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Malcolm Bruce: To ask the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions pursuant to the answer of 11 November 2005, Official Report, column 798W, on the Office for Disability Issues, what criteria his Department uses to decide whether a consultation will be (a) an informal exercise and (b) a formal consultation; in which circumstances each are used; for what reasons his Department decided the consultation on the establishment of the Office for Disability Issues would be an informal exercise; and how his Department communicates to relevant individuals and organisations the status of a consultation. [32551]
Mrs. McGuire:
All Government Departments follow the Cabinet Office Guidelines on consultation. These guidelines clearly state how Departments should run formal consultations and are available in the Library (Cabinet Office Guidance on Consultations). However
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as this was an informal consultation and involved no change to either statute or regulations, the formal guidance was not applicable.
We were determined to ensure as many disabled people as possible could engage with us, and through the informal consultation we had many opportunities to engage, through regional consultation events, leaflets, intensive calls to disability organisations, signposts on local authority, Disability Rights Commission, Disability Now and You able websites and press advertising. We offered people the opportunity to express views by e-mail, in writing, by telephone, in various languages including Welsh and Braille and had copies of the consultation available in easy read and audiotape. We employed an external research company to ensure all responses were treated fairly and in unbiased fashion.
Mr. Andrew Smith: To ask the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions what proportion of Pathway to Work participants have moved into jobs in each of the pilot areas. [17608]
Margaret Hodge [holding answer 17 October 2005]: The information is not available in the format requested because we only know about Jobcentre Plus and, NDDP job broker job entries. We also have information on return to work credit awards. However, we can provide information on job entries recorded through these channels and this is provided in the following table. The total number of job entries that actually occur will be higher than this as there will be a significant number of benefit leavers that have found jobs that were not the result of a direct intervention from Jobcentre Plus. The job entry proportion, as shown in the table, is an under-estimate of the true underlying job entry rate due to the fact that more recent cases will have had less time to find a job.
Figures are presented for all customers entering the pilot, those customers who attend the initial work focused interview after eight weeks and those customers taking up an element of the choices package. All customers making a claim to incapacity benefit in the pilot districts are defined as participants as they are
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subject to the Pathways to Work regime. However a significant proportion of customers leave benefit early stages of the claim and therefore do not attend the initial work focused interview where the full range of support is explained.
Geraldine Smith: To ask the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions if he will list the Pathways to Work pilots currently in operation. [37308]
Margaret Hodge: The Pathways to Work pilots are operating in 11 areas.
The first three started operating in October 2003 and are in Bridgend, Renfrewshire and Derbyshire.
Further pilots in Gateshead and South Tyneside; Somerset; Essex and East Lancashire started in April 2004. Four more pilot areas were rolled out in October 2005 in Glasgow, Cumbria, Lancashire West, and Tees Valley.
A further 10 pilots in Durham, Lanarkshire and East Dunbarton, Staffordshire, Barnsley and Rotherham (to be merged with Doncaster), Manchester (to be merged with Salford and Trafford), Greater Mersey, Liverpool (to be merged with Wirral), Eastern Valleys, Swansea Bay (to be merged with West Wales), and City of Sunderland will roll-out in 2006.
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Chris Ruane: To ask the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions how many and what proportion of pensioners were living in absolute poverty in each region of the UK in each of the last 30 years. [36911]
Mr. Timms [holding answer 12 December 2005]: The seventh annual 'Opportunity for all' report (Cm 6673) sets out the Government's strategy for tackling poverty and social exclusion and reports progress against a range of indicators. Detailed information about the number and proportion of pensioners living in low income households for Great Britain is available in Households Below Average Income (HBAI) 199495200304", available in the Library.
Robust figures on pensioners in low income, broken down by region, for each of the last 30 years are not available. Three-year rolled averages for the number and proportion of pensioners in absolute low income are available for the Government office regions, Scotland and Wales from 199495. These are set out in the following tables. Equivalent data is not available for Northern Ireland, as the necessary information has only been collected for two financial years.
An individual in absolute low income is defined as someone living in a household with income below 60 per cent. of 199697 median income, adjusted for inflation.
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