Examination of Witnesses (Questions 1
- 19)
WEDNESDAY 9 NOVEMBER 2005
MS LESLEY
STRATHIE, MR
KEVIN BONE
AND MR
MATTHEW NICHOLAS
Q1 Chairman: Good morning. Can I
just ask, or can you confirm, that nobody will be resigning! Ms
Strathie, you wanted to say a few words and introduce your team.
Ms Strathie: Thank you very much.
Good morning. My name is Lesley Strathie and I am the newly appointed
Chief Executive of Jobcentre Plus and, prior to my appointment
on 13 October, I was the Chief Operating Officer for Jobcentre
Plus. On my right I have Kevin Bone who is responsible for our
Chief Information Officer role as well as the business design
of all of our products and processes in the business, and Matthew
Nicholas has Board Director accountability for our partnerships,
our third-party provision, all the labour market programmes that
we purchase to support people into work and our communications.
I would just like to take a couple of minutes to say a few words
about Jobcentre Plus and its scale and context. We are a very
successful organisation and we launched in 2002 as the successor
to the old Benefits Agency and Employment Service dealing with
working age. Since then we have helped 2.4 million people into
work, we have helped 450,000 employers a year to fill their vacancies
and we have processed well over 10 million claims to benefit.
Last year we delivered five out of our six formal targets and
we did all of this while we managed staff reductions of 11,000
since Jobcentre Plus was launched and 6,000 since March 2004 when
we had the Budget announcement of Civil Service staff reductions,
and we have done that with no compulsory redundancy so far. We
are transforming our business which is a huge challenge. We are
very proud of what we have done, but there is an enormous amount
to do and we have faced a number of difficulties along the way.
Our transformation includes the roll-out of all of our new-style
Jobcentre Plus offices which creates a completely new environment
to help our customers, and we aim to finish that next summer,
we are expanding our Contact Centre network, we are going to centralise
all of our working age benefit-processing where we will move from
over 650 sites down to 77 by 2008, and we are streamlining our
management and support functions as we develop our new IT. All
of this is in order to change the way that we work with our customers,
the way we interface with our citizens, the way we support employers,
and it is an enormous challenge to do all of that with the Efficiency
Challenge, the headcount reductions that we have, but we have
a programme of delivering our vision, our transformation programme,
on which we have begun the journey and aim to complete by 2008.
Q2 Chairman: Thank you for that.
Can I just begin by asking you a question on the memorandum. In
1.3, it is quite impressive, you say that you get 13,000 vacancies
a day and you help 4,800 people into work each day. There is a
gap there. Is it a question of a skills deficit?
Ms Strathie: Sorry, vacancies
and people into work? I am struggling a bit to hear. The vacancies
are those placed by the employer through our single telephone
number, Employer Direct, and then we have a process of converting
those into job entries. Some of the people we place into work
are through the actual vacancies we take and some are people that
we place through other private agencies or other routes into work
in supporting them, so over the period of time, depending on the
labour market, the conversion of those vacancies from vacancy
into job entry for one of our customers could be one in four,
could be one in three and in some cases a lot higher; it depends
on the type of vacancy. What we have done in Jobcentre Plus over
the last couple of years as we have developed is work out through
solid analysis what markets Jobcentre Plus wants to be in, so
we are not using vast amounts of resource taking vacancies that
we do not have the supply side to fill and working out the sectors
that we need to be in so that we can upskill our customers, our
jobseekers, ready for those opportunities. The number of submissions
of customers to a vacancy in Jobcentre Plus will vary according
to the type of vacancy, as will the outcome.
Mr Nicholas: Perhaps I can add
just one thought to that. The figure for the 4,800 is people that
we directly help where we can point to some interaction with an
adviser or front-line staff in office. There will be many more
people of course who will see those jobs on our website, apply
perhaps direct to the employer and, therefore, there has been
some involvement of Jobcentre Plus, but we have not directly helped
place them into that job, so we would not count them in those
figures.
Q3 Chairman: I do not want to pursue
this for long, but the point I was trying to get at is that it
is often proclaimed that there are no jobs for people to go to
and I think there are hardly any areas in the country where that
is true, but there is an impressive number of vacancies notified,
a much lower figure of job placements, and all I am asking is:
is that deficit primarily because of skills deficits or is it
a multiplicity of things like drug and alcohol abuse, language
in ethnic minority groups, or what is the key thing, would you
say?
