Examination of Witnesses (Questions 20
- 39)
TUESDAY 31 OCTOBER 2006
MR RICHARD
CAIRNS, MR
LAURIE RUSSELL,
MS KATE
STILL AND
MR DAVID
COYNE
Q20 Michael Foster: On our travels
we have seen some really good examples of confidence building
and how folk who have been in real difficulties have learned new
skills and so on, often without ever finding a job. How would
you evaluate that? The DWP's task at the end of the day is to
get people into work, to achieve their focused targets and so
on. How can we measure the value of what guys like you are doing
if it does not finish up with a job?
Ms Still: I think it is about
looking at soft measurement indicators. We know—there are
different views on this—there are at least five stages to
employment. There is the initial engagement, the activity, getting
people to get up in the morning, having a routine, that type of
thing, the confidence building. These are the initial stages.
Then there is the need to have a route, employment pathway, which
is the next stage, which is initial work preparation which is
looking at a person's individual skill set and the ideal kind
of career or job that they would like to undertake and then building
to look at new vocational skills, training and education that
can come in at that point that can build for that person's journey.
Then you are looking at the into work stage and the aftercare
stage. Some people would argue there are four stages, five stages,
seven stages, but we all know that those stages exist and have
been mapped.
Q21 Michael Foster: I noticed in
One Plus's evidence you said: "lone parents furthest from
the labour market do not easily fit a model which is target driven
based on short-term into work outcomes." That is the sort
of group we will be particularly looking at and seeing the confidence
factor grow. There has to be some measurement. How do you measure
success as opposed to some sort of very soft social work approach
to no doubt deep-seated problems and all very desirable but not
what the DWP is paying for?
Mr Coyne: It is difficult to quantify
economic impacts on the kind of capacity building and confidence
building work that we do early on in the process. If you are looking
for impacts on the Treasury those are very difficult to assess.
The sorts of impacts that are made at that earlier point in the
continuum are around things like family cohesion, debt management,
educational attainment or attendance of children at school. It
is much more about assembling the basic building stocks of a stable
family environment in which the parent can then start to move
towards the economic interventions that DWP are interested in.
What we would argue very strongly is the other things are a very,
very necessary precondition for New Deal type initiatives to work.
If they were not being done then the interventions in the 13 weeks
before and after job entry would be unsustainable.
Q22 Michael Foster: One of the problems,
I suppose, is that the DWP do look to the measurement of jobs.
Is there a risk at least that you will create your programmes
based on that and, therefore, the front end, the difficult end,
is not dealt with, you only take merely work-ready people? Is
that a risk?
Mr Cairns: That is a very real
risk if one does not take an holistic view of what the problem
is. We know that if we want to move people in this city, and this
is probably true in most other cities, from various forms of benefit
into work then early engagement is crucial. That early engagement
around whatever the issues that confront these individuals is
crucial. If one does not do that then what you will do is you
will harvest the low hanging fruit and you will find yourself
with none of the techniques and capabilities to go any further
and, therefore, the endeavours will run into the sand relatively
quickly once you have harvested those most able to work. One of
the challenges and one of the things we have to work on is to
find ways of really measuring progression towards work in a sensible
fashion. We have all seen various evaluations that talk about
positive outcomes of one sort or another other than work. I think
we have to become more rigorous about that and we have to be tracking
these things more seriously across the city and across the country.
We have to reward not only the activity, and I agree entirely
with David and Laurie that a lot of this activity is a fundamental
prerequisite for getting people into a position where they can
work, but in addition to rewarding that activity we have to find
ways to capture and record their progression. A possible outcome
might be a client of One Plus who has been assisted in this way
but we capture the fact that they have moved on to whatever the
next stage is. They might still be receiving services from One
Plus but we have to capture these things and track that progression
and crucially think of ways of rewarding the entire continuum.
If you do that you will have the integration of more outcomes,
all of which are valued because they contribute to the end result
rather than it being end loaded.
