Examination of Witnesses (Questions 20-39)
MR LEIGH
LEWIS, MR
ADAM SHARPLES
AND MR
PHIL WYNN
OWEN
28 MARCH 2007
Q20 Chairman: The point is that it
is only official error where you actually pay money out, it is
not official error where you deny people money wrongly. Perhaps
you need to review that.
Mr Sharples: Official errors can
result in underpayments as well as overpayments.
Q21 Miss Begg: I have a couple of
questions about the subject of disability, not that I am being
stereotyped you understand. According to the figures with regard
to your target of hitting 75% awareness of the DDA (Disability
Discrimination Act), as far as I can see it is actually going
backwards and fewer people know about the DDA than did in October
2004, yet you hope to get to 75% by 2008. What are you doing about
that?
Mr Lewis: It is fair to say that
we have a further set of data in this area, unlike the area I
was discussing with your colleague, since the report was published
and it is more encouraging but it does not in any way negate your
question. Our most recent four month figure for the four months
from September 2006 to January 2007 showed that awareness has
risen from 71.8% to 72.9%, which is an encouraging move but it
is still below the baseline, as you said, and it is still not
at 75%. In truth, this is quite a blunt instrument of a measure
because it is simply based on one question in an ONS omnibus survey.
What we are trying to do in relation to this is making people
aware, not so much of the Act itself because the Act in a way
is merely the vehicle, but of the rights that emerge under the
Act and the rights people have. For example, of fundamental importance
has been the establishment within our Department—but it
is a cross-Government unit—of the Office for Disability
Issues, about which I am sure you will be aware and there is the
requirement now on all public bodies as from last December to
produce disability equality schemes and we have run various awareness-raising
campaigns as I am sure you will know, targeted particularly at
small and medium enterprises which we did in the first half of
2006. The latest kind of evidence we have got from that is that
we are seeing awareness rising, but looking at this target in
the round I think what we are trying to do is to not simply make
people answer yes rather than no to a question in a survey which,
as I say, in the end tells you something but perhaps does not
tell you a huge amount, but actually are we making the lives of
people with disabilities better through the help that they are
receiving and the rights which the DDA now gives them.
Q22 Miss Begg: Do you have any data
with regard to disabled people themselves, as to their awareness
of their rights and what protections they have under the law,
given the most recent introduction of the equality duty?
Mr Lewis: My understanding is
that the data do not cut down to that amount of detail, but if
I find when I am back in the Department that I am wrong about
that then I will certainly write to the Committee, but I do not
think we have that.
Q23 Miss Begg: That is obviously
your key target group, the disabled people themselves, and also
the service providers.
Mr Lewis: Yes.
Q24 Miss Begg: I still find a level
of ignorance among service providers because their knowledge of
the legislation is simply wrong, they think what is expected of
them is either far more or indeed far less than reality, so have
you got any plans to target your awareness-raising more subtly
I suppose?
Mr Lewis: Yes, and a key responsibility
of the Office for Disability Issues and of the Department as a
whole is very much to go on raising awareness. It is worth saying—and
perhaps if you would find it useful I will most certainly let
the Committee and of course yourself have a copy—we have
just published a research report in our DWP research series, it
only came out on 1 March, which has been looking precisely at
DDA awareness by both employers and by providers of goods and
services. That has actually been rather encouraging; for providers
of goods and services, it shows that awareness has doubled since
2003, so we do seem to be making some serious headway but that
is not for one moment to say that there is not further we need
to go.
Q25 Miss Begg: You obviously work
in conjunction with the DRC (Disability Rights Commission) in
raising awareness; can you foresee any problems when the DRC becomes
part of the CEHR (Commission for Equality and Human Rights) and
perhaps the focus on disability is diffused in some way?