Mr Nicholas: I think it is probably
a mix of those factors. Amongst those vacancies will be some,
for example, at a fairly senior level in the NHS that would not
match the skills of the people coming through and some which are
actually perhaps rather unattractive to people, like some of the
agricultural jobs, so it is a mixture of mismatch with skills
and with the aptitudes of people and the attractiveness of the
jobs themselves.
Ms Strathie: And it also depends
on the information at the moment that the employer gives us, so
in our existing processes in order to validate the job entries
that we claim where we have assisted someone through one route
or another into that job, we rely on the employer telling us who
got the job. Sometimes there may be a number of people or there
may be lots of jobs, but one vacancy, so we are only reliant on
what the employer tells us and we offer employers a number of
ways of filling their vacancy. We can either have a service where
we will sift, select and pre-select for the employer or, in the
other extreme, we can offer the employer the facility of simply
putting their vacancy on the Internet with the details and allowing
the jobseeker to deal directly, and that is our Apply Direct service,
and we signpost people depending on the vacancies and then it
depends on the information. We are intending, and we can talk
later about it, to bring in a new way of measuring our performance
next year which will rely on the Inland Revenue database and the
Department for Work and Pensions' longitudinal survey that will
give us the information of who went into work.
Q4 Chairman: I think we are all agreed
that this is a time of considerable turbulence in Jobcentre Plus.
You have got a change programme which you have described in your
memorandum as "enormous", and we are expecting, and
hoping indeed, for forthcoming policy announcements and then the
efficiency savings agenda. Some NGOs are saying that this is having
a serious impact on the service provided actually to the claimants.
What is your overall assessment of the situation as you begin
this journey?
Ms Strathie: Well, I think we
are well into the journey and I would not want to underestimate
the scale of the challenge, and I am enormously proud of what
we have done already and I am absolutely confident that we will
complete this transformation. But it relies upon bringing on board
a whole range of changes that will allow us to improve customer
service and to help more people into work through different customer
groups, but, in doing so, by taking a vast number of people out
of the organisation and also moving a lot of people around the
organisation to new jobs. So I just do not underestimate the challenge.
There have been some really negative impacts on customer services
in hot-spots across the country as we have done that. For example,
we have 25 contact centres at the moment, contact centres that
deal over the telephone with a job-broking service, Jobcentre
Plus Direct. We are the first contact for people who want to make
claims for benefit for working age claims and also for the single
number who refer to Employer Direct, so any employer in the country
can ring one number and place a vacancy and it is immediately
on to the second biggest job-bank in the world. We are dealing
with all of that and during the summer we had a number of factors
hit us and six of those 25 contact centres went into real difficulty.
For a number of reasons, we lost a lot of trained staff at that
time, we hit our peak summer leave, and we learned an enormous
amount in running our contact centre business. I wish we had learnt
it sooner, but what we learned was that if you fail to answer
your calls and answer them quickly, then the spiral of decline
is rapid. If you can answer 10% more of your calls, you get a
25% success rate because what we discovered was not only do people
do things like £5 on their mobile and create another 100
calls on repeat if they are not getting through, they then have
to turn to advocacy agencies, like the Citizens' Advice Bureau
and others, who then try to make the call for the customer and
suddenly you have multiplied your calls and cannot handle it.
That is just one example of what we learned during that process.
I would love to sit here and say we have sorted all of our contact
centre problems and it is not going to happen again. We have robust
plans and have been improving incrementally in those and we have
actually replanned the schedule of roll-out of the new business
process and telephone system, so we still get to the end point
for 2008, but we have taken a different route so that we are not
just pouring more and more work into centres already under pressure
on capability, so that is one of the negative impacts. On all
of the other centres, the new business process is working. Customers
do not have to make a journey into their local office and queue
up to make an appointment to make a claim, collect the forms,
take them away, fill them in and come back; they make a first-contact
telephone call, we take all the information we can get from them
straight into the system, we give them an appointment within the
next few days when we will ring them back when we need them to
provide lots more information to validate the claim, we have that
interview over the phone, then the system prints off the forms
and sends them to the customer who checks them, signs them and
arrives for an appointment with a financial assessor and personal
adviser. Part of all of that process in making the claim includes
us doing an electronic job-search for them and submitting people
to jobs from the start, so that is the service we are aspiring
to give, to on improve that and to do much more over the telephone
and through the Internet.
