Examination of Witnesses (Questions 220
- 240)
WEDNESDAY 22 NOVEMBER 2006
MR DAVE
SIMMONDS AND
MR WAYNE
SHAND
Q220 Chairman: What have we learnt,
if anything—and both of you have referred to disadvantaged
groups—about what works for those groups?
Mr Shand: I think the experience
certainly in Manchester and a number of other cities is how you
start to work with and through local community organisations,
how you develop a clear presence within communities that have
a number of disadvantages, and how you are able to be flexible
and tailor services to the needs of individuals. I think a real
challenge, particularly for the local authority sector, is how
we get sufficient flexibility at a very local level to be able
to bend a mainstream activity to reflect the specific needs and
barriers that individuals might face. The city has been running
a project with individuals on incapacity benefits for the last
three years and we have worked very closely with Jobcentre Plus
using neighbourhood renewal funds to try and find ways in which
we can supplement mainstream programmes and to ensure that local
individuals, particularly those furthest from the labour market,
are able to benefit and access and, more importantly, progress
from initial contacts where we are helping them build their confidence
and motivation through to training and employment support services,
where they can be better prepared to compete for work. On the
specific issue of ESOL as well, I would like to make one comment
on that. I think Manchester is one of those cities where we do
have large numbers of economic migrants coming in, as well as
large numbers of foreign students, and clearly we have lots of
individuals that are soaking up entry level posts and jobs, particularly
in customer service industries. I think flexibility and a joint
approach between Jobcentre Plus, the local authorities and the
Learning and Skills Councils about how ESOL provision is protected
and focused in those communities were language is a significant
barrier is very important. The overall lesson I think we have
learned from our experience is the greater you can be flexible
and tailor provisions to those local areas and not try to standardise
activity the more successful you are in engaging and taking people
through a process.
Mr Simmonds: There are four key
points in terms of what works from our point of view. First of
all, increasing the individual employability of disadvantaged
groups—and I stress the individual nature of that because
every person is different, everybody has different combinations
of both pros and cons when it comes to the labour market, so we
need a far more individualised system to increase employability.
Secondly, increasing the amount of job seeking. If we are not
asking people to engage and look at the labour market then they
very often will not, and we have seen the consequences of that
over the generations with incapacity benefit, where the average
duration is over seven years. Thirdly, increasing the financial
incentives to work and the level of in-work support and in-work
benefits, there is no doubt that the Making Work Pay agenda is
absolutely critical and is the key both incentive and disincentive
for many disadvantaged groups. Finally, and I think importantly,
a new area of policy which needs to be concentrated on is once
we get disadvantaged groups into a job it is how we then help
them to stay in that job and progress in it. Certainly the performance
of many of our programmes have been undermined in the past by
high levels of turnover, and it is a greater concentration of
helping people stick in work rather than recycle around benefits
which is an important new area of policy.
Mr Shand: A final point, Chairman.
Our experience locally is that once you help individuals who have
been away from work for a very long time overcome some of the
confidence barriers and attitudinal barriers as to what engaging
employment support might mean, our experience is that it is very
successful, and Stepping Stones, for example, the project we run
with Jobcentre Plus, we have engaged and worked with around 3,500
people and by the end of this year we would have helped 2,000
people from IB back into work. What has really surprised us is
that once you overcome those initial barriers that people really
then go on very fast and it is really worth making that initial
investment to overcome the confidence issues to get them involved,
because it does work and they do get into employment.
Q221 Chairman: There will be questions
later on about the City Strategies, so I would ask you not to
venture into that, but how well do you think Jobcentre Plus and
local authorities are working together? Is that element of the
local area agreements actually operating? Is it successful everywhere,
is it patchy and is the Accord more than just a piece of paper?
