Examination of Witnesses (Questions 46
- 59)
TUESDAY 31 OCTOBER 2006
PROFESSOR IVAN
TUROK AND
PROFESSOR ALAN
MCGREGOR
Chairman: Good morning.
Thank you for bearing with us. It is good to have you with us.
We will crack on because we have got rather a lot to do.
Q46 Miss Begg: I have a few questions
about engaging people with services. The DWP has a substantial
programme of research to investigate issues such as barriers to
work and to evaluate the effectiveness of its various interventions.
I think you both argue that a systematic assessment of the nature
of the challenge and the most effective practical response is
needed. Why, given that there seems to be a huge amount of research
anyway? What would what you are advocating involve?
Professor McGregor: I am not advocating
any more research personally, but that is because I am an old
guy coming to the end of my research career and it is easy for
me to be a little bit more dispassionate about the value of research.
In terms of engagement there is a serious issue in terms of effective
engagement of folk who have been jobless for a long-time on Incapacity
Benefit. Engagement is not about having somebody in for a work-focused
interview, for example, it has got to be about getting somebody
interested in changing their status and changing their way forward.
I do not think the issue here is about research. There is already
quite a wide range of more proactive efforts to engage with people.
I do not know what you have heard this morning about what is happening
in Glasgow but the full Employment Area Initiative in Glasgow
is an engagement process that actually goes out into communities
and tries to engage with existing communities but also the people
who are not actively involved in voluntary sector or community
organisations and tries to get them on board, gently at first
but on a path that may lead to employment or at least enhanced
employability for some. I am not for a lot more research, I am
more for learning the lessons that we already know and applying
them more generally.
Q47 Miss Begg: Ivan, you argue for
a detailed breakdown of all the people on inactive benefits in
Glasgow according to "individual needs, capacity and aspirations".
How would that help? How would that add to the global sum of our
knowledge because presumably we already know that, do we not?
Professor Turok: I think our evidence
base is very weak in this whole area of evaluation evidence, and
what emerged from that last session demonstrated that in a variety
of ways, but in particular an understanding of the problem that
we are dealing with. I will give you a couple of examples. The
first is the organisations in this city, the Welfare to Work Forum
and Jobcentre Plus, are making great positive news about the big
reduction in the numbers of people claiming sickness benefits
over the last five years. I have been looking at the data on flows
of people on to and off sickness benefits In Glasgow that reveal
that the reduction is largely due to people not coming on to the
benefits. There has been no significant increase in the rate of
people coming off benefits. It is not as if this whole infrastructure
has proved more effective over the last five years despite the
improvement in the labour market in Glasgow. It could be that
people are staying in jobs who might otherwise have come on to
benefits or it could simply be that the rules are being tightened
up so fewer people are coming on to sickness benefits. With that
basic level of understanding, and that is really the level at
which I am coming into this, I am not closely involved in the
way Alan is or the people you heard before, I am more at the strategic
level, and I would say that is a key issue that nobody is talking
about. I have done some other work on it using the Labour Force
Survey to show the probabilities of somebody who is unemployed
getting a job are seven times greater than somebody who is not
actively looking for work. Again, that suggests the challenge
is much greater than we have been assuming in terms of getting
people back to work. I think this broader evidence is critically
important to go alongside all the rich information we have from
practice about what works and what does not work.
Q48 Miss Begg: Are you essentially
saying that the Wise Group, who were sitting in the chair you
are sitting in, has not got anybody back into work who was sitting
on a benefit?
Professor Turok: No, of course
I am not saying that. I am saying that there is a significant
number of people who are constantly moving through the system
off benefits into work, out of work on to benefits, but there
has been no increase in the rate at which people are coming off
benefits. The fall in the number of people on benefits in Glasgow
is due to fewer people coming onto benefits.
Q49 Miss Begg: So it is a churn rather
than people actually coming off benefits completely? There are
50% who get into work but the next time they are the 50% who are
out of work, is that what you mean?
Professor Turok: I am not sure
of the question.
Q50 Miss Begg: When I say a "churn"
I mean they are not coming off of benefits and going into sustained
work, they are going in and out of work all the time which is
why the numbers are remaining the same.