Mr Lewis: I may defer to my colleague
Adam Sharples in a moment. It is an important transition and I
know that actually the CEHR themselves are absolutely very concerned
that there should be no loss of focus on disability, just as there
should be no loss of focus on any other individual strand of equality
when the new commission is established. Indeed, I have met myself,
only in the last couple of weeks, with the new chair of the disability
committee for the CEHR and we have discussed precisely that. I
am confident that actually the CEHR ought to provide a wider framework
and a broader home for disability issues, but I know the chair
of the CEHR and its commissioners are very seized of this issue
and we as a department are ourselves.
Mr Sharples: To add to what Leigh
Lewis has been saying on this, you are absolutely right to raise
the issue. It must be a risk as you transition from one institutional
structure to a new structure, particularly one in which equality
issues will be dealt with more comprehensively, that the focus
on individual strands of disability could get lost, so this is
part of our job, working through the Office for Disability Issues,
to make sure that that does not happen. We have very close relations
with the Department for Communities and Local Government who are
leading on equality issues, working very closely with them, with
the DRC and with the emerging CEHR to try and make sure that does
not happen.
Q26 Miss Begg: You obviously have
your own disability equality scheme action plan as you are obliged
to do under the new legislation as a department, but does your
department take any responsibility for ensuring that other Government
departments have a good, robust, equality duty scheme in place?
If not, why not and who should?
Mr Lewis: Yes, it is me and I
have and probably still not enough. In the run-up to last December
and some months before when it was important that of course we
were concentrating on trying to produce some very good schemes
because we believed we had to be an exemplar for our own department,
I wrote to all of my fellow permanent secretaries to make sure
that they were personally aware that this duty was coming towards
them and to say to them, if they were not already personally involved—and
actually I was encouraged that a large number were—that
I thought it would be a good subject for their personal attention.
We had a discussion of that at one of the meetings that, if I
was not at this Committee this morning, I would be at, the Wednesday
morning meeting of permanent secretaries. Yes, I have taken action
myself to try to make sure that that awareness is shared.
Q27 Miss Begg: It might be too early,
I realise it is only a couple of months since the duty came in,
but are you aware that there will be some kind of almost seismic
shift in the attitude of civil servants and public bodies into
the way that they treat people with disabilities or they factor
the fact that a large proportion of the population has a disability
into their planning and their policy decisions?
Mr Lewis: Again, Adam may well
be able to say more and better than me, but you are right to say
that it is a seismic shift because this is not about having a
policy and then thinking oh gosh, will this policy work with someone
with a disability, it is about having that as an absolute key
ingredient at the point where the policy is being conceptualised,
developed, detailed, put into operation. This is bringing the
notion of ensuring that our policies are fit in every respect
into the heart of the process.
Mr Sharples: Indeed, and we have
been working hard with other departments on this. As Leigh Lewis
was saying, he has discussed this with other permanent secretaries;
I have taken meetings with other departments to discuss how we
embed this in policy-making, so we have been trying to raise awareness
in departments in that way. You used the word seismic, is there
a seismic shift; I think this is going to be a bit more gradual
but I detect a real change, but if I could just give one example
of that, in our department the process of involving disabled people
in working up our action plan for disability equality has thrown
up a whole series of issues on which it is fair to say awareness
was too low before. We have become much more conscious of issues
around the way services are delivered and this is really fed back
into our consideration of the design of services and the design
of policy. I can see the impact it is having on us and we are
working hard to make sure that other departments are going through
that same process.
Q28 Miss Begg: Have you succeeded
then in making all your information easy for disabled people to
access, which was one of your key targets in your own plan?
Mr Lewis: We have done well, but
not well enough. I am pleased to say that we have just had the
first response from the DRC to our own disability equality scheme,
and they have congratulated us on it. They thought it is a good
scheme with a great deal in it which they welcome, but it would
not be the real world if they had not also pointed out some areas
where they think the scheme could go further or does not go far
enough. In terms of our own provision to our own customers, we
have done a lot. We completed a major programme across all of
our premises in March 2005; every one of our sites is subject
to an annual accessibility audit, we believe the great majority
are fully compliant, but in an estate the size of ours it is difficult
to be utterly 100% compliant in every single instance on every
single day, but we have put enormous importance on that. We built
DDA compliance into the design criteria for our new Jobcentre
Plus offices from the outset and we have recently begun a major
accessibility audit of all our IT systems, so we are looking at
all of our IT systems and looking at the accessibility of those.