Q5 Harry Cohen: What was the reason
for that call centre failure? Was it job cuts or was it administrative
or technical failures?
Ms Strathie: It was not administrative
or technical failures. Because we are managing our headcount reduction
an agency of the Department for Work and Pensions and not just
as a business, because DWP is the employer, and we would not want
one business to be spending vast amounts of money making people
redundant when another part of the Department has a recruitment
need, that has meant, as we have built our contact centres, we
could not just go out and recruit hundreds of people and put them
in, but we have had to manage when people free up and we have
had some temporary staff. What happened with these six during
the summer was that we had a lot of term-time employees, people
who were only contracted to work during school terms and not work
during the holidays when they had childcare responsibilities.
We had lots of people we had recruited who failed to turn up because
they got other jobs because the labour market was buoyant and
we had a number of people who left to do other things, and we
did not have the number of trained, skilled staff to be able to
deal with the volumes of telephone calls. There were a number
of other factors in individual centres, but that was a big issue
for us.
Q6 John Penrose: If I can just pick
up on that last point, you mentioned, I think, twice now that
you had a number of your best-trained staff leave. I understand
the other problems you were having which Harry Cohen has just
asked you to elaborate, but what was causing the crown jewels,
the best-trained staff, to leave?
Ms Strathie: I do not think I
said the "best-trained staff", but experienced staff.
Essentially, our contact centres have been something we have developed
over a number of years. We have built the Employer Direct service
and we built the Jobcentre Plus job-broking service. The first
contact is a new service which we brought in as part of our new
business process as part of the new Jobcentre Plus model, so we
did not have vast numbers of trained, experienced staff on that
element. In terms of staff movement, our attrition rates are around
6 and 7% and that has hardly changed. That is no different from
when we were in a big growth to when we are in a headcount reduction,
but the reality of any major change and downsizing is that the
most able usually move first, and the challenge for me and my
Board and my leadership team in Jobcentre Plus is to make sure
that more of the right people stay with us. That means a big job
in selling our vision out to all of our people, being absolutely
clear about how many of them have a future and where those jobs
are and the type of jobs because I believe by 2008 we will be
a much leaner, fitter, sharper, customer-focused organisation
and that Jobcentre Plus will actually be an exciting place to
work. That is a big challenge for us now with so much turbulence
in the organisation.
Q7 John Penrose: I think you said
you had more of a problem in six of your contact centres. What
was different about the staff turnover and the experience of the
experienced staff in those six places?
Ms Strathie: I cannot answer the
detail of that. Kevin, is there anything you want to say on that?
Mr Bone: I think it is fair to
say that there were also some management issues in some of our
contact centres in terms of how they are managing the profiles
of the number of staff that were on duty at any one time and they
were misinterpreting management information in the centres, which
we picked up on as well.
Q8 Chairman: You will be aware, I
hope, of the report by the Oxford Economic Forecasting for the
national voluntary organisations. It said that Jobcentre Plus
should reduce itself in effect to paying benefits, managing contracts
and deciding eligibility. What is your reaction to that?
Ms Strathie: I have one, but I
am going to invite Matthew, because this is his territory, to
speak on that.
Mr Nicholas: I think that the
key issue of what Jobcentre Plus does and what we contract for
with other people really is a policy issue for our Ministers.
Essentially, our role is to do whatever part of the process they
want us to do, so I would not want to stray into how big or small
Jobcentre Plus's role should be. I have met Stephen Budd from
the Association of Chief Executives of Voluntary Organisations
and Debbie Scott from the Employment Related Services Association
to talk through the report. I think there is quite a lot in there
about how we can improve our relationship with the voluntary community
sector and other providers, but I think the crucial issue of whether
Jobcentre Plus should be a smaller, commissioning, front-end body
really is one you need to put to our new Secretary of State.
Q9 Chairman: Would that be your view?
Mr Nicholas: I think we are there
to develop the services that Ministers think we are there to do.