Ms Still: That is going back to
the point that there are stages and what we should be doing is
measuring a person's progression through the stages from their
starting point.
Q23 Michael Foster: Is that why you
said earlier you feel there should be a single source of information
relating to an individual, subject to data protection and all
the rest of it?
Mr Cairns: Despite all of the
challenges that brings, and even though we have looked at it I
have no doubt we will find that we have underestimated just how
difficult that is, unless we do something like that that includes
all of the organisations that work with the workless, and unless
all of those organisations wholeheartedly buy into that principle,
apart from anything else it is difficult to see how we can come
up with a structure that rewards those contributions. Unless there
is some single means of measuring this it is difficult to see
how we move from the complex marketplace we currently have to
one that is better aligned with what we are trying to achieve.
Mr Coyne: If I could come back
to your point about rewarding progress at all points in the continuum.
The reality at an operational level is that we need to resource
progress at all points in the continuum and as an organisation
we do that through looking not just to DWP for financial support
but to the big Lottery, to Children in Need, to the Working Families'
Fund, to the local authorities in assembling a package of resources
that can take people right from giving them advice on a one-to-one
confidential basis about debt management or whatever right through
to ILM programmes with strong job outcomes.
Q24 Justine Greening: It is very
interesting that you talk about how we can incentivise more effort
on the hard to reach cases. You have talked about the process
that people go through, which arguably may not be dissimilar from
a customer who does not know of a product and gradually decides
it is something they want to buy. One other thing that you see
in business is customer lifetime value. Do you think it is possible
that one of the ways we could look at this would be to say that
a person who is on this many benefits over a lifetime with no
intervention is going to cost this much, and instead of saying
that is a bad situation we may well be able to say with that particular
client in that case we could invest a different level of amount
because we know otherwise they will have a different value. I
am interested in hearing what you think. Maybe one of the ways
of doing this is to give particular groups, such as your own,
portfolios of clients to work with that perhaps have different
values attached to them based on the benefits they are having.
Mr Cairns: I had this discussion
with some private sector providers only last night around what
the merits would be in people with different sets of circumstances
having some different premium attached to them that was measured
on the basis of their opportunity costs relative to remaining
on benefit in the long-term. In theory everyone subscribes to
that because organisations like the Wise Group and others would
be given adequate resources to deal with the kinds of people that
they find at their door and any organisation that chose to work
with the least challenged, if you like, would earn less revenue
from doing it. In principle it is a reasonable model.
Mr Russell: I absolutely agree
with you and it is one of my hobbyhorses about this area. Let
us take your analysis of the cost a stage further and let us move
back a way. If we have got some of the hardest to help groups,
if we are talking about people with drug and alcohol dependencies
or ex-offenders, how much have they cost society?
Q25 Justine Greening: The broader
healthcare issues going forward.
Mr Russell: I do not know whether
we can put a figure on this and whether there has been any research
on this. If we were to put a figure on what they cost society,
not just as individuals in terms of benefits or the cost to the
justice system or the court system because they are in and out
of prison, often fairly frequently, the cost to their families,
they may have kids in care, they may be costing the education
system more for their kids who are disruptive, et cetera, if we
were to look at that and then look at the cost of our intervention
per person and look at the positive value if we could get that
person into work contributing to society, paying taxes and not
costing what they cost in the past, then that intervention and
the cost of that small intervention over a short period of time
is a very, very low percentage for this group of people. We need
to increase it because we need to spend a bit more time on somebody
who has got potentially 20 years of a chaotic lifestyle behind
them before they come to the Wise Group or any other organisation.
Q26 Michael Foster: I want to ask
one more question because time is moving on. This is to do with
the monitoring role. We have already learned of the job creation
in auditors that you have told us about, and obviously that is
a side-effect of your efforts but they are not really the target.
Presumably the answer is not to have 21 auditors but what are
the key measurements you think the DWP should be interested in?
In particular, do you think their new main contractor scheme and
allowing the main contractor to subcontract to other providers
is a step forward or is undesirable? Will it leave people out
if that scheme is pursued?