Again, without going into a very long list we have looked very,
very hard at our communications materials. You may have seen some
of those which our Disability and Carers Service produced and
they are absolutely leading edge in terms of the number of formats—very
large text format, Braille format and so on—that we now
use.
Miss Begg: I may have a question when
we come to questions on crisis loans about the use of phones and
things, but I will leave that for now.
Q29 Greg Mulholland: Some questions
on child poverty; first of all you are meeting your targets on
childcare places, but would you agree that the unaffordability
of childcare is still a major factor in dissuading some coupled
and lone parents from working?
Mr Lewis: Of course, there is
a great deal of support for childcare now, particularly within
the tax credit system where parents can claim help with childcare
costs up to £175 a week for one child and up to £300
for two or more children. Adam, I wonder if you might like to
go into a little bit more detail on this.
Mr Sharples: As you say, the availability
of childcare places, formal childcare places, has been expanding
rapidly in the last few years. Numbers have pretty much doubled
in the last 10 years and are now up to very nearly 1.3 million,
so running rather ahead of the target. That has been a success
and, as Leigh Lewis has said, the support for the costs of childcare
has also been expanded rapidly, in particular through the childcare
cost element of the working tax credit. The financial support
through individual support for parents, combined with the money
going in through Sure Start where there is nearly £2 billion
a year going into children's centres and other forms of support
for parents, amounts to pretty much a revolution in Government
support for parents and for childcare.
Q30 Greg Mulholland: You mentioned
Sure Start but of course the DWP and the DfES have delegated Sure
Start to local authorities, so how can the Department be sure
that there are enough childcare places available to support the
Department's lone parent employment and child poverty targets?
Mr Sharples: We do this by having
what we call a childcare partnership manager in Jobcentre Plus,
so each district of Jobcentre Plus has a childcare partnership
manager whose job it is to liaise with the local authority to
make sure that sufficient childcare places are available. As you
may know, the Childcare Act last year places duties on local authorities
to consult with Jobcentre Plus and the feedback I get is that
this relationship is working really well and Jobcentre Plus, through
the childcare partnership managers, has good relationships with
local government.
Q31 Greg Mulholland: Lisa Harker's
report in 2006 said that the Department was not yet working as
closely as it needed to be with local authorities. Is that something
that the Department has acknowledged and is addressing?
Mr Sharples: As I said, through
the childcare partnership managers—we have 60 of these,
one in each of the Jobcentre Plus districts, and they are the
focus for that communication. Obviously, some of the provisions
of the Childcare Act have not yet come fully into force, so this
is a developing story, but this combination of availability of
formal childcare places, which is running well ahead of target,
the support through Sure Start and through helping to meet childcare
costs, combined with our programmes for lone parents and the further
steps we are taking to support parents in general, we feel really
is making a difference here.
Mr Lewis: If I could just add
one thing to that to generalise it slightly, if one wanted to
caricature our department at its origin and perhaps its predecessor
departments, relationships traditionally, historically, with local
authorities were probably not the strongest. Its predecessor departments
tended to operate on a kind of national rather than place-based
way. That has changed out of all recognition actually in recent
years and we tend now to be very, very much involved at local
level with local strategic partnerships, in the building up of
local area agreements and on the whole place-based agenda, and
although obviously childcare and its provision is only one element
of that, by and large now this is a department that is at the
table locally, whereas if you go back some years it was not always
so.
Q32 Greg Mulholland: Thank you. Turning
to the Budget, do you think the extra funding announced in the
Budget for working tax credit and extended schools will actually
be enough to help achieve the 70% lone parent employment target?
