Examination of Witnesses (Questions 1-19)
JOBCENTRE PLUS
AND DEPARTMENT
FOR WORK
AND PENSIONS
Q1 Chairman: Good afternoon. Today we
are considering the Comptroller and Auditor General's Report,
Jobcentre Plus: Delivering Effective Services Through Personal
Advisers. We welcome Lesley Strathie, who is Chief Executive
of Jobcentre Plus, Sharon White, who is head of the Welfare to
Work Directorate, which is at the Department of Work and Pensions,
and Nick Owen, who is head of Labour Market Products at Jobcentre
Plus. Ms Strathie, why do these Personal Advisers spend, on average,
only half their time helping customers find work?
Ms Strathie: I assume that you
are referring to the 52% of time they spend interviewing customers.
Q2 Chairman: The reference is paragraph
48 if you want to see it in the Report.
Ms Strathie: I do not think we
should assume that means that is the only time that our Advisers
spend helping customers. That is the agreed findings from the
NAO Report which we welcome and accept in terms of the time that
they are customer facing and interviewing customers.
Q3 Chairman: It works out, according
to this paragraph, at 28 interviews a week. I may be being unfair,
but that does not sound a lot of interviews a week when you are
a Personal Adviser and that is your job to meet the public personally.
Ms Strathie: If your question
is do we think it is enough, the answer is no, but if we think
the average interview with a Personal Adviser is 41 minutes and
we are looking at increasing that and trying to find different
methods of increasing their time and productive customer facing
time. What you will need to know is that, since we accepted the
recommendations of the NAO Report, we have restructured the use
of the entire advisory resource. We have implemented our standard
organisation model which means that we have appointed a thousand
adviser managers and we have almost completed the appointment
of 1,300 diary and admin support staff. We have tried to increase
productivity through up-skilling and better quality management
and we have tried to unburden our advisers of a lot of the admin
work and diary support work.
Q4 Chairman: If we were looking at
this in a year's time how many interviews on average a week would
your Personal Advisers be conducting?
Ms Strathie: I do not know the
answer but if we got to 65 it would be 35 a week.
Q5 Chairman: Is 35 a week your aim?
Ms Strathie: No. I am answering
your question. If we achieved 35 a week, that would be 65% of
the time front facing. At the moment we do not really know the
answer because there is a balance to be struck between quantity
and quality. At the end of the day the work focused interviews,
and Jobcentre Plus advisers did 10.8 million of them last year,
they are about moving people closer to the labour market and into
work. At the moment we are looking at how we measure all that
work and how we get the right levers in place to get the right
outcomes which is people, especially those most disadvantaged,
back into the labour market and back into work. We do not know
the answer to the number yet.
Q6 Chairman: The Bill going through
Parliament, the Government is trying to move a million people
from benefit to paid employment so there is going to be a lot
more customers who need help. How will you cope with these extra
numbers without reducing the amount of time that each client spends
with a Personal Adviser?
Ms Strathie: I think we are on
a journey at the moment. For example, as we have rolled out the
new Jobcentre Plus model and new service, and we are almost at
the end of that, we have been incrementally introducing an incapacity
benefit specialist adviser who handles people. Once we put the
new model in place in each location we handle people who arrive
with a medical certificate wishing to claim incapacity benefit
and they will be given special advice. We have also rolled out
our Pathways to Work model in a third of the country now with
our plans in place for the next two-thirds of the country.
Q7 Chairman: I will put the question
again because there is no point in getting a long answer about
various mechanisms. That does not actually answer the question.
In general terms are these clients going to spend the same amount
of time with the Personal Advisers?
Ms Strathie: The incapacity benefit
customers, who will be claimants to the new Employment and Support
Allowance, will have a whole series of interventions from specialist
advisers and that will be delivered in partnership through the
private and voluntary sector.
Q8 Chairman: I will try for a third
time. I think you said earlier that on average they are spending
41 minutes. Given that we are now going to try and move another
million people from benefit into paid employment with a lot more
customers coming in, will on average these new and existing clients
still have, on average, 41 minutes with a Personal Adviser? There
is no point, is there, in getting many more people streaming into
the system who, by definition, because they have not got a job
at the moment are the more difficult clients. There is no point
in encouraging them into the system if they are not spending adequate
time with a Personal Adviser. That is the whole point of the system
to be personal. It probably does take a good 41 minutes to work
through this.