Mr Shand: I think the Accord that
was signed in 2003 helped to set the foundation for greater collaboration
formally between Jobcentre Plus and local authorities, and certainly
through the LGA it has given the opportunity for local authorities
to be involved at a strategic level, both the LGA and individual
local authorities themselves, in the design and development of
the Green Paper and City Strategy that has followed. So I think
in terms of the impact of the Accord it has been very useful in
that way to get a foot in the door, if you like, but also to ensure
that local authorities' views are conveyed as part of the national
policy development. I think in terms of the practical relationships
between Jobcentre Plus and local authorities it is fair to say
that it will vary across the country. I think where you have had
a strong relationship over a number of years it is starting to
work well, but I think that the issues about the outcome of the
local area agreement, Refresh, and the production of the business
plans for the City Strategy will really be quite telling about
in practice how much change that brings about in terms of different
working arrangements between local authorities and Jobcentre Plus.
Q222 Mrs Humble: Can I explore a
little further the effectiveness of the current programme. Can
you tell us if you think that there are particular groups that
are not well served by the current programme? I am especially
interested, David, the comments that you were making about the
over 50s because you told us a minute ago that there are more
over 50s now going into the labour market, and yet we have been
given evidence to suggest that participation in the New Deal for
over 50s has gone down. Can you square that circle?
Mr Simmonds: The employment rate
for over 50s is on a very firm upward path. Go back to 2000, the
employment rate was about 67%; it now stands at almost 71%. So
that is quite a rapid increase, and if we look at that trend then
it is going to meet the present national employment rate of 75%
at around about 2010-11. So one of the disadvantaged groups will
no longer be technically disadvantaged. That is not to say that
there are still lots of over 50s who have other disadvantages
and will still be unemployed for a range of other reasons, given
the multiple barriers and so forth. So, overall, the numbers of
over 50s are increasing quite rapidly. When it comes to participation
on New Deal for 50 plus you are right that numbers have been going
down and, if I remember rightly, the job outcomes do not look
too good either, but here we have to look at New Deal 50 Plus
that made a relatively small contribution to achieving the increasing
trend for over 50s, and what that is saying is that the supply
side interventions probably are not so important for the over
50s; rather, it is the demand side pull and employers saying,
in part helped by the age discrimination legislation, "We
positively want to pull over 50s back into the labour market.
Whilst we were busily shedding them we now see this as a pool
of labour that is experienced, that knows how to deal with customers,
knows what is required within a work place, knows it is important
to turn up on time," et cetera. So the overall message we
are getting from that is actually it is probably the labour market
as a whole and employers adjusting more and actually Government
supply side interventions are relatively less important.
Q223 Mrs Humble: Do you think that
Government interventions through New Deal could be important for
those people who have been on benefits for a long time, who were
furthest away from the labour market, who need to be winkled out
of their armchairs, because many of the over 50s who are actively
participating may well be people who have given up one job, taken
early retirement, for example, and then decided that they want
to go back into the labour market and there are new opportunities.
So it is the entrepreneurial group you were talking about earlier,
who were already active who were getting in there, but what about
the hardest to reach people? And should we, for example, be looking
at some sort of compulsion for New Deal 50 Plus to get those people
who are not having anything to do with the labour market?
Mr Simmonds: For us that is more
of a matter where multiple disadvantaged comes in because those
over 50s who remain out of work will inevitably have health problems
and will be on IB, and, yes, more support through, for example,
Pathways and the Stepping Stones example from Manchester is important.
It is not our view at the moment that any greater compulsion is
needed around that, and I think we need to get that legislation
in; we need to get Pathways working across the whole country before
there are any further decisions about further responsibilities.
But also there is the issue of low skills. Many of those over
50s who are out of work are classed as having low or no qualifications;
that is about when they were at school, it is about how their
skills are not recognised within the qualifications framework,
and so you bring into question the problem that we have with the
actual declining employment rate for those people with no skills.
So for us it is more of an issue of looking at how these different
disadvantages combine and how you tackle it for the individual,
given that there is a multitude of combinations and permutations
of the different disadvantages.