Mr Sharples: The first thing to
say is that we have been making really good progress on lone parent
employment over the last nine years or so; the proportion of lone
parents in work has gone up by about 11 percentage points from
around 45% to around 56%, so the trend has been strongly upwards.
We feel that has been achieved through a combination of factors:
partly the support for lone parents in looking for work and partly
the financial incentives through the working tax credit, through
helping to make work pay through the minimum wage and other factors.
What has happened in the Budget is that building on the progress
that has been made- providing additional support for parents in
general, particularly low-paid parents and therefore improving
the incentives to move into work- the Treasury's estimate is that
the measures in the Budget will take about 200,000 children out
of poverty.
Q33 Greg Mulholland: It has been
acknowledged that the 70% lone parent target is a very ambitious
one; do you think with the extra funding that the Department is
still on course for that?
Mr Sharples: We have got a strategy
here which is built on Lisa Harker's report last autumn, we have
had David Freud's report earlier this month and yesterday, as
you may know, we published our own child poverty strategy. That
sets out a number of the measures that we are adopting, building
on what is in the Budget, to try and further increase the rate
of employment for lone parents and further reduce the numbers
of children in poverty. For example, the measures announced in
the Budget provided for extending the in-work credit—this
is the £40 a week payment for the first 12 months when a
lone parent moves into work—to June 2008. It is being increased
from £40 a week at the moment to £60 a week in London,
and it is worth remembering that this is a payment that comes
on top of tax credits and other payments so there is a real financial
incentive for lone parents to move into work. The Treasury also
announced funding for an extra 50,000 additional free childcare
places for workless parents, as well as the measure on tax credits.
Within our own strategy document we have indicated that we think
that further steps need to be taken on the balance of rights and
responsibilities. As you may know, David Freud's report proposed
that the age of the youngest child at which a lone parent qualifies
for income support, which is currently 16, should be brought down
and our own strategy document indicates that we think this is
the right direction of travel. Building on the measures in the
Budget, our own strategy document adds further measures. Precise
quantification of the full impact of this is a little difficult
at this stage because we are still consulting on David Freud's
report and ministers will want to take a view in the light of
that consultation as to how far and how fast to move on some of
the things that David Freud has recommended.
Q34 Greg Mulholland: You mentioned
the lone parent in-work credit in London; what impact specifically
do you think that will have on lone parent employment rates in
London itself?
Mr Sharples: It will have a positive
effect; quantifying precisely how big that positive effect will
be is a little difficult. In-work credit is a programme which
is still being piloted; it applies in about 40% of the country
at the moment and we have just published a first evaluation of
the impact that it is making, so it is at a very preliminary stage
and it is difficult to draw firm conclusions at this stage about
precisely what the quantitative impact will be. We expect to have
a further evaluation early next year and that should give us a
sounder basis on which to draw conclusions.
Q35 Greg Mulholland: Thank you. My
final question to you, yesterday's households below average income
figures were published for 2005-2006 of course, showing a rise
of 100,000 in the number of children living in relative poverty
compared to last year and I know that there have been some explanations
given for that. My question is does this mean that actually the
Government will fail to meet its 2010 target and what action is
the Department going to take to address this rise?
Mr Lewis: It does not mean that
and as ministers said yesterday it leads them to wish and us to
wish, working and supporting them, to redouble our efforts on
this front. Clearly, Adam has set out a number of the measures
that were taken or announced in the Budget, within our own strategy
document yesterday which I appreciate members are unlikely to
have had time to read in any depth, but there is a really very
wide-ranging programme of further measures set out as well as
the measures that we already have in place. This remains an ambitious
target, but it is a target to which we are absolutely committed.
Q36 Chairman: Can I take you back
to this employment rate where you said the lone parent employment
rate has gone up by 9 or 10 points; the fact is it has not shifted
in London, it has stayed flat, so I want to take you back to this
question of the costs of childcare. Yes, tax credits pays a percentage,
but only up to the limit of £350 and £350 does not get
you childcare in London for two children so you have to fund 100%
of the amount over that and 30% of the amount under it, so you
are asking people to find around about £100 a week, perhaps.
