Examination of Witnesses (Questions 20-39)
JOBCENTRE PLUS
AND DEPARTMENT
FOR WORK
AND PENSIONS
Q20 Mr Wright: As you can imagine,
I get a lot of casework relating to Jobcentre Plus and I have
to say that the district manager of Jobcentre Plus in my area
is absolutely first class and it is probably the best agency in
responding to me promptly out of everybody I deal with, so I would
thank you for that. A common theme that comes out is that on a
face to face basis the individual Personal Advisers are absolutely
first class; the Contact Centre is downright ineffectual and I
think this Report shows that. I am concerned that people's experience
of Jobcentre Plus is not good because the Contact Centre gives
them contradictory/conflicting advice. Can you elaborate on how
that is going to improve?
Ms Strathie: There are quite a
number of things in there. Our Contact Centre network delivers
a whole range of services from being the first contact if you
want to make a working age claim, and that is very much about
data collection and then telling the customer what evidence is
required in order to access that.
Q21 Mr Wright: A common theme is:
I have lost my job. These are not long-term unemployed. There
is a theme of people really wanting to get into the job market
again straightaway. I have lost my job on the Monday. I have contacted
the Jobcentre Plus on the Tuesday. The people in Hartlepool were
very, very helpful, but I mentioned the Contact Centre. They have
lost my details and I have had to give them again and they have
lost them again. This is a recurring theme in my caseload time
and again. The contact centres are letting constituents down.
Ms Strathie: I am really sorry
to hear that because I am quite proud of the Contact Centre network
we have built and the improvements we have made in terms of the
calls we answer and the speed we answer them at.
Q22 Mr Wright: You keep losing files
on my constituents.
Ms Strathie: I would be very happy
to take that up outside of the Committee. It is a huge change
programme. We had about 15 months ago six weeks of serious difficulties
in seven or so of our Contact Centres and we have put that well
behind us. If that is still an issue then I would want to know
and in the mean time I thank you very much for what you said about
my district manager.
Q23 Mr Wright: Can you talk a little
about regional performance of Personal Advisers? It says in paragraph
19 that: "International comparisons suggest that Personal
Advisers have a positive impact". The more that you actively
participate in trying to change things, the more the employment
rate will improve. Is it not just the case that we have had a
very buoyant economy over the last 10 years because of a whole
range of things that the Government has done and other things
that employment rates were bound to increase? You see that in
London and in the South East. In my patch where there are real
problems with employment and inactivity because of deprivation
and illness we have not seen the same successes. Personal Advisers
have not had that much of an impact, have they?
Ms Strathie: Could I ask Ms White
to answer that question because she has the policy responsibility
here.
Ms White: The analysis that we
have done has not been region by region but it has tried to separate
out how far this is about the work that Jobcentre Plus has done
and how far this is about having a benign economy. It shows that
even with the economy performing as well as it has, the programmes
which have a very high content in Personal Advisers generally
perform twice as well. If you are lone parent rated then you deal
with lone parents because it is twice as likely to get into a
job. That is across the country now. There are likely to be regional
variations in there which we have not picked up, but the impact
is above and beyond the impact of the economy though.
Q24 Chairman: You have mentioned
this problem of contact centres. The reference here is in figure
10, page 20: "Personal Advisers were concerned at the amount
of time they spend correcting contact centre errors..." so
it is in the Report. It does not seem from reading the Report
that you know the scale of the problem caused by the contact centres.
You may or may not want to comment on it more, but it is a subject
that we may want to return to in our Report.
Ms Strathie: I think that is a
separate point from what Mr Wright was saying about loss of documents,
et cetera. The Minister announced a few months ago our
plan to revamp the first contact for handling claims for benefit
and the introduction of an 0800 free phone number. One of the
difficulties in the contact centre network is the amount of information
we need from the customer in order to make the claim processed
and ready. That includes telling the customer the evidence that
is required by regulation before they can access the benefit.
Very often the point at which a new claims Personal Adviser is
interviewing the customer, the customer has not brought the information
or it has not been gathered at the Contact Centre. We are heavily
reliant on what the law asks us to obtain from customers and sometimes
we have several attempts and the customer has 30 days to provide
the information. We are trying to drive a service where we help
the customer to help us process their payments.
Mr Wright: I looked at figure
10 and it was entirely in keeping with the experience of my constituents.
The contact centre errors do seem to be a recurring theme that
my constituents tell me.
Q25 Chairman: Mr Williams has reminded
me that in paragraph 63 it says here: "We [the NAO] obtained
records from two sites we visited which showed errors occurring
several times a week (40 incidents in 17 days at one site, and
89 incidents in 10 days at the other site)". It seems that
the National Audit Office has managed to get some useful information
which perhaps your own organisation has not been so diligent in
obtaining.
Ms Strathie: We have looked very
hard at what did happen in the early days and what probably was
happening at the time the Report was done, but we accepted this
Report as it is. What I was trying to say is we recognise that
we needed to standardise our processes, we needed to improve them,
we needed to upskill our people. We have done a large number of
big releases on our IT system to make it easier for people to
gather that information. I am not refuting the difficulty. My
concern was specific to your constituency about how much you said
was currently going wrong and I would still like to take that
up outside of the Committee.
Q26 Mr Dunne: You currently have
9,300 Personal Advisers. Does each Adviser retain a personal responsibility
and relationship for each of the cases that they look after?
