Examination of Witnesses (Questions 40-59)
JOBCENTRE PLUS
AND DEPARTMENT
FOR WORK
AND PENSIONS
Q40 Mr Dunne: You are conducting
interviews over the telephone now.
Ms Strathie: Yes, we have been
for some time for the new claims process. A significant amount
of our job brokering work is through Jobcentre Plus direct—that
is on the telephone—and indeed a lot of our customers help
themselves through our website.
Q41 Mr Dunne: I would urge you for
those where you need to have face to face interviews where distance
is an issue, particularly in rural areas, to consider the relatively
modest cost to the agency of providing the travel because it would
help enormously those who are on very limited means to attend
the meetings and therefore retain their benefits. The telephone
issue takes me on to the next point I wanted to raise which is
the proportion of claimants who have mental health problems. I
was interested to note on table 11 on page 21 that much the highest
proportion of those who miss interviews are those on incapacity
benefit and a large proportion of those will be suffering from
mental illness. I believe it is approximately 40% of incapacity
benefit claimants suffer from mental problems. What assessment
can you make for an initial claim as to whether it is appropriate
or not to make an assessment over the telephone?
Ms Strathie: Starting with the
40% of customers who we believe have some form of mental health
problem in relation to those customers who are currently on incapacity
benefit, we have done an extensive amount of work on the needs
of that group with the health professionals and professional help
is very much part of the Pathways package. When a customer phones
in the first place to claim a benefit most customers have a view
of which benefit they wish to claim—for example, I have
a medical certificate, I am sick or I have had to give up work—so
our agents are trained to handle that in their interventions with
the customer to find out exactly what their circumstances are
and then to book the appropriate intervention. We have been piloting
Pathways for how long now?
Ms White: Since October 2003.
As you possibly know, with incapacity benefit the first work focused
interview does not take place until somebody has been claiming
benefit for eight weeks. There is also quite a lot of flexibility
particularly thinking about people with mental health conditions
to vary the conditionality. Even in Pathways areas where somebody
has to go for six work focused interviews, there is a lot of flexibility
for the adviser to waive the interview or to delay it if it is
not appropriate in terms of somebody's medication cycle or general
wellbeing.
Q42 Mr Dunne: I am concerned at how
easy it is to make an assessment of in particular mental health
conditions over the telephone. In many cases people over the telephone
can give an impression of much more suitability for work than
they would if you were seeing them face to face. I would like
you to comment on how you can train people to do this and how
well you train your Personal Advisers generally to recognise a
mental health issue?
Ms White: It is a different process.
Within incapacity benefit there are two lots of specialists: there
are Ms Strathie's Personal Adviser specialists who are helping
somebody back to work but there are also health professionals
who do something called a personal capability assessment. That
is an assessment made normally about 28 weeks into an incapacity
benefit claim as to somebody's wellbeing, mental or physical condition.
They are either doctors or they are other health professionals
who are making that assessment, not Jobcentre Plus Personal Advisers.
Q43 Mr Bacon: Could I start by asking
about figure 6 on page 15 where it sets out the metrics for Jobcentre
Plus compared with various benchmark organisations, including
a Dutch government agency. You will see there that it says: "Advisers'
expected customer facing time"—60% Jobcentre Plus,
80% for the Dutch, WorkDirections is 80-90%. What single thing
do you think could do most to get the 60% number for Jobcentre
Plus up?
Ms Strathie: There is no direct
comparison at all and indeed I applaud what the NAO did to try
and draw out those benchmark organisations. If we take the Dutch
organisation, for example, they only deal with customers up to
six months' unemployed. It is a different service and it is those
who are closest to the labour market they are handling. That is
one issue.
Q44 Mr Bacon: Whereas Personal Advisers
here do that plus beyond six months?
Ms Strathie: Exactly. We have
Personal Advisers at the new claim stage to set up the contract
of rights and responsibility and help and then the Personal Adviser
service kicks in really at six months onwards and there are different
durations of length of unemployment. If you are a jobseeker, lone
parents obviously and incapacity benefit and disability advisers,
so it is a completely different service that we are running for
people at different points and need.
Q45 Mr Bacon: That said, you still
have a considerably greater degree of expected customer facing
time. You are going to have to do something, are you not? It says
in paragraph 33: "... there is no reason to believe that
there are too many advisers at present." In the following
paragraph: "... the need for suitable Personal Adviser support
will be substantially increased". That is because of the
various changes outline in the 2006 Welfare Reform Bill. Again,
later in that paragraph it says: "Jobcentre Plus will need
to explore different solutions such as recruiting additional staff,
further redeploying staff to the frontline, and altering the interview
schedule ...". Taking those three in turn—recruiting
additional staff—what are your headcount plans?
Ms Strathie: Our headcount plans
overall are to reduce further to March 2008, not Personal Advisers
specifically but for the business.
Q46 Mr Bacon: This paragraph is about
Personal Advisers and my question on headcounts is about Personal
Advisers. What are your headcount plans for Personal Advisers?
Ms Strathie: We need to remember
Jobcentre Plus delivers the bits of the support package that ministers
agree that it is going to deliver. The resources that Jobcentre
Plus has allocated and its headcount challenge that it has to
March 2008 is the challenge for the organisation. Overall, DWP
had a headcount reduction of 40,000 gross.