Q224 Mrs Humble: Wayne, I would like
your comments on whether you think there are particular groups
that are not well served by the existing programme, but I also
want to pick up on the comment that you made in answer to a question
from the Chair about flexibility within the system, and you talked
about initiatives in Manchester and in other parts of the country
where there is flexible working between DWP and local authorities.
How can that be better improved in order to get those groups of
people who are not best served by the existing operation? And
who are these groups, as well as the over 50s—or not?
Mr Shand: I think our experience
has been that it took a fairly long time, probably the best part
of a year, to get to a point in our relationship with DWP nationally
and Jobcentre locally to start to get below the headline statistics.
I think what has been really important for us is to be in the
position where we can start to understand the dynamics within
communities and to segment the market almost. So the approach
that we have taken with Jobcentre Plus with our NRF project, but
not in the mainstream, one might say, is to set a number of criteria
for those people who have been on IB for two years or more, and
basically to have a target group within that. In Manchester we
have 37,000 people approximately that are on incapacity benefits,
and of those, once we take out people with terminal illnesses
or very serious disabilities or people who are very close to retirement
age, you end up with about 40% of the overall stock, and that
is where we have focused our activity. Within that, I think what
we have tried to do is to identify both geographical communities
but also target groups themselves, which would include the ones
we have mentioned—the over 50s, young people on long-term
benefits as well as people from minority communities and people
with disabilities would be our priority areas for intervention.
But in some ways what we have tried to do is to have those as
medium-term targets but work below that to focus activities so
that there is sufficient volume within communities to try and
deal with those areas where you have almost an overbearing concentration
of worklessness, which we think is one of the factors that continues
to position Manchester as one of the most deprived areas in the
country, despite the rapid economic growth that is taking place
in the sub-region. Two particular issues which I think are important
around the point on flexibility, one is the complexity of existing
mainstream services, particularly with JSA, for example, that
18 to 24 year olds have different eligibility criteria from over
25s, so different eligibility criteria from 50 plus, and I think
what we would want to see is greater flexibility locally to be
able to move the entry points for those services so that we can
better reflect the needs of our communities; but also to look
at encouraging work across public sector agencies, so particularly
on the skills agenda with the LSC and Department of Health and
GP practices and the health sector's involvement, and DTI in terms
of business support. I think part of the issue in terms of effectiveness
for us is about not only how you start to engage and involve individuals
in employment support and have a flexible approach at a local
level, but also how you have a joined-up approach across government
departments to make the most of the resources that are available.
Mr Simmonds: Can I just add that
as far as I talked about the over 50s I did not answer your main
question about who is least well served. I think put simply it
is those people with multiple disadvantages who are not well served.
I am not going to single out a group of people because I think
that is almost now missing the point, because whilst the present
programmes we have are defined around age groups with a strict
eligibility it is still a one-size fits all approach, and whilst
that has worked for many people who have one main disadvantage,
who are actually highly employable bar one significant barrier,
where a one-size fits all type approach might work, and does on
a regular basis for many, those who are not well served are those
where it is a lot more complicated—different permutations
and combinations of disadvantage, as well as geographical disadvantage
in terms of where they are living—and our present system
is not geared up sufficiently to tackle the hardest cases.
Q225 Mrs Humble: We are running out
of time and I have two questions and I would welcome fairly brief
answers. The first question follows on from the issue of complexity
because the people who are dealing with that complexity are the
personal advisers. Do you think they are up to the job?
Mr Simmonds: Yes and no. There
are some excellent personal advisers and you just have to go and
sit with a bunch of them and they are absolutely fantastic, they
are doing a great job. However, the overall quality constantly
needs improving. As problems and issues change, up-skilling and
training of personal advisers is critically important, plus they
also need freeing up, and I still do not believe that there is
sufficient freedom in the system as a whole to enable personal
advisers to take the right decisions for individuals. If you look
at the equivalents in Employment Zones, that is where those personal
advisers are taking decisions around what individuals can and
should do and have a pot of money to help them do that—they
have that freedom. But within the Jobcentre Plus personal advisers
their hands are tied, so whilst there is a lot of willingness
by PAs, a lot of enthusiasm and commitment by a lot of them for
their job, I am afraid we are still tending to tie their hands
far too much.