We provide very effectively what we are asked to do, but we will
do that whether they want us to deliver more of it inhouse directly
or to contract it with external partners.
Q10 Mrs Humble: Can I just explore
a little further how you will be meeting your efficiency targets.
You have already answered very openly and honestly about the problems
that have been encountered in your attempts to meet those efficiency
targets and you said that so far you have not had to impose any
compulsory redundancies.
Ms Strathie: No.
Q11 Mrs Humble: Do you anticipate
that you will have to impose any compulsory redundancies and,
in reducing your headcount, can you just clarify how many of those
are natural wastage and how many are voluntary redundancies? What
is the profile?
Ms Strathie: I think first off,
as a good employer, we would not wish to make anybody compulsorily
redundant unless it was absolutely unavoidable, but, given the
scale of the challenge for the Department, it is very hard to
see right now that at some point there will be pockets of people
in pieces of geography with no work and, therefore, compulsory
redundancy will be the option of last resort. Whether or not we
have no compulsory redundancies will not be for me; that will
be very much a policy strategy decision taken by the Department.
For the first phase of our workforce management policies negotiated
by the Department, we had a no compulsory redundancy agreement
for the first phase, I think six months it was then. That has
expired and it has not been renewed, to the best of my knowledge,
and we continue to work on the basis of movement of staff between
our different agencies, different parts of the business. We have
a regional executive in the nine government office regions and
Scotland and Wales led by the Jobcentre Plus Field Director as
the Chair, but with every business represented on that, and all
recruitment and early release schemes are managed through that
process across the Department. Where we have got to so far, as
I said, our natural wastage is between 6 and 7% and that is not
very different from what it has been for a very long time before
all of this. We have, through managed release systems, let 707
people go. These are very targeted for us. We offer it on a voluntary
basis, but only after the process of making sure that we have
to offer some exit packages because we cannot move people across
the business. We have also developed an electronic facility for
all Whitehall departments to be able to place their vacancies
on that, so once we have exhausted the DWP family, which is pretty
large, we then look at how we can move our people into other departments
that are recruiting. Therefore, with all of that which we have
done to try and manage this, it makes it a bit slower for us than
if we just did it all as a single business, but the imperative
is to be a good employer, to bring on board the good customer
service and to reduce the amount of money we spend on redundancy
payments.
Q12 Mrs Humble: If it is slower,
are you going to meet your targets because I understand, for the
reasons that you have outlined, that the bulk of the reduction
was end-year loaded and that has affected the efficiency targets
that you have been expected to meet, so in financial terms are
you going to meet those targets?
Ms Strathie: Yes, absolutely.
Absolutely, we will. I think it is worth pointing out that prior
to the Chancellor's 2004 announcement on Civil Service cuts, Jobcentre
Plus had already taken a very large number of people out of the
business as part of the merger dividend, just bringing together
the Benefits Agency and the Employment Service and driving out
duplication which we had. Then we had our baseline of the figures
that we are dealing with now and what we have to hit. 2005/06,
the year we are in now, is the greatest challenge for Jobcentre
Plus. Our headcount reductions in the next two years will be smaller
than they are now, but, in order to live within all of that, we
had to set ourselves roughly double the challenge this year because
if we did not reduce this year, then we would put pressure on
the pay-bill for the next two years. So the faster we reduced
in that period as we developed all the new methods, systems and
structures that we were bringing on board. In terms of end-loading,
one of the strands of our Efficiency Challenge has been to develop
a new organisational structure for Jobcentre Plus, designed to
reduce the management overhead. Therefore, as we are organised
at the moment, we have a district tier, and we started off with
90 districts and we have now gone down to 50 and they have a corporate
support structure to help with delivery. Then we have the regional
tier in each of the Government office regions, and then we have
the national tier that interfaces with the Department in the development
of operational policy. We are reducing that in order to put roughly
3,500 more staff into customer-facing roles and that takes time
because once we had done the high-level design, the detailed design,
communicated and started to implement, we had to start with the
Board first and work our way down through selecting who got jobs
and who did not. That takes time to move people forward, but that
has been a huge piece of work and it will provide much greater
line of accountability from the bottom to the top and from the
top to the bottom of the organisation and create that efficiency
by putting more people in contact centres and more people in local
jobcentres.