Professor Turok: That is part
of what is going on, but I am also making a point about the scale
of the increase into employment and the fact that there has not
been an increase in the rate of people entering employment.
Q51 Miss Begg: So what needs to be
done to—
Professor McGregor: I slightly
disagree with that. If you look at the other figures, one of the
things that has happened in the city if you look at another set
of statistics is that about 10 years ago the employment rate in
the City of Glasgow—that is the proportion of working age
people in a job—was 55% and it was going south, people were
predicting less than half the population of working age would
be in employment, but the Labour Force Survey evidence is now
66%. Something has happened in the city, people are getting in
jobs and staying in jobs. These are residents of the City of Glasgow.
The unemployment rate is going down. Put to one side benefit flows
and all this, something is happening, the labour market has improved,
more people are finding and keeping jobs and I do not think there
is any debate about that.
Professor Turok: What I am saying
is there are some significant puzzles and uncertainties here because
the flows data is hard administrative data, you cannot dispute
the data. I agree entirely and my paper presents the data showing
a big increase in the employment rate but it is not consistent
with what the evidence about flows on and off benefits is also
showing. It could be that people are staying in work longer, it
could be that people are coming into work from other regions and
countries, it could be younger people who have not been on benefits.
I am saying there are some big uncertainties about what is going
on in the labour market and to say that we do not need to improve
our evidence base is not sensible.
Q52 Miss Begg: I just wonder whether
one of the explanations, particularly in terms of Incapacity Benefit,
is that there is no incentive for someone who has been on Incapacity
Benefit for five or 10 years to be engaged at all and those who
are engaged with the services are the relatively new cohort who
have come in, the flows in and out of benefit. Nobody has tackled,
nor indeed does the most recent Welfare Reform tackle, that stock
of people apart from way down the line. Are they just so far from
the labour market that any kind of money that is spent on interventions
for them would be wasted money?
Professor McGregor: That is a
very interesting strategic question. It is a big choice. If you
look at the figures in Glasgow you have got tens of thousands
of people who are 50-plus who have been on Incapacity Benefit
for at least two years and the average is probably nine or 10
years. With the best will in the world, for folk who are older
and fall into that category and people who are very long-term
unemployed their chances of getting work, as we know, are relatively
speaking very poor. There is a strategic choice about how much
resource should be deployed there. Working with jobless people
is a labour intensive activity. To work effectively with them
is labour intensive. How do you deploy that resource most effectively?
The point I made earlier about the engagement strategy is it is
about giving people more opportunity to engage but it is still
going to be people who largely self-select even into an outreach
service and at least it is a mechanism for folk where there is
a little bit there that says to them, "I want to get a job
again. I want to try and get back in the labour market".
You can engage them that way but having everybody in for interviews
on a programmatic basis would be very labour intensive for little
output, frankly. I think a lot of the effort has to be on folk
who are coming in to Incapacity Benefit or who are recently in
there, that is a realistic proportion at this juncture.
Professor Turok: You need to give
people the option and not exclude them because some of them may
well come forward and, indeed, as more younger people come back
into the labour market this might have a culture change, it might
change people's perceptions as to the possibilities of getting
back to work and it might encourage other people to take up that
option which in the past they might have ruled out as a possibility.
Q53 Mrs Humble: Looking at co-ordinating
services, earlier, Alan, when you were not here I quoted you.
Professor McGregor: I was listening
at the door.
Q54 Mrs Humble: You were rather rude
about some of these people who were giving evidence to us in describing
the "industry" of services to jobless people as "chaotic
and underperforming". I have to say that they accepted what
you said and that work does need to be done. You both highlight
the fact that the challenge of co-ordinating services is an enormous
one and yet we have heard some examples of good work both by individuals
and by people who want to work together, so why is there still
a problem?
Professor McGregor: This was at
a number of levels. First of all, part of the problem of co-ordination
is down to the funders, the funders are not co-ordinated. If you
take the city, and it will be the same across the UK I guess,
in the city the principal funders of services for jobless people
are, say, the council, Jobcentre Plus would be the major player,
Scottish Enterprise Glasgow in the Scottish context, colleges
and other key players in European funding come in. These organisations
buy their services on an individualised basis, they do it as individual
organisations, they do not get together to ask the question, "What
kind of services do we want to deliver for jobless people in the
City of Glasgow? How much money have we got to spend on these?