Mr Shand: The very brief answer
is that our experience is that the PAs that work with the hardest
clients need to be the best PAs and generally need additional
training to be able to deal with the complexity of the issues.
Q226 Mrs Humble: Finally from me,
Building on New Deal, why has it not worked? Why has it not worked
as well as we wanted it to? The Government reduced the number
of pilot areas. What has gone wrong, what should go right, what
is the future for BoND?
Mr Simmonds: We said back in the
summer, I think, that BoND should be buried because in effect,
from our point of view, BoND has not happened. The key decisions
to roll this out have not been taken, we understand because of
resource issues. So from that point of view we have to see it
as a direct casualty of the tough settlements for DWP and Jobcentre
Plus as part of the CSR. We still dispute the fact that it would
actually cost more money; we have not seen any conclusive from
the Department as to why it should cost more money. Actually I
do not think that the Department, from what I have heard, has
actually rowed back on the fundamental principles on which BoND
is based, and that is introducing far more flexibility into the
system, introducing the menu-based approach so that individuals
and personal advisers together can pick and choose. So we still
hope that those principles are alive and well. How they are introduced
in the future, whether or not it is called BoND or something else,
we do not particularly care, as long as the system as a whole
is progressively freed up in one way or another, and probably
BoND as a Green Paper at the end of the day. Part of what we were
saying was bury it because that has now gone, let us carry on
with the debate and let us look at in 2007 the best way for strengthening
the New Deals and introducing more flexibility and ending the
one-size fits all.
Mr Shand: Very quickly to say
that I think we would encourage the Department to not proliferate
activities of a vaguely similar nature. I think some of the principles
of BoND were right but as there has been very little progress
we would encourage them to reintroduce those principles as part
of the City Strategy Programme.
Q227 Miss Begg: That leads me very
neatly on to the questions on City Strategy because I was going
to ask—and I think you have just answered it—whether
with City Strategy we might see the son of BoND rising and whether
it works. A very simple question to begin with is how well do
you think the development of Cities Strategy is going?
Mr Shand: In some ways it is a
bit early to tell. I think the local government sector welcomed
the Green Paper and welcomed the introduction of Cities Strategies.
I think the local authorities are working very closely together
and with DWP to produce business plans. We are being actively
encouraged by the Department to be challenging and to identify
those things that we think will make a difference. Those will
be put within the business plan and it will be submitted by local
authorities, local consortiums in December, to DWP. I think one
of the concerns we have is that the experience of local authorities
through the local PSA Agreements, the local area agreements in
our City Strategy, is that lots of things have been asked for
and lots of challenges have been made and it has been very difficult
to get a positive response back. So I think we welcome the opportunity
but we wait to see how effective it is in practice.
Mr Simmonds: Just briefly, it
was John Hutton in launching it who said that he wanted City Strategies
to be challenging and it has precisely been that, so it would
be foolish to say that everything is going swimmingly because
it is a very challenging set of issues that both local areas have,
as well as central government in changing how it thinks and behaves.
So I would say, relatively speaking, over the time period, over
the three or four months since people have really got down to
business, that progress has been pretty rapid, relative to the
scale of the challenge and relative to what people have to do.
As I constantly say, you are told to deliver a one-size fits all
solution for 10 years and then you are told to start thinking
again and be challenging, and you cannot do that overnight. From
our point of view, the areas that we have been working, there
have been some fascinating debates and discussions at the local
level as to what the local solutions should be to their local
problems, and at long last now our local partners are sitting
around the table, they are discussing what the problems are, analysing
the nature of the problems and identifying what the solutions
might be. But let us not kid ourselves that that is not an easy
task everywhere, because it is an entrenched problem plus, also,
certainly at the local level, a lot of the capacity to analyse
and to look at the nature of local labour market failure, to look
at all the different funding streams coming into an area, and
just to map activity is a vast job in itself. So progress to date,
relative to the scale of the challenge, I think has been pretty
good.