Q13 Mrs Humble: I have a brief question
about the transfer of jobs across different departments because
all of that is highly commendable, letting staff know what the
vacancies are across all government departments within a particular
locality, but nevertheless, for some individuals that are employed
by you, often women who are working either part-time hours or
hours that suit their caring responsibilities, seeing a vacancy
that is 20 miles away is actually no use to them and they cannot
take it up because they may not have transport to enable them
to take it up. What sort of profile have you seen there? You have
talked about some packages that you can provide for people for
whom maybe there are no jobs, so they cannot transfer, but are
you looking at the people who work for you and how in fact some
of the offers that you are making to them are impractical for
them?
Ms Strathie: I think it is a very
fair point. I am a woman, I do have children and I have worked
in a whole variety of jobs across the country, so I know exactly
what it is like to be faced with that change. We are a very large
employer of women and men with caring responsibilities too, but
I think we are a very good employer and have won awards for our
work/life balance policies and the way we look after people's
whole lives as an employer. This is tough when you are faced with
the balance of skilled people you want to keep on board and to
take with you and the challenges faced by efficiency and our existing
estate because we are not in a position to go out and buy new,
purpose-built benefit processing centres, so we have a number
of challenges: the people; the estate; the IT; and the delivery.
For some people it has been really tough, but I would say there
are lots and lots of our staff with whom we have sat down and
talked to them about the realities of the job and what we might
be able to do to help that transition. I have talked to people
in my very earliest processing centres in Wrexham and Wolverhampton
where I have staff who are driving 45 miles because they wanted
the job that badly. They will in time find a way of deciding whether
they stay, whether they move home or whether they move job, and
it depends very much on the level they are at. At the end of the
day, roughly 85% of my people will have a job in 2008. If all
things stay equal and the Government does not ask us to take on
more new things, that is roughly what I am looking at and I have
tried to be very honest with my people, that they have to decide
if they want to be in it for the long haul or whether it is just
too much what we are asking now and where the job is.
Mr Nicholas: If I can just add
something to that, directly what we do with a situation where
we are, say, closing an office and we do have quite a high proportion
of part-time staff, women with caring responsibilities particularly,
the management would sit down and work through with everybody
in the office which other offices they could get to, so they would
have a personal profile of everybody. Then we would try and match
most effectively against those people who can travel a bit further
and those who cannot to make sure that we do take fully into account
the situation of every member of staff. So probably those younger
men with cars and without caring responsibilities would take the
jobs slightly further away because they can do that journey.
Q14 Mrs Humble: Can I move on to
look at the impact of the efficiency savings on the quality of
service. Again you have talked about the negative impact on customer
services and hot-spots and you specifically referred to contact
centres. However, what we want from you is an indication of how
you can demonstrate that your efficiency savings are not going
to impact on customer services. Interestingly, a couple of weeks
ago when we had the Chief Executive of the Disability and Carers
Service in front of us, he acknowledged that his department was
meeting many of the targets that the Government had set and internally
they felt that they were doing a good job, but externally, for
many of their customers, the customer reaction was not as positive.
Is it the same for you, that you might be meeting some of the
targets that the Government is setting you, but the quality of
service as perceived by your customers is rather less than that?
Ms Strathie: I am going to ask
Matthew in a moment to say a few words on this, but one of the
things I would say first of all is that I am very proud that Jobcentre
Plus has a customer service target. We do not just have our Efficiency
Challenge, we do not just have the hard numbers of the number
of people placed into work and we do not just have the accurate
and timely payment of benefit or the reduction in fraud and error,
but we measure various elements of our service, and I think I
am right in saying that we are the only business in the Department
that has that measure, and we also measure our employer satisfaction
with how we handle their vacancies and the outcome of that. Therefore,
we have all of that in place as well as overall customer satisfaction
surveys and staff satisfaction surveys that we are trying to measure
as we go and take the messages from.