Mr Cairns: Somebody has to answer.
Can I take the main contractor question first and I will have
to ask you to remind me of the first part because I was so busy
looking at my colleagues that I slightly lost the plot, I am afraid.
In the discussions around the future shape of service in this
city we have looked at the main contractor model, although we
have described it differently. We have described it more as trying
to imagine a sort of airline alliances model where you might wish
to fly from airport A to destination B and you might use a number
of different airlines in order to get you from airport A to destination
B but there is some alliance or association between those organisations
agreed mutually by them that ensures you get from A to B with
your luggage with the minimum possible disruption and at a very
competitive cost. There is a question around whether you allow
those sorts of consortia to form naturally or whether you go for
a main contractor model. I can see either of those working but
there are then questions in cities in particular around the special
geography in which it is appropriate to do these things, the function
or sectoral specialisation of the organisations doing it, and
one would have to think very carefully about the design and the
outputs.
Q27 Michael Foster: The first part
was the key audit questions. What are the key audit questions
the DWP should be concerned about in returning value for money?
Mr Russell: Essentially it is
still going to be about job outputs. We have all said this morning
that there is a process along the line to get into jobs and then
sustaining people in jobs and the value of those jobs in terms
of wages and the skills that people have so that they are on a
permanent process. We mentioned, and you might want to come back
to this, a scheme we have got called Next Steps which gives people
two years' support, and I know there is a Jobcentre Plus pilot
operating around the UK to do that. I think that is increasingly
important. It is not just getting into jobs, although essentially
that is the first measurement there has to be, it is how do you
keep people in jobs and where do they stay, can they grow within
that job financially and in terms of their skills and importance.
Ms Still: I think on that point
about skills and training and the role that plays, we know in
terms of the labour market that increasingly the jobs will grow
in areas where people have qualifications above entry level. That
is where the jobs growth will be. One of the things we need to
make sure of is that when we put people into jobs we give them
the opportunity to have a long-term career and there is investment
in the job but that aftercare and training and skills development
is not ignored.
Mr Coyne: From our perspective
the key measure of success is sustaining employment at 26 and
52 weeks. Lone parents in particular tend to cycle in and out
of work because of the stresses placed on them in the workplace
around childcare, managing children's sickness in education and
that kind of thing which puts pressure on people. If you can support
people in the first six months or so of employment to find ways
of managing those issues then it becomes sustainable.
Michael Foster: Thank you.
Q28 Harry Cohen: Laurie Russell talked
about the Wise Group's Next Steps project. Could you tell us a
bit more about that? I know it is meant to give continued support
to sustain people in their employment. What goes through my mind
is it seems almost like a pilot project in a way, or a one-off
type project. Why are there not more projects like that? Is it
something that Jobcentre Plus could do themselves or get more
involved in?
Mr Russell: You are right, it
is essentially a pilot project. I believe there is a Jobcentre
Plus similar pilot project run by Jobcentre Plus themselves, although
I have not seen an evaluation of that. Essentially it is taking
people that we are placing in jobs and working with them for a
two year period in whatever way they require once they are in
a job. The evidence from our first year of it, so it is still
early evidence, is that we are getting a much higher proportion
of people sustained in the job and a high proportion of people
who are going on to take other training courses. It might just
be a contact point, it might be somebody you can come in and see
every now and again or speak to on the phone about issues you
are facing. I would like to add a bit more about financial support
for people once they are in a job generally to the service we
provide. Essentially it is about finding ways of keeping people
in a job and dealing with whatever problem may come up. The re-skilling
part of it is crucial if we are going to have people moving and
staying in jobs. At the moment we are getting something like 76%
who have stayed in their job for over 26 weeks on this scheme,
which is higher than we have got with any other project. That
is a very high retention rate. Our initial view of this is we
think it is working and I would be interested in what other pilots
are doing. You are absolutely right, we could do more of this.