Q228 Miss Begg: You touched on the
fact that one of the crucial elements of the City Strategy is
the ability to pool the funding, so if I can take Manchester as
an example, what funding streams have you identified? Are there
barriers to proving this? Is there extra flexibility that the
Government needs to put in place in order for those funding issues
to be brought together? Is it going to be possible to coordinate
all of this at a local level and do you have any evidence that
the Health Service or some of the other agencies involved are
beginning to get very protective of their funding and are therefore
putting up unnecessary barriers into bringing all that funding
that needs to happen into that single pool?
Mr Shand: It is a big question
but I will try to be brief, Chairman. The work that we have done
within Manchester and Greater Manchester is that we have gone
through a process of trying to map what resources are available
and working on this issue and these client groups and what provision
is in place and how that fits or does not to the needs of the
people we need to support. To be honest, where we have been more
successful is having discussions around non-core budgets and about
how they are brought together more effectively. So with the Learning
and Skills Council, for example, we have effectively pooled some
of the money for local learning in deprived communities with our
NRF resources. We are still awaiting the final decision from Government
on the Deprived Areas Fund, but it is intended that that money
will be pooled alongside other resources. Where we have had success
is in those areas which are large or small relatively but are
not part of the core service provision, particularly that which
Jobcentre Plus offers. What we have tried to do is to manage the
relationships locally and nationally, so where departments are
reluctant or not in a position to pool resources to at least align
them, so we have a very clear set of goals and objectives and
any positioning activity is aligned so that they all fit together
as best they can. I think there is a certain institutional resistance
from the departments to let go of responsibility for some of their
areas so I do not think we are quite there yet in terms of it,
but I think certainly the challenge for City Strategy going forward
is to demonstrate that we can achieve additional impact from those
areas where we do work together and pool resources. I think in
terms of health it is not an issue that we have made a huge amount
of progress in. We have as part of our plans closer working with
GPs and to ensure that we have sufficient capacity within the
condition management programme, so that we can help those people
who have chronic long-term issues to manage pain or manage their
health conditions, but to put support in place where it does not
prevent them going back into work. It is early days and it is
a bit of a mixed message, but I think there is a certain pull
against pooling resources themselves.
Q229 Miss Begg: Can you see yourselves
at some stage, if the blocks are there that you need to unblock
to deliver a City Strategy, knocking on Government's door and
saying, "You are going to have to come in and help us here,"
or do you think that the solutions will largely be at a local
level?
Mr Shand: No, I think, again very
bluntly to keep it short, that unless the Government departments
release grip and allow greater local delegation to this then City
Strategy probably will not work. You will be able to deal with
the peripheral funding issues around the edges of core, but unless
you fundamentally change the approach of how national programmes
are delivered and commissioned then City Strategy will not work.
Q230 Miss Begg: Do you have any evidence
that things are changing?
Mr Shand: We are optimistic. As
we say, the process of producing the business plan is going to
be the telling point.
Q231 Miss Begg: Obviously as the
plans have to be submitted in December, is it too early to give
us any timescale of when we will start to see City Strategies
work on the ground; that there will be some impact on the individuals
that will be affected by City Strategy?
Mr Shand: We have been running,
using our own resources, a programme called the Core of City Strategy
for two and a half years now in Manchester. I think that in a
small way it has demonstrated that it works if we can engage the
right people and support them. We have set ourselves very stretching
targets for Manchester and tried to get 12,500 people off long-term
benefits into work over the next three to four years, and we would
know by the middle or the end of next year about how effective
both the management and administration of City Strategy has been
and the buy-in of Government, but also the real impact that it
is having within our communities.