Mr Nicholas: We try and measure
what the experience is like for our customers, so we have a mystery
shopping organisation who come in essentially and act as customers
to check whether we are speedy in dealing with enquiries, whether
we respond to what customers really need rather than just give
them a yes/no answer, whether we are proactive in answering what
they want and what the environment is like in our offices. We
have an annual target set by Ministers for that which we met last
year and which we are on course to meet this year, so that gives
us a sense of what the customer experience is like as well as
looking at all the data about the number of calls we take. Perhaps
I can use an example of somewhere where our customer service was
relatively poor and where the change has made a big impact. In
Rotherham we had a social security office with massive queues
as people felt they had to come into the office to get anything
sorted out. They would sit there in the office for hours and they
were very frustrated, our staff were very frustrated. So we put
in a telephone service there where you would ring and we would
try and deal with your query over the phone and, if we could not
deal with your query, we would make an appointment. We thought
at first that it would still lead to a lot of people coming in
for appointments, but in fact 85% of people's queries were dealt
with over the phone. They did not have to come into the office
and if we had to give someone an appointment because they had
a complex issue to deal with, we could do that within 24 hours.
The response from customers has been tremendous, the response
from the advocacy bodies, like CAB, with whom we did a lot of
work, was good and actually our staff feel a lot better about
it as well. So that has been a genuine improvement by something
that was put in place to help us manage with fewer people and
actually our customers responded very positively.
Q15 Mrs Humble: In all of these surveys
that you are doing, have you seen any correlation between a reduction
in customer satisfaction coinciding with a reduction in staff
and staff turnover?
Ms Strathie: I would not say a
direct correlation, but my own monitoring of this where we have
really failed in our customer service is in the Contact Centre
Directorate. Strangely enough, last year when we were struggling
with our job-broking service and contact centres, we were doing
marvellously against the customer service targets and this year
we are doing much, much better across the business in our customer
service and the whole experience for the customer, but we are
failing badly in the targets that we set ourselves for customer
service in the contact centres. That, for me, is around capability
in the organisation, it is about having a mature workforce that
can reach the standards of all of the new processes they have
to deliver, but at the same time can hit the standards for customer
service, so that is the biggest example of where I think the organisation
has a huge, huge journey to make.
Q16 Mrs Humble: Have you had to withdraw
or suspend any of your services because of job cuts or because
of particular difficulties in areas?
Ms Strathie: No. What we have
had to do, and you can never lift this just from the drawing board
and make it all work over a three- or four-year plan, so what
myself and my Board have been working through as we bring on board
each planned phase of transformation in any of the strands is
to learn the lessons as quickly as we can. We look at whether
that means we carry on with the implementation that is scheduled
for that particular part of it, either rolling out the new IT
system or opening a new office with its new-style processes. One
of the things we have had to do with the contact centres for the
first contact, the claims-making process, is develop a means of
reverting to clerical contingencies if we are not able, if we
do not have enough people trained to do the new process, so in
some places, and you might want to say a bit more about this,
Kevin, we have had to go for fifty-fifty. The important thing
at the end of the day is that people have to make their claims
and they have to make them quickly because we have to process
their claims quickly, so we have to establish entitlement and
for many people Jobcentre Plus making decisions on someone's entitlement
to their working age benefit is then a passport to other benefits,
like housing benefit and so on, so if that is what you were thinking
about as a suspension, that is the only example I can think of
where we change the way we do things in order to address the problems.
Q17 Mrs Humble: Can I ask you finally
then, and it is a key question, how is this impacting upon staff
morale? Is the reduction increasing the workload of individual
members of staff? Your staff provide a key service, so what is
their morale like at the moment?
Ms Strathie: Well, it comes up
pretty often if we have a staff attitude survey, and the last
staff attitude survey showed us that only 22% of our staff were
satisfied with the way we were running the business and how they
felt about their jobs. Now, that is not a place that any business
and certainly any chief executive wants to be, so we have a process
in place where at every level in the organisation we analyse our
results at that local level. All of my leaders in the organisation
have been asked to produce plans to address that, discussing it
with all of their people, and to focus on the things that they
can change locally while we focus on the things that we can change
nationally and we focus on the things that we need to take upward
into the Department or with others. So that is the satisfaction
index and that is probably as low as I have ever seen it in Jobcentre
Plus or in any of the businesses I worked in beforehand. Morale,
on the other hand, how do you measure it? Well, in attendance
management terms, sick absence, we are much better now than we
were when we had high satisfaction from our staff. We have no
relationship between the best-performing parts of the organisation
and the poorest-performing parts of the organisation in our sick
absence and we have no relationship there between high satisfaction.