Q29 Harry Cohen: That is very helpful.
Mr Cairns: Can I add one point
in relation to that and it is around understanding the economic
dynamic of this. In an increasingly tight labour market we have
to work on the assumption that is in the employer's best interests
to have relatively low churn in the labour force because clearly
the costs of finding replacement labour are higher than retaining
somebody if at all possible. The other part of this, and it is
particularly true in Glasgow where levels of business productivity
are far lower than we would like them to be, is we have to find
here a win-win relationship between investing in the individual
as an employee in the business for their own career progression
and ensuring that they never come back on to benefit, but investing
in a fashion that delivers for their employer in terms of activity.
That is what will deliver for the city and the economy. We already
know that the profile of spend historically in this city has been
less on engagement and less on in-work support. I would rather
we stopped using the term "in-work" support and started
talking about "in-work development". We have to shift
the profile of spend to address both of those issues.
Q30 Harry Cohen: That is a fruitful,
interesting answer and it would be interesting to see how this
develops. I think this advice contact point at a minimum is extremely
useful if it has those successes. Professor Alan McGregor and
his team at the University of Glasgow did a mapping exercise of
employability services in late 2004 and came up with the conclusion
that it was skewed more towards skills and jobsearch, rather than
outreach and initial engagement and in-work support. Did things
change as a consequence of that? I know he is doing another mapping
exercise now. What would you expect to see in that?
Ms Still: Basically that Glasgow
Challenge report was one of the reasons why Equal Access developed
within the city. It is a strategy about co-ordinating the different
services to increase that pathway from that very early engagement
right through to aftercare. In a sense, that mapping study itself
led to the creation of the Equal Access strategy which has brought
partners together and is working with partners currently on the
City Strategy about looking at the structures that are in the
city on the planning and delivery of services so that employability
pathway actually works. It is also looking at the financial resources
and how we can reallocate those financial resources to do exactly
that.
Mr Cairns: I think it is probably
worth recognising we are fortunate in this city in terms of the
quality of the academics we have had at our disposal to do some
of this work. Would that that specialism was never necessary,
but the fact is we do. One of the things the City Strategy is
looking very seriously at, although it is linked to this question
of how one pools resources, is that we have to shift where we
spend the money. That either means that we continue to fund the
same sorts of people and ask them to do different things at those
two ends of the spectrum or it means that we consciously make
a choice to purchase other forms of service and intervention at
those two ends of the spectrum at the expense of whatever is currently
going on in the middle. That shift clearly has to happen. In effect
what we have to do is depress the bulge in the centre of that
employability activity graph and raise both ends. The scale of
that shift we are not quite sure about but it clearly has to happen
and it has to be part of the decision-making process that all
of the partners to the City Strategy sign up to.
Q31 Harry Cohen: It will be informed
by the mapping exercise and, indeed, by all the partners in the
City Strategy. Let me come on to another point in Glasgow's Full
Employment Areas Initiative which in my notes talks about community
animators working with people right at the very early stage dealing
with that social deprivation problem right at the early stage.
Can you tell me a little bit more about that?
Mr Cairns: We find ourselves in
the interesting position where almost all the people in this room
are relatively new at doing what they do. The Full Employment
Areas Initiative originally started as a pilot and the way it
works is we employ local animators, people from within particular
communities, equip them with the skills to go out to places where
one would find the workless and engage with them, raise the questions
about employment, work with groups of people, work with families
with a view to starting them on the path. What you get is someone
who is an independent broker recognised as having that local credibility
with no specific axe to grind who then points people towards other
sources of support and assistance to get them started along that
continuum.
Q32 Harry Cohen: Is that effective?
Mr Cairns: Yes, it is, and somewhere
in this pile of paper I have the results of the evaluations thus
far.
Ms Still: I think as an early
intervention engagement mechanism it is doing that but they are
also going through a process of evaluation currently and looking
at how they can improve the model. Some of that is about co-location
of organisations and agencies in an area, not just having a group
of animators but linking them, co-locating them, with other providers
of services in an area.