That is not much of an incentive to move into work. The in-work
credit is very welcome, but the evidence that we got in our inquiry
on the employment target was you need to do much, much more in
London around childcare. What you have said today is that there
are no plans to do anything specific on child care in London,
is that right?
Mr Sharples: I do not think that
is right, I have not said there are no plans to do anything and
in fact as Leigh Lewis has indicated there are a wide range of
measures in our child poverty strategy document. If I could just
indicate one that addresses the specific issue you raise; one
of the propositions is that in London there should be financial
support for upfront childcare costs because our research has suggested
that one of the obstacles for lone parents moving into work is
that many nurseries or childcare providers ask for payment upfront
for perhaps the first month's fees and for many lone parents this
is a difficult lump sum cost to find, so we are going to be providing
support to meet those upfront costs in London.
Q37 Chairman: Is that 100% support?
Mr Sharples: I believe it is 100%
support; no doubt there will be a threshold and we will need to
work through the precise details, but this will be support for
meeting the upfront costs of moving a child into childcare, which
is something which is going to be done in London, precisely in
response to the concerns that you raise.
Mr Lewis: One of the most notable
things actually about our own document yesterday and the Budget
is that there is a real recognition that this is an area where
there are some special London issues. For example, another proposal
is that the new deal for lone parents plus as we call it, which
is a kind of enhanced version of the new deal for lone parents,
will be expanded to cover all lone parents in London. Of course,
Adam has mentioned the additional in-work credit which will be
£60 in London compared with £40 elsewhere, that is self-evidently
as a piece of mathematics worth £1,000 a year to someone
who is going into work for a year. This is a non-trivial amount
on top of the other in-work benefits to which they will very often
be entitled, so there is a recognition on our part that London
has some special needs in this respect.
Q38 Chairman: We await with interest
your response to our excellent report that makes some very good
suggestions. Can I move on the Jobcentre Plus performance analysis?
How well do you think the mystery shopper programme measures customer
service and satisfaction?
Mr Lewis: It is one element in
measuring it. The chief executive of Jobcentre Plus, Lesley Strathie,
who I know has appeared before the Committee and only recently
was here, she would herself say that this is only one element
in their overall attempt to understand the satisfaction, wishes
of their customers et cetera et cetera, and of course they undertake
other ways of measuring customer satisfaction, including through
surveys. It is one way, it is a pretty kind of rigorous programme,
it is pretty widespread, it involves quarterly visits to every
Jobcentre Plus office, it involves telephone calls to each Jobcentre
Plus site and contact centre four times a quarter and its great
advantage is that its sort of evidence-based results emerge in
terms of what happens when the people carry out the programme.
Of course, it is carried out for Jobcentre Plus by an external
contractor so it is not Jobcentre Plus staff acting as judge and
jury in this respect, and when they make those calls or make those
visits they experience what it is like to be a customer. Overall,
Jobcentre Plus is doing well this year. The latest performance
is just over 84% against an 84% target. It is a weighted measure,
as I am sure you know very well indeed, but I think it is an important
measure. It is not the only basis on which Jobcentre Plus or we
as a department, as the parent department for Jobcentre Plus,
seek to measure its customer service.
Q39 Chairman: Sticking with this
mystery shopper programme, is it not invalidated when staff have
all the scenarios on their desk?
Mr Lewis: There has certainly
been some discussion of this as to whether people are given an
idea of what a mystery shopper may be shopping for. As someone
who was the first chief executive of Jobcentre Plus and the chief
executive of the then employment service before that, which also
had a mystery shopper programme, no. It is a bit more canny than
this. It is not remotely easy to know if the person who is on
the telephone or who has just walked through the office door is
a mystery shopper. It is a bit like the person from the restaurant
guide. Maybe the very, very canny restaurateur can spot the individual
but I do not think it is that easy. I think this is a pretty genuine
test of what it is like and the service you receive.
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