Morale, for me, is what I see when I visit my offices and, despite
people who know they have not got a future, who know that maybe
next year the benefit processing centre in another town or city
is going to take their job away and that they have to look for
something else, I still see those people striving to give the
best possible service they can to their customers. For me, poor
morale will be when people do not want to do that because I really
believe that the vast majority of people who work for me work
for their customers, they work because they want to give a good
service to their customers and they understand what it is we are
trying to do. Every second month I have a Talk Direct Day in a
different region where 100 to 200 of my people at every level
come and grill me and/or one of my Board members for two hours
about the Efficiency Challenge and what it means for them and
I think the more that people understand the challenges for the
business and what we are trying to do, the more people have said
to me in feedback, "I now understand why this system is doing
that and I understand why you have to do it". That is what
we need to keep on doing.
Q18 Mr Dunne: You have talked about
some of the successes from this efficiency programme, and Rotherham
is a good example. By what criteria will you assess whether or
not it has got to the point where it cannot continue? I represent
a rural area and I have got to know, as a result of being on this
Committee, what your agency does in my area and my concern is
widespread in the outlying areas, that there has to be some face-to-face
contact with clients at a certain point and if you reduce and
concentrate the number of facilities down to a certain level,
you have to start cutting them out in rural areas. You talked
about the trouble of clients travelling to get the face-to-face
contact and if they have no money, they cannot do that. How do
you judge at what point you have reached that critical point?
Ms Strathie: It is a real challenge
in terms of designing what is a modern, active service for working-age
customers as well as putting that into the existing estate and
what you aspire to do, bringing on board the new-style offices.
We have brought over 600 of those to the community and that was
from a starting point of between 1,450 to 1,500 old-style social
security offices and jobcentres. By next summer we will have around
880 of those new outlets. That is one programme of work and that
is our absolute commitment as a business to face-to-face contact,
but we have to do that within the resources available and we have
to do that according to density of population and customer need.
I am afraid the days of just maintaining an outlet and all of
its overhead are very difficult for us now to maintain, so we
have looked at the face-to-face service and why we need it. We
need it for those who are the hardest to help and we need it for
those people who need to build a rapport with a personal adviser
in a jobcentre to help move them from being not job-ready for
whatever reason, lack of confidence, time away, basic skills,
any range of things. They need someone who is on their case, supporting
them, building their skills and building their confidence, and
that is essentially our justification for our continued local
presence in the community. We will always provide support for
those hardest to help and our new business model in each of those
offices and in a number of outreach facilities means that we have
self-service kiosks, which again I am very proud of. There are
9,000 of those across the UK where people can self-serve, select
the vacancies, go on a phone and deal with that either direct
with the employer or through Jobcentre Plus Direct. We recognised
that for some people that is just a bridge too far, so we have
customer service officers and we have floor-walkers to help people
use the IT and use the telephones, but for those who cannot, we
still have to provide that service of additional support. We will
never have the number of outlets we had in the past and my vision
over a period of time is that with the outlets we have, we may
want to bring more services across the department into those outlets
so that, if you like, it is a departmental store, it is a place
for the citizen to turn, but that is way into the future. For
now, we want to put those customers who can help themselves on
the phone or on the Internet and those who need more help to have
personal adviser support, face-to-face.
Mr Nicholas: We possibly put too
much emphasis in our presentation on the new offices because some
of our most innovative services are now about taking advisers
out, co-locating them with respect to putting them in doctors'
surgeries, for example, so they can meet people coming in for
medical appointments. Our core offices will only be the sort of
centre of what I hope we will see as progressively more advisers
out and about in the community, in Citizens' Advice Bureaux and
doctors' surgeries, not every day, but so that you know there
is going to be somebody there on a Tuesday morning every time.
We are considering doing that in some of the wrap-around school
developments so that there is a lone parent adviser every second
Tuesday in the primary school so that people can get to where
our customers go rather than our customers having to come in to
us.
Q19 Mr Dunne: Are there any specific
criteria that you apply and could you publish them if there are?
Ms Strathie: As to whether or
not there was an outlet, face-to-face contact?
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