Mr Cairns: We are in the process
of rolling it out to other parts of the city. The classic dilemma
with these things is what we have here is a model which is almost
certainly replicable in other parts of the city and a set of techniques
that are probably replicable by different providers but there
is a different question which is the extent to which it is scaleable.
Clearly there is a sensible limit on how many animators you can
have in any given community and there is a sensible limit on how
many clients or people they can work with in a given place. That
whole business of early engagement by people who are perceived
as being more like oneself seems to have value. It is not the
only tool you would want to have available but it clearly seems
to have value.
Q33 Harry Cohen: I am interested
in whether it is replicable across the UK. If you get some assessment
of the project at some point could you let us have a look at it?
Mr Cairns: Of course.
Mr Russell: There is an important
point that Richard has just made. I think a lot of success of
schemes comes from the fact that the people who are engaging have
to be close to the people they are engaging with, and in this
case it is at a neighbourhood level and it is somebody up the
next street or their brother's pal or whatever. On an ex-offenders'
project there are people who are ex-offenders. Often they are
the most effective people—this goes back to why we as the
voluntary sector can reach these groups better—because they
are closer to the people they are talking to and they understand
their problems because they have worked them through firsthand
and they are not that far away from them.
Q34 Harry Cohen: In a way they cannot
be left to do their own thing, they have still got to deliver.
Mr Russell: No. They have still
got to be within a framework for a professional organisation that
is properly monitored, costed and everything else, but having
that blend of people who are close and who have been through the
problems is often most effective.
Ms Still: The other point is about
the locality and the fact that a lot of the voluntary sector organisations
are engaged with communities because they are located in the community
is very important as well because they bring them in and they
will have the comfort of coming into these areas and we can work
with them to make sure that they then engage with other organisations.
Harry Cohen: Thank you.
Q35 Mrs Humble: Can I just ask you
some questions on co-ordinating services because earlier, Richard,
you said there were too many organisations involved.
Mr Cairns: I said instinctively
I feel there are probably too many.
Q36 Mrs Humble: I wrote it down!
You said it is important to look at what works. You have also
got a lot of initiatives co-ordinating this plethora of organisations.
What works amongst these initiatives that you have got?
Mr Cairns: What works and what
does not? Different things work in different ways. The evidence
we have on the Full Employment Initiative, since we start at that
end as it were, is if we start at that end of the continuum we
know that at a local level community animators can have real success
in moving people towards services they would not otherwise have
engaged in. We know that. We know in relation to Equal Access
that the right kinds of intervention can prove to those who engage
in the front line with clients for a variety of different reasons
that the right kinds of interventions there can shift the attitudes
of social workers, healthcare workers and others to be more positive
about employment as a possible outcome for their client group.
As a consequence of that, that gives us more advocates in the
field because we need more advocates but we do that by converting
those who might not be advocates into advocates. We have much
better hard information on the kinds of employment outcomes, conversion
rates, for close to labour market projects statistically but the
weakness in this, and it still concerns me, is the causal link
between those final outcomes and the range of interventions that
have happened beforehand. I mentioned the Working Neighbourhood
pilots, for instance. Because these are not delivered in isolation
it is very difficult at this point to attribute all of the positive
outcome merely to that intervention, which is a short way of saying
I do not know enough about which outcomes are most successful.
Q37 Mrs Humble: Can I just follow
up on your point about people other than those employed in the
employment field being involved with these people because, as
everybody has acknowledged, a lot of your clients have multiple
disadvantages, and you mentioned health. Earlier, Kate, you also
talked about people involved in housing and health and you said
it was important to know when to intervene with an employment
strategy when there is another organisation dealing with a different
issue for that same individual. Surely the point is that some
of these other people are not actually interested in employment
strategies and perhaps do not see the worth of getting somebody
into work. Do you think that we should have targets for them or
engage in a change in culture so that people do see the worth
of employment?