Q232 Miss Begg: We visited Glasgow
a couple of weeks ago. They conducted a mapping exercise to find
out exactly where the provision was across the city and have set
up a programme called the Equal Access and Full Employment Areas
Initiative specifically to fill the gaps in provision. Have other
cities done something similar? Have they got a separate body that
is there to fill the provision or how have other cities tackled
that to make sure it is covering all aspects of employment in
the city?
Mr Shand: I think most of the
pilot areas of the City Strategy, and there are 15 nationally,
are engaging in the process of trying to do that sort of mapping
exercise. We have done it in Manchester. We established a skills
board two years ago to try and bring the strategic commissioning
and delivering agencies together to do exactly that. The intent
was to make sure that, particularly in the vocational, training
and educational sector, any provision that is being put in place
is specifically aligned to the requirements that employers have
and to use the resources as effectively as they can, but Dave
might have a view on the rest of the authorities.
Mr Simmonds: I think you can go
to every single local authority in our cities and point to a local
initiative that is being taken and funded somehow, quite simply
because there is that local recognition that more is needed over
and above what is being provided through the mainstream programmes,
either in terms of improving the performance of those mainstream
programmes or reaching out to groups which those mainstream programmes
were not designed for outside the eligibility criteria. That action
is happening all of the time in our major cities, and the important
thing is that, through the City Strategy crisis cities have now
got the opportunity to build on those initiatives that they have
been running for some years, like the Jets or the one-stop shops
in Liverpool and those equivalents in Southwark and so forth,
you can point to all of those. However, I would reinforce Wayne's
point that city strategies will not be as effective as they can
or should be if they are just marginalised to what is called the
"funny money" at the edges. It is the performance of
the mainstream programmes that needs to be improved, and that
is the critical step which City Strategies can and should be taking,
and so seeing those mainstream programmes, both in LSC and Jobcentre
Pluses, within the City Strategy pot is incredibly important.
Q233 Miss Begg: One of the other
things we have seen in Glasgow, and it is a criticism that we
as a Committee have heard before, is that a lot of the services
tend to cluster around job search and usually those closest to
the labour market and there are not the resources put in to either
bring the people who are furthest away from the labour market
closer to the labour market or, indeed, to sustain people in work
once they get a job. Is that something that exists everywhere,
is it just in Glasgow, or is it often the way that New Deal works
as well?
Mr Shand: There is a gap at that
end, and I think that is where we have concentrated some of the
effort for our Neighbourhood Renewal Fund. There is a principle.
Certainly we have tried to set out, within our City Strategy,
a proposal about how Government needs to think differently about
resourcing in the future. I think, broadly, we would think, certainly
in Manchester, that in total, for the whole public sector, there
is probably enough resource there to do the job, but we need to
be more flexible about how we use it and more intelligent about
how that is commissioned and applied. If we can get that working
properly, there is probably enough core resource there to get
where we want to get. However, I think there is an issue going
forward, particularly with NRF finishing at the end of next year,
that there will be a gap with regard to those people that are
furthest away from the labour market. Certainly one of the principles
that we have tried to articulate to Government is that, by getting
thousands of people off of benefits into work, there are huge
savings to be made in terms of benefit payments, there are huge
benefits to the Exchequer in terms of tax revenue as well as local
economic impact, and one of the principles that sits within this
is about how Government recycles some of that resource to make
sure that there is sufficient capacity at a local level to continue
to do that engagement work.
Mr Simmonds: I should flag up
the concern around the future of the European Social Fund and
the Equal Programme, which, of course, is on a rapidly declining
route. Many of the additional programmes that we have been talking
about, and you have looked at, are probably, one way or another,
supported through the ESF, and the withdrawal of that cash progressively
over coming years is of grave concern at a local level. Again,
from our point of view, that just points in the direction of the
critical importance of freeing up the mainstream so that it is
better able to fund those local priorities and the range of different
services that are needed. At the moment I would say that we are
too channelled down the main core services. Actually, the point
that we are constantly trying to get over with the 80% is that
you cannot hit the 80% without acting on a wide range of fronts,
which means a wide range of services and, in some cases, new services,
specifically in terms of the in-work support for disadvantaged
groups.