What are the constraints on how we spend our money?" because
Jobcentre Plus is a bit more tightly constrained than, let us
say, the city council, "How can we best spend our money to
get a more comprehensive, better co-ordinated service for jobless
people in the city?" That does not happen. It is beginning
to happen. There have been discussions for the last 12 or 18 months
but it is a slow process. It starts there. In a sense you get
what you pay for and you get it in the way you pay for it, and
funding is Balkanised and so service delivery tends to be Balkanised.
Q55 Mrs Humble: Do you think that
introducing flexibility into the system could help? You are right,
there are some funding streams that can only be used in very particular
ways and then people tailor their services to the funding stream
instead of saying, "This is the sort of service that we want,
give us a funding stream that will enable us to do it".
Professor McGregor: The starting
point is the folk we are trying to help, jobless people, are very
diverse. We keep calling them the long-term unemployed, people
on IB, the IB stock, all these kinds of phrases, but out there
you are dealing with individuals and individuals vary tremendously.
One individual will have one significant barrier to get them back
into work, it may be caring responsibilities, a massive barrier
but still one barrier, and there are other folk who have 10, 12
or 15 things they need to act on if that person is going to be
moved into sustainable employment, so a much more complex service
delivery package needs to be out there for them. Flexibility has
to be part of the process because we need diversity of service
for the client we are dealing with but it has got to be delivered,
organised and funded in a much more coherent way. One of the other
problems is that because we are now moving backwards in the sense
that there are folk further from the labour market, we are now
having to bring in co-ordinated services where we are co-ordinating
health services with employability services or we are co-ordinating
social work services with employability services, and then the
problems are you have got organisations with very different background
staff with different cultural orientations, different objectives,
and that is a fairly significant difficulty. The Equal Access
strategy in Glasgow has been trying to create this pipeline of
services taking folk further back from health and social work
into employability services towards the labour market. It is slow
because frontline staff have to change to be up for that kind
of process. That is not a funding issue, that is an investment
in organisational change.
Q56 Mrs Humble: I want to come back
to that particular point in a minute, but before I do can you
tell me how you think the Scottish Executive should be intervening
in this?
Professor McGregor: The Scottish
Executive has got responsibility for social work services and
for health services. It does not have responsibility for employability
services but it has got responsibility for some budget lines that
can play into that. Part of the problem is that there is a perception
that perhaps the Scottish Executive is not that well joined-up
in terms of the central level in Edinburgh: social work services
civil servants talking to health civil servants talking to economic
development and employability civil servants. That sends messages
down into localities, into local government. You can bring education
in there as another key service. The Scottish Executive has got
to demonstrate a commitment to joined-up working around service
delivery from the centre.
Q57 Mrs Humble: Can I go back to
the point you were making about culture change in the frontline
services because in our earlier evidence session I asked some
questions about using people who are health professionals, people
who work in housing, et cetera, but they do not always see employment,
getting people into work, as being part of their job, nor indeed
do some of them accept that it is a good thing in terms of their
clients. I would like your comment on it but I would also like
to bring Ivan in because he makes an interesting point in his
submission that there is a basic choice to be made between a "decentralised
approach or a more closely planned and co-ordinated city-level
framework". In a way, you are highlighting the fact that
we have got a choice of top-down or bottom-up, where do they meet
and which is the best way of doing it, but that in turn links
into how you can involve all of these different agencies and get
them all singing off the same hymn sheet. Alan, do you want to
start off and then Ivan can come in?
Professor McGregor: We have been
given a lead on city-wide frameworks and the Scottish Executive
has published Workforce Plus, the Employability Framework for
Scotland. The key element in that is about the development of
local employment, local employability action plans. These were
designed locally and there will be local labour market conditions,
problems with local jobless people and all those kinds of things.