Ms Strathie: That is the average
time. We do a whole range of interviews. Yes, they will still
have a Personal Adviser service. The detail of the next two phases
is not completely in place yet because they will be private and
voluntary sector led. These are our customers; they are not new.
The help they are going to get is going to be an increased package
and that is what the Welfare Reform Bill will bring about but
these are not new customers. They are customers of Jobcentre Plus
and, yes, we will spend the time. Will it be 41 minutes on average?
That will be built up over a period of time because there are
a whole series of other help that people will get through our
partners.
Q9 Chairman: I think the answer is
we do not know. We have to try and work out who are the good and
bad performing advisers. You have changed your systems, have you
not? If we look at paragraphs 44 and 45, it seems from reading
those paragraphs that we now cannot tell how an individual adviser,
or even an individual office, is performing. We may have a less
bureaucratic system of assessment. We may know how a district
or region is performing, but you have very little information
on how a Personal Adviser is performing. Is that fair?
Ms Strathie: No, that is not true.
This refers to the job outcome target, which is a new measure
introduced this year. This is our first year of learning, if you
like. That is the total outcome for the customer as measured by
those people who start work and go through the tax system. We
measure what happens to customers at the end of it.
Q10 Chairman: Would you please look
at paragraph 45 on page 19, where it says in this Report that
you agreed to: "However, it will not be possible to attribute
job outcomes to individual offices or advisers". So the question
I put to you was entirely fair. If it was not fair why did you
sign up to this Report?
Ms Strathie: It is a fair question
and I am trying to answer it. This refers to the job outcome for
the customer. We measure advisers by a series of interventions
we ask them to take the customer through in their journey back
to work. That includes the number of interviews we want them to
do and the quality of what happens. Basically it is the job of
the adviser to do some diagnostic work on the barriers to employment
to identify what help we can give them; if they are job ready,
what do we need to do to get them towards job applications and
successful entry? If they are not job ready, what sort of interventions
do we need to have with them to move them further in that journey?
We have put in place a whole series of quality assurance framework
and an achievement tool to measure those activities. That is quite
separate. This is the overall job outcome for the entire business,
not just for Personal Advisers.
Q11 Chairman: The simple answer to
my question is that you will be able to assist individually how
Personal Advisers carry out their work.
Ms Strathie: Yes.
Q12 Chairman: If we look at the number
of people who turn up for their scheduled appointments—this
is dealt with in paragraph 52 onwards—we see that customers
do not turn up for 1.8 million interviews a year at a cost of
£16 million. What more are you doing to try and get people
to turn up?
Ms Strathie: When I mentioned
the three key actions that we had gone ahead in implementing the
diary admin support manager role, part of the job that they have
is maximising the diary time that is available for interviewing
customers and work focused interviews and then doing everything
we can to support the customer to turn up including telephone
calls the day before to confirm. Not all of our customers lead
very orderly lives with diaries, et cetera, so we do try and we
have improved that already and will continue to do so.
Q13 Chairman: What lessons are you
learning from the private sector?
Ms Strathie: Much of the programmes
of intervention we have, the labour market support has been built
up incrementally over the years, much of which has come from different
tests from the private sector. For example, our employment zones,
which are private sector delivery, we take the learning from those
and then test how we apply that more broadly in the business.
Adviser Discretion Fund would be one example where we did not
give ourselves the flexibility we gave to the private sector but
we learned the benefits of a small amount of money helping track
the difference between someone being able to start work and not.
Q14 Mr Wright: I am going to incur
the wrath of my Chairman and start by saying I disagree with him
to some extent. I think that 28 interviews a week is quite a lot.
Given that we need to have a first class service for people moving
from incapacity benefit into work, to be able to manage that caseload
seems quite high. Bearing in mind what the Chairman said about
getting a million people into work who might not have worked for
some considerable time, if at all, how on earth are you going
to deal with that?
Ms Strathie: For everybody who
says that 28 is not enough there will always be somebody who says
that 28 is too many and that is why I say we do not know the right
answer. We have been delivering Personal Adviser services for
a very long time and incrementally with different groups of customers
and customers with different needs. The 41 minutes is an average.