Q234 Miss Begg: A lot of that is
to do with the supply side. We took evidence as a Committee from
Cay Stratton on Monday, who said that employer involvement is
crucial, and in fact the model which she presented was quite different
from the one that we have heard most about this morning, which
was that you would engage with the employers first to see what
skills, what jobs they had available and then look after your
supply of pooled labour and make sure that the programmes, the
employment programmed and the work share programmes developed
the skills around the jobs that were there that were going to
be available to them. To what extent do City Strategies (and it
may be different across different cities, I realise) set out with
the precise intention of involving employers at a very early stage
in the planning and the strategic development of services?
Mr Shand: Certainly for the Greater
Manchester City Strategy, employers have been involved from the
very outset. The Employers' Coalition is a member of the consortium.
We are currently working with the National Employer Panel in running
projects focused particularly on employment for BME communities
in Manchester, and we have quite a mature group of sector networks
where we try to use some of the intelligence that comes out of
those to make sure that certainly the work that we do for the
schools' board is specifically picking up on the requirement that
employers have. As part of our work going forward, I think we
have tried to concentrate on two areas with regard to employers.
One is how we prevent large numbers of people falling out of work
and into long-term benefits and provide particularly SMEs with
the sort of support that they need to manage chronic illness or
sickness in the workplace without those individuals then falling
into Statutory Sick Pay and then potentially on to incapacity
benefits and then getting trapped in that loop. We are aiming
to work with the Health and Safety Executive nationally to try
and see if we can build capacity in that area. The second area
is the point around brokerage—it is about that interface
between the individual and the employer—and we have run
some activity over the last couple of years that has tried to
broker that relationship and present individuals to employers.
I think we have learned a number of lessons from that and I think
that, as we go forward, what we are looking to do is to both provide
the support for the individual to present themselves to the best
effect, particularly when they are competing with other people
that will have a better track record in employment than they will,
but also to make sure that the employers are aware of the support
and advantages in taking people from the register.
Q235 Miss Begg: Is it easy for employers
to know where to go for that help? Is there a one-stop shop for
them? Again, in Glasgow—and I have taken a knowledge of
what happens in Aberdeen—various providers go out to the
employers and so a single employer might be approached by a number
of different job brokers, or whoever, seeing whether they will
place some of their clients, rather than it being a single body
that the employer can come to and say, "I need somebody with
these skills", and then it is divided out to whoever it is
that can supply the individual with those skills.
Mr Shand: Certainly, in our case,
not at the moment. We have got the LSC, the colleges, Jobcentre
Plus and other projects that are all approaching employers and
one of the aims is to streamline that. We need to be aware as
well that employers will not just work through one route. As well
as trying to do what we can to capture some of the jobs and present
individuals to employers in the best way that we can, we also
need to make sure that the individuals themselves are competitive
and are able to compete on their own terms with others that are
also going for jobs.
Q236 Miss Begg: Professor Ivan Turok
argued that there is a basic choice to be made between a decentralised
approach or a more closely planned and co-ordinated city level
framework. Which do you think should be pursued?
Mr Simmonds: Certainly we see
that the fundamental building block of a city strategy is the
ability for local partners, both policy-makers and politicians
and the different government agencies, to come to a strategy which
is based on a firm, sound understanding of their local labour
market, where the local labour market failures are and what needs
fixing to increase their employment rate and to tackle the entrenched
worklessness in some of their areas. In that way, it is more likely
to be the case that the solutions that are put in place will actually
be the right solutions for those local problems, but that does
mean that local partners do have to approach the job in the first
place by a very sound analysis, by sharing local labour market
information, and that means Jobcentre Plus and LSC actually sharing
data and their understanding of the local labour market so that
we are pooling together all these different perspectives of how
the local labour market is working, and that includes employers
as well. Certainly, from our point of view, we think that the
increased performance that City Strategies can bring will be precisely
because they are better at identifying what the problem is and
therefore what the fix is.