The Scottish Executive in a sense has set some kind of framework
now and it is indeed called the Employability Framework, so we
have something along those lines. In terms of the joining-up of
service delivery, housing people, you have put your finger on
the issue, there is no two ways about it. For individual social
workers normally employment is not only not a good option but
it is a downright bad option for some of their clients in terms
of their vulnerability where they are in a poor condition with
a low level of equilibrium, stable low income but a stable income,
able to get by and that is all. They see if you get somebody in
the workplace in a less controlled environment and it goes wrong
that is a disaster for their clients. That is one aspect of it.
There is an ideological bit behind that as well, politics, but
we do not need to get into that. Then there is a second aspect
which is that they have got enough to do. I speak to social workers
and a lot of health professionals, they are busy people and if
you ask them to take an extra dimension into their job when they
have got plenty to do that is a difficulty. Thirdly, there is
the issue of skill sets. You cannot suddenly come into employability
with your basic skill set social worker or home visitor, health,
whatever the case may be, you cannot just bolt that on, it is
not as simple as that, you have got to do a lot of capacity building,
a little bit of organisational change, a little bit of culture
change. That is an investment, that is money, that is taking people
out of frontline services in order to do that and at this point
in time I am not sure that people buy into the need to make that
investment.
Professor Turok: Part of what
Alan is saying is evidence that employment is a good route for
many people would help to persuade people and their managers and
decision-makers that this is a sensible way to proceed. In response
to your question, there are two models of how to proceed. One
is the market model, which is competitive, which relies on diversity,
experimentation and some of the benefits of that approach that
through competition you get better practice. The other one is
more of a planned approach with co-ordination and a clear stronger
top-down element. I would argue that we have neither of those.
Both are plausible models but we are somewhere in-between and
that is partly because the system has grown up incrementally over
time, gradually, organically, organisations have emerged because
of a perceived gap in what is being provided. We do need to make
some sort of decision, do we want one or the other.
Q58 Mrs Humble: Very briefly from
me, because we are running out of time, how do you want the Glasgow
City Strategy to be evaluated? How can it prove value-added success
in this plethora of organisations and initiatives that are taking
place?
Professor McGregor: That does
go back to the points that Ivan raised earlier about being able
to monitor what is going on. I do not think you have to know what
is going on to get on and do stuff. I think we know a lot about
what works and what needs to be done, but to see whether we have
any success we need to see reductions in the number of people
who are on Incapacity Benefit and on other benefits. We need to
know that a lot of that has to do with successful return to employment.
There is an horrific statistic that if you have been on Incapacity
Benefit for something like two years or more you are more likely
to die or retire than get a job. We need to be able to monitor
what is happening through the Incapacity Benefit stats. We need
to prove that and benchmark that against other similar cities.
I do not think it is that difficult to do if we can get access
to the DWP data which allows us to do that.
Professor Turok: There is a need
at a strategic level to see changes in the way organisations operate
in terms of, at the very least, alliances and better referral
systems, tracking systems, the whole of the infrastructure to
enable a more joined-up approach.
Q59 Justine Greening: One of the
things we talked about in the earlier evidence session was the
fact that people are sometimes quite a long way away from being
ready to work and the danger of having work outcomes as the main
target measure is that people focus on those people really close
to the job market. Do you think it is possible to measure the
work that is done to move people to being in a position where
they will be able to get a job? Is it possible to measure that?
If so, how would you suggest that it ought to be done?
Professor McGregor: There has
been a lot of work done on so-called measures of distance travelled
or measures of softer outcomes. I come from Ayrshire and I am
a wee bit of a sceptic about everything, it is a genetic problem
I have in that regard. It is difficult. However, there are intermediate
steps. There are people going into learning situations, whether
it be college, community learning or whatever, where that is progress
for lots of people who perhaps have been inactive, not getting
out of the house much, not doing very much. That is a fairly standard
measure. It is not about qualifications, it is about getting engaged
in learning, it is about staying in the learning process and maybe
progressing. What we are looking for is people being engaged in
activities that perhaps broaden out the current range of activities
they are engaged in and activities which could be part of a pathway
towards employment. There are questionnaires and surveys on attitudinal
changes and I am a little bit sceptical about the value of these,
I think something harder needs to be put in.
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