We average it out across all the customers groups and it depends
on the extent to which the Adviser is involved. For example, a
first interview with someone who has an expectation that they
are going to claim incapacity benefit and do nothing in return
and get nothing in return and no help, that first interview of
taking somebody on a journey towards the expectation to work could
be quite lengthy, and Advisers build up a rapport with their customers.
On the other hand, an advisory interview may be very quickly brought
to a head. 28 is where we are; we are taking steps to drive that
up. 30 would get us to something that we would think hard beyond
that.
Q15 Mr Wright: Looking at paragraph
22, page 13, it says: "The researches found that Personal
Advisers are highly valued by all groups, but some customers felt
that Advisers were always very busy, rushing through their appointments
and failing to contact customers in between appointments".
That shows that, given where you said we are making a journey,
the journey is going to be a bit bumpy and turbulent, is it not,
because if they are failing to contact the customers now it will
get a lot worse?
Ms Strathie: The fact is that
we have tried to improve by setting benchmarks for the various
things we want to do by upskilling and the admin support. One
of the reasons why our advisers are very busy, as quite rightly
pointed out in the Report, is the burden of admin tasks on them.
We have introduced that support role and it is making a difference
already. It is early days but we also need a mechanism for constantly
upskilling those people so that we can do more in the interview
and we have that in place with a quality assurance framework and
an Adviser achievement tool to help support them.
Q16 Mr Wright: You mention the admin
support officers. That seems to me to be entirely sensible in
order to reduce some of the bureaucracy by these frontline services.
Given the Government's policy of pushing resources away from the
back office function towards front of office, and given that DWP
has to make something like 5% real efficiency savings, is this
not the first thing that will go and that we will just be back
to square one? If you need to keep within the budget they are
going to have to go, are they not?
Ms Strathie: If we look at the
story so far, the reductions that Jobcentre Plus has made on its
headcount and in making that reduction it has actually increased
the jobs that have moved from back office to front office. It
is important to stress the language here. If we look at what Sir
Peter Gershon was talking about in terms of productive time, time
spent in frontline activity, we have modernised the business from
a single channel where you walk into a social security office
or job centre to dealing through contact centre services and e-channels
as well as job centres. We have a very good track record already
of protecting our advisory resource. By March 2008 we have a target
for Jobcentre Plus of around 9,000. We have already achieved about
7,500 of those moving from back office to a customer facing role.
Q17 Mr Wright: Moving to paragraph
36, the last sentence: "In addition, the Agency's systems
do not allow it to know accurately how many of each type of Personal
Adviser it employs—such as Lone Parent advisers, New Deal
advisers and Incapacity Benefit advisers". Then at paragraph
38: "Personal Advisers specialise in helping a particular
group of customers and often have a considerable knowledge of
their associated benefits; for example, they may specialise in
working with disabled customers or lone parents." That is
entirely contradictory, is it not?
Ms Strathie: Is your question
around whether we have specialist advisers dealing solely with
specialist groups?
Q18 Mr Wright: I have a constituency
in the North East of England where we have a high percentage of
people who are economically inactive for a whole range of reasons—incapacity
benefit, lone parents, that sort of thing—I would like to
take comfort from the fact that the DWP and Jobcentre Plus are
targeting those groups with real skilled people. I take comfort
from that to some extent with paragraph 38, but two paragraphs
earlier I do not take any from it at all because you do not really
know what sort of person you are employing. All I am saying is
do those two things not marry up?
Ms Strathie: We absolutely know
how many of each particular type of adviser we have. Advisers
start off with a generic set of models for the learning and development
to be an adviser and then they follow different routes, depending
on whether they are going to be a lone parent adviser or an incapacity
benefit adviser. You have to remember scale and context here.
If it is a very small office, perhaps in a rural location, an
adviser will have to deliver to all customer groups, or to two
or three different customer groups. They will have to be multi-skilled
and have all of that. In a large conurbation advisers will specialise
in one group.
Q19 Mr Wright: Are you saying that
for my constituency of Hartlepool, which is an urban area of 90,000
people with high levels of deprivation and high levels of economic
inactivity, you will expect to see specialised people working
with targeted groups of individuals?
Ms Strathie: Yes, absolutely.
That does not mean that once I become a lone parent adviser I
will never learn how to be any other kind of adviser. People are
on a career path of gradually increasing their knowledge and being
able to work across those groups.
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