Mr Shand: Briefly to add to that,
to some extent it does not matter. At the end of the day what
we need is a responsive local system that meets the needs of the
people that we want to support. If we have got either devolved
government arrangements or we have got a more flexible and responsive
national system, either way it works, as long as we get the outcome
that we need at the end.
Q237 Miss Begg: In that case, how
should the success of the added value that City Strategies will
have be measured?
Mr Shand: I think its impact in
those communities that we want to serve.
Q238 Michael Foster: Do you have
a view as to the relative advantages and benefits of employment
services being delivered by Jobcentre Plus as opposed to the private
and voluntary sector?
Mr Simmonds: We are constantly
looking at who can best provide the most effective performance,
and the answer to that, over the years, will probably change.
We certainly do not have a dogmatic, ideological view that one
group of providers is automatically better than another group
of providers or better than a large national agency. Certainly
we do believe that it was the right decision to strengthen the
Employment Service at the time in 1997 to enable it to run the
New Deal, because that was the only way in which you were going
to get off the ground what actually was a massive exercise, and
the Employment Service successfully delivered that; but we are
now living in a different labour market, we are living in a different
society insofar as people's expectations of public services are,
quite properly, increasing and it is about how those services
are individualised, which is all taking us in the direction that
probably the delivery of employability support is best delivered
through the private and voluntary sector; and we will always lump
private and voluntary sector together because, again, we see some
very strong pros and cons within the provider sector in terms
of what they can bring but similarly for the voluntary and community
sector as well. I think the secret is how you get the system as
a whole working together and the best set of providers at a local
level. Again, I would say that the best people to judge on that
are those people at the local level with sufficient control over
the funding pot so that they can commission the right sorts of
organisations to deliver that performance gain, because at the
end of the day that is what we are talking about. We are looking
at where we get that performance gain for the most disadvantaged
in society, and if the private and voluntary sector can deliver
that, then we are for that.
Mr Shand: I think, generally,
we would agree with that position. One of the issues that could
become an obstacle is overcomplicating things. I think the experience
has been that, as Government has trialled different approaches
to delivery of services, arrangements for contracting or different
target sets that do not fit together just make it harder to deliver
locally. So, I would agree, generally, that we want the best quality
and capacity of services locally to do the job, regardless of
which sector it is from, but there needs to be a very clear structure
about how that is commissioned and delivered so that we do not
spend as much money on the administration as we do on services
delivery.
Q239 Michael Foster: We have had
comparable evidence, I suppose, by the way we have gone to talk
in particular to voluntary sector organisations and their clients,
that they welcome not just the individuality of the programme
but the ethos and the confidence that they can build with non-state
employee programmes. Is that something which is important or do
you have any comment or evidence to suggest that that is the case:
because, in fairness, I do not believe that we as a Committee
have had the opportunity to talk to those same clients who have
been serviced by Jobcentre Plus to the same extent in any event?
Mr Shand: Our practical experience
on the ground is that voluntary and community organisations can
be very powerful advocates in communities that maybe feel distant
from local authority bodies or other mainstream institutions.
Certainly, as we go forward with our City Strategy, what we are
currently working on is a new formalised arrangement with voluntary
and sector community groups to try and help them to take the message
out to the people that their working with most closely, and I
think that is the key part of this, particularly if we are going
to get the volumes of people through into the City Strategy and
on to work that we need to hit the target.
Q240 Chairman: Thank you very much.
It has been a long session, but a very important one. You can
read about yourselves in our report!
Mr Simmonds: Thank you.
Mr Shand: Thank you.
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