Ms Still: That is exactly what
is going on. In terms of the Equal Access strategy, health, social
work, the council, the local economic development agencies and
the voluntary sector are all working in partnership to say that
no one organisation can crack this problem on its own, if we want
to meet that employment rate we all have to work together in a
co-ordinated fashion. It has been bought into at the city level
and it is increasingly bought into at the ground worker level
because they understand that they cannot help their individual
get into a position of work and employment if they have got a
housing problem or if they have got a benefits problem. What we
are trying to do is change the attitudes to say, "Within
health and social work we know there is evidence that says people's
health can improve if they have access to employability, so at
the stage you are engaging with them you need to know who you
can refer on to locally and there has to be locally co-ordinated
groups of practitioners, of operational staff and strategic planning".
At those three levels we are bringing the practitioners together
so that they can work effectively, they know who is about, what
services they provide, where they can go to and who will provide
that additional support, so one agency does not have to do everything,
they will look to who has got the expertise and who they can call
on to get a package for that individual. Not everybody has bought
into attitudes. We have done an attitudinal survey and we know
that one of the issues is middle management is blocking some of
the attitudes, not people at the high level or the low level in
the city because they have all signed up to that partnership approach.
A lot of work is now going on to look at training and culture
change and in joint working together locally, things like shared
assessment tools to identify when somebody is ready to consider
employability or training. I do not know if I have answered that.
Q38 Mrs Humble: You have covered
my points. You have all been positive about the work that your
own organisations do and you have been reasonably positive about
the co-ordination of services, but we have had a rather less than
flattering assessment of what is going on from Alan McGregor who
says that there is a problem with the infrastructure that picks
up jobless people, with the organisations involved being part
of a "chaotic and underperforming `industry'". How do
you respond to that?
Mr Cairns: He has a point!
Mr Russell: We can always improve
our performance. I am not sure that it is quite chaotic and underperforming.
Aspects of what we do on performance will be poorer than others
and some aspects of performance are high. When you speak to him
Alan will be able to elaborate a bit more about what that is based
on. He is an academic, he is looking in from the outside and he
does not see all aspects of what we do. He is somebody who has
a contribution to make and he is involved in the City Strategy,
so his contribution has been taken on board at that level. There
are different ways of measuring performance and we have talked
about this in the last hour or so in different responses to different
questions. None of us around this table will want to countenance
poor performance in our organisations and we will do everything
we can to improve the performance, but we have got to be realistic
with the kind of people we are working with and set targets that
are both challenging but realistic. Let us not pretend we are
going to get 75% of ex-offenders into work within three months,
we cannot because there are significant barriers, not just with
them as individuals but with employers and everybody else, as
we discussed last night, who will not look at employing certain
groups of people. There is work to be done there. Underperformance
is not necessarily at the level of the individual or the organisations
that are working with those individuals and taking them through
that process.
Ms Still: All of us agree that
there needs to be rationalisation in the system and trying to
pull together planning at a strategic level and the delivery at
an operational level but there are problems, I do not think anybody
here would say there are not, but are the partners trying to achieve
that rationalisation and that cohesiveness in the system, I think
the answer is yes. Will we make mistakes in that process? Absolutely.
The fact that people have signed up to that rationalisation and
that planning and operational practitioners are working together
is the first step.
Mrs Humble: Thank you.
Q39 Justine Greening: Following on
from that last point when Kate was talking about the need to pull
everything together, the way my brain works is it made me think
of the statementing process that takes place for special needs
children where people will sit down with a group of stakeholders
and work out an overall package of support. An off-the-wall idea
is are we saying that something like that may be required for
some very hard to reach people? Are you saying that you might
go through a statementing style assessment of all the pieces of
the jigsaw that need to be in place for them to be helped and
supported properly?
Ms Still: I think that is absolutely
right. There is an action planning process but there are difficulties
about who takes the lead on that at any given time. The notion
that three or four organisations need to be co-ordinated around
an individual to make progress is absolutely correct.
| 