Ms Strathie: They do while customers
are going through that caseload intervention period. The Personal
Adviser service is built on a series of interviews and a series
of handovers to others, depending on the customer group and the
length of time they have been away from the labour market, so
advisers caseload their customers and work with them because that
is most important. If you come back into the system having been
out of it or ad hoc then you might be allocated a new adviser.
Q27 Mr Dunne: For example, on page
27 there is a very helpful table explaining the process of interviews.
If you look at lone parents claiming income support there are
subsequent interviews 12 months after an initial claim. That will
be undertaken by the same Personal Adviser who interviewed at
the initial stage?
Ms Strathie: No, I would think
it is unlikely to be because the new claims intervention is a
single process and then people, if you are claiming Jobseeker's
Allowance, for example, you would come in every two weeks as required
to provide evidence of unemployment and have additional support.
At the six months stage of unemployment you would have an adviser
allocated to you in that process. You would have your Personal
Adviser to help you because you have now been away from the labour
market for six months and whatever help we have been giving you
or you have been helping yourself back to work clearly has not
worked, then you would be allocated a Personal Adviser and the
caseload process would start.
Q28 Mr Dunne: How many offices do
these Personal Advisers work from?
Ms Strathie: We are rolling out
the new model and we are almost at the end of that roll-out of
the new Jobcentre Plus offices. We have 870 of 880 but we still
have a number of old social security offices not quite closed
yet.
Q29 Mr Dunne: How many offices have
you closed in the Pathways areas in the last couple of years?
Ms Strathie: I do not know the
answer to that in Pathways areas specifically. Since we started
the roll-out programme, which I would like not to see as a closure
programme because it was a huge investment by government in our
new network and our new model and a completely different type
of service, so as we have rolled out 870 approximately—I
think that is the number today—of those new ones we have
probably closed about 600 old style and small offices.
Q30 Mr Dunne: If you ignore the distinction
between Pathways and non-Pathways areas, the numbers you are giving
us are covering the whole country.
Ms White: Yes.
Q31 Mr Dunne: If you add 870 to 600
you get to the total number of offices you had before the programme
began.
Ms Strathie: We had roughly 1,450
outlets. That includes old job centres, old social security offices
and some outreach services.
Q32 Mr Dunne: If individuals who
need to get to work focused interviews because they are mandatory
in order to receive their benefit, the number of offices offering
that interview has declined very significantly over the period.
Ms Strathie: Not completely in
terms of new relations with the customers. The vast majority of
offices are full-time. We have part-time offices. We carry out
advisory interventions in other locations of our partners and
so on. One does not equate to the other easily, but the total
number of the network is smaller, yes.
Q33 Mr Dunne: In my area at least
I have experience of office closures. Benefit recipients are now
being encouraged to travel, in some cases very large distances,
in order to get to their interview. Do you have an assessment
of what is an acceptable distance for benefit claimants to have
to travel? Do you have minimum criteria when you allocate your
office closure programme?
Ms Strathie: We have extensive
criteria in working out what the new network would look like which
was heavily consulted upon as well. For example, a lot of the
offices that closed were old style social security offices. They
never did conduct work focused interviews; this was something
that happened in job centres. Again, it is not a direct translation.
What we have done is worked with local partners, worked with local
stakeholders to look at what the network coverage could be including
outreach services, flexible delivery as well as a standard Jobcentre
Plus because so much of our transactions now are conducted through
e-channels or telephony.
Q34 Mr Dunne: For work focused interviews
these are one-on-one interviews with experienced personnel which
you cannot outsource to other partners unless you are doing it
under contract and they are full-time engaged for you, I assume.
Ms Strathie: We do. A lot of the
advisory services in employment zones are delivered by other partners
already.
Q35 Mr Dunne: They are contracted
to do that and that is a full time occupation for the Advisers?
Ms Strathie: Yes, we contract
that part of the process to the private sector to deliver those
advisory services. Depending on the location, if you were a lone
parent or you were a Jobseeker's Allowance customer, you would
be getting your support through the private sector employment
zone rather than by coming each time to a Jobcentre Plus office.
Q36 Mr Dunne: The claimant has to
attend an interview somewhere. That location may vary according
to the area in which the person lives.
Ms Strathie: Yes, as indeed it
always did.
Q37 Mr Dunne: A major focus of this
Report is on the inefficiency from appointments that are not kept.
It seems to me from reading it that there are very few solutions
offered here from the analysis provided as to what you could do
about that. In my experience a number of individuals fail to turn
up to appointments because of the distance that they have to travel
to get to the appointment. They may be lone parents for whom it
is difficult to make childcare arrangements. What are you doing
to make it easier for those people to access interviews?
Ms Strathie: It very much depends
on the type of interview we are talking about. For example, if
you are a jobseeker and you cannot get to the six-monthly work
focused interview then there would naturally be a conversation
about why and how one is available for work and actively seeking
work, because most job centres are within easy access of public
transport.
Q38 Mr Dunne: I am concerned about
those that are not within easy access where people have to possibly
take public transport for many miles and many hours, which is
the case in my area. For example, do you offer travel cost assistance
to attend interviews?
Ms Strathie: We do not for the
initial claims for benefit.
Q39 Mr Dunne: Is that something you
ought to think about, given the cost to the service of these failed
appointments?
Ms Strathie: It has certainly
been the requirement for people to attend for work focused interviews
and the interviews where we require them we do refund but not
at the initial claim stage. That is one of the reasons that we
have introduced our Contact Centre network where people now can
start that process of having their claim taken, they can start
the process of having their advisory interviews booked, et cetera,
without leaving home. They can do that from a landline and will
be able to do it from a landline at no cost.
| 
