that status. It is only when we can collect that sort of data that we can really assess the differential impacts our services are having on different groups. We are on the way to collecting more data but the trick then is using it and using it scientifically. Things like the geographical information system are going to be really helpful in getting the street-by-street data so that we can really begin to target and understand our resourcing that much better. This is a decision about using all that data scientifically, like we have done with the wards, to focus our efforts ever more tightly on particular issues. I am confident we will get more data as time goes by and the trick is then to use it.

Q297 Chairman: The impression I get is that there are efforts now being made and a lot of our witnesses said a good job too, it has been a long time coming. I think in the past there has been some very clear evidence that we have been struggling to try to provide service levels that are adequate for this day and age for some of our black and ethnic minority customers in the Department. I think the evidence is clear about that. I think there is a welcome sign that the strategy across the Department is getting a bit more focused and a bit more professional at this level but we have still got a very long way to go, as the Prime Minister keeps telling us about most things. I think the evidence that you have been able to give us this morning is reassuring in that direction.

Jane Kennedy: Thank you.

Q298 Chairman: There is still work to be done and it is the most vulnerable households in the country that we are trying to accommodate here in better ways, so it is important that we get it right.

Jane Kennedy: I could not have summarised our own position better. Thank you very much, that is encouraging. This is definitely work in progress.

Chairman: Thank you very much for your appearance.