Q47 Mr Bacon: I am not asking about
DWP. My question is about your headcount plans for Personal Advisers.
It may be one of three things: they can go up, they can go down
or they can stay the same. What are your headcount plans for Personal
Advisers?
Ms Strathie: My plans are to maintain
the level we have.
Q48 Mr Bacon: That is roughly at
9,300.
Ms Strathie: At March 2008, 9,300,
yes, that is correct, because I do not have any allocation beyond
that.
Q49 Mr Bacon: You mean that until
the Comprehensive Spending Review is out of the way you will not
know what you are capable of doing beyond March 2008?
Ms Strathie: DWP settled early.
It was one of the Departments that did.
Q50 Mr Bacon: It is an internal departmental
wrangle to figure out what you will get after that, is it?
Ms Strathie: The process of planning
how we live within those means and what we do as a department
through to 2010-11 is something that we are just at the early
stages of.
Q51 Mr Bacon: You are expecting to
be 9,300 up until March 2008 and thereafter you do not know what
is going to happen.
Ms Strathie: I have no plans to
reduce those Advisers from the job that they are doing but I have
to live within the total allocation. I would expect it to increase
if I was doing more work with incapacity benefit advisers. I would
expect it to be up, not down.
Q52 Mr Bacon: There are two other
areas there: redeploying staff to the frontline and altering the
interview schedule to make interviews shorter or less frequent.
Those are both commonsense; you can do one, the other or both.
Are there any specific plans to make interviews shorter? Having
done the calculation of 28 interviews divided by five being 5.6,
I am slightly sympathetic to what Mr Wright was saying, that is
not quite six a day—three in the morning, three in the afternoon—plus
phone calls, general hassle, buying a sandwich. You can see how
in a working day that six would be eaten up. It is not easy to
see how you could get to nine or 10 unless you make them very
snappy ten minute interviews, in which case the productivity out
of those interviews might decline significantly. Are you looking
at making interviews shorter?
Ms Strathie: No.
Q53 Mr Bacon: You are not?
Ms Strathie: As you spelt out,
there are a number of choices. If we just look at the advisory
resource per se, we want the advisory resource to be efficient,
but I need to look at the totality of what Jobcentre Plus has
to deliver. If my challenge was the same as the department's 5%
year on year, I need to find that from the entire business, not
specifically from the advisers. As I said earlier, we do not know
what the right number is or the right amount of time. This is
built on history so far.
Q54 Mr Bacon: The right number of?
Ms Strathie: The right number
of interviews. We do not want to suffer on quality. There is no
point in having a sausage machine approach that does not help
anybody get into work.
Q55 Mr Bacon: In paragraph 36 it
says: "Jobcentre Plus' understanding of staff numbers is
limited ... To arrive at a better approximation of the number
of Personal Advisers, Jobcentre Plus has adjusted the headline
figure downwards by 13.5%". How difficult can it be to have
an accurate idea of how many people you employ? How do you pay
them? Do they all get paid? Presumably each of them has a bank
account and each of them gets money paid from the taxpayer into
that bank account. You must know into how many bank accounts you
are paying salaries.
Ms Strathie: We do know the total
number of Advisers. We do know that they get deployed according
to the business volumes and requirement. We have a breakdown of
how many we have of each particular type and, as I have already
mentioned earlier, they do multi-tasking. What we had was what
I would regard as inadequate information from our activity based
information that we were using and what NAO looked at when they
came in. What we have done now as part of our roll out of a big
resource management system, a transformation programme in the
Department, we have adopted new model using activity-based management
and built up a much better picture of unit costs and deploying
that to use for productivity. It will be better. We will have
a much greater handle on what each of our Advisers are doing but
it may well change the baseline because you cannot really compare
like with like.
Q56 Mr Bacon: Is it possible that
you could send the Committee a more detailed note about that and
when you expect it to have bedded down?[1]
Ms Strathie: Yes, we would be
very happy to do that.
Q57 Mr Bacon: In paragraph 54 it
says: "Some missed interviews ... are caused by customers
who have found a job. Others fail to attend even though they may
miss out on benefits or face penalties . . . " It goes on:
"... sanctions may be applied, which for Jobseeker's Allowance
customers means their benefit is terminated, while for Income
Support customers they can lose up to 20% of their benefit for
every time they fail to attend." This may be a question for
Ms White. How often are sanctions applied?
Ms White: For lone parents on
income support in about 4% of cases sanctions are applied.
Q58 Mr Bacon: Do you mean 4% of cases
where sanctions could be applied they actually are applied?
Ms White: 4% of the total caseload.
For Jobseeker's Allowance it is higher at about 10%.
Q59 Mr Bacon: I am not talking about
the total caseload. In those instances where it would be possible,
according to your own rules, to apply sanctions, how often are
sanctions applied?
Ms White: I think the cases are
probably overturned at decision making about 50% of the time.
Ms Strathie: I think it is slightly
less than 50%. We have a range of sanctions but presumably you
want me to focus just on the sanctions for people who fail to
attend.
1 Note by witness: The new Activity Based Management
System (ABM) aims to reduce costs by eliminating inefficiency
and improving customer service by minimising performance variation.
It will be used in 2007/08 to develop a clear understanding of
productivity for the key activities in the business and identify
and agree benchmarks on both current and future costs and productivity. Back
| 
