Examination of Witnesses (Questions 40-59)
DEPARTMENT FOR
WORK AND
PENSIONS, JOBCENTRE
PLUS & LEARNING
AND SKILLS
COUNCIL
WEDNESDAY 24 OCTOBER
2007
Q40 Chairman: At the end of that
there are a couple of things that must be pursued from Mr Mitchell's
excellent questioning. The fact remains there are still more than
4.2 million working adults and 1.7 million children living in
households where nobody works. If you look at figure 2 on page
13: "Internationally the United Kingdom has one of the highest
rates of people living in workless households". He mentioned
two points and I do not think you can just brush them aside because
you must have seen today's press about the impact of immigration
and the United Kingdom population rising to some 70 million by
2020. You must know in towns like Boston in Lincolnshire a very
high proportion of young people now coming into the workplace
are from Eastern Europe. Frankly, you have got to address the
fact that there is some resentment amongst people with low skills
that these basic jobs, for instance working in the field of Lincolnshire,
are being taken. You cannot just brush it aside and say it is
not in this Report; it is absolutely key.
Sir Leigh Lewis: My apologies
if I appeared to give the impression that I was brushing it aside.
I am not anxious to get into the whole issue of migration, which
is complex and difficult. All the evidence is that we are benefitting
as an economy from migration into this country. That is the thrust
of the House of Lords' Report.
Q41 Chairman: I am sure the economy
is benefitting, nobody is denying that the economy and economic
growth is benefiting, but the point is that many of these young
people with low job skills are saying that these jobs are being
taken by immigrants. There is nothing racist about this because
they are from Eastern Europe, they are very active, good, hard-working
people from Eastern Europe who have taken the jobs. They are,
frankly, cancelling out all these little schemes that you are
doing.
Sir Leigh Lewis: No, I do not
accept that. On any given day of course if there is a job that
is taken by somebody who has come into this country, then by definition
that job has not been taken by a person who is local to this country,
but actually if you look at the economic evidence and the statistics
over recent years, unemployment has continued to fall and more
people are continuing to be in work, notwithstanding the fact
that we have people coming into this country.
Q42 Chairman: All right, and also
Mr Mitchell mentioned the carrot and stick point. We have got
this one international comparison that I have alluded to—figure
2—but there is nothing in this Report about what people
are doing in places like Wisconsin, these famous experiments we
hear about all the time. Do you want to say a bit about that of
what work you are doing in the Department in terms of stick as
well as carrot?
Sir Leigh Lewis: Again recognising,
please, that I would prefer not to use that terminology.
Q43 Chairman: Then let me use that
terminology and you can use another.
Sir Leigh Lewis: If you look at
the Green Paper that my Secretary of State put out just before
the summer recess In work, better off, that does in the
area of lone parents, and work to help lone parents, set out precisely
the more help that we want to give lone parents yet which is more
than even the range which is currently on offer. That does propose—these
are proposals the consultation period has not yet ended—that
in October 2008 lone parents whose youngest child is above 12
should not henceforth be able to claim income support as a lone
parent but would need to claim another benefit, and from October
2010 the proposal is that that should be the case where the youngest
child is over seven. So the Government is putting forward, and
has indeed moved already, to increase the conditionality which
attaches to a number of benefits in the benefits system.
Chairman: After we come back from voting
Mrs Browning will have the floor.
The Committee suspended from 4.09 pm to 4.17
pm for a division in the House.
Chairman: I think Angela Browning has
some questions now please.
Q44 Angela Browning: I would like
to concentrate on the work in the Report on disabled people, so
I should perhaps declare an interest in that I am Vice Chairman
of the National Autistic Society and a Patron of Research Autism.
On page 22, paragraph 2.13 it states in regard to the New Deal
for Disabled People that the programme was most successful for
people with mild to moderate disabilities but that its reach was
limited. While around 57,800 people had participated in this programme
at time of the Report, this was only a small percentage of those
who could potentially benefit. So what I must ask you is, are
you top-slicing the easy people with disabilities to get them
into work and leaving the rest?
Sir Leigh Lewis: No, I do not
think we are doing that. It must be the case of course that there
are people with disabilities—as you will know from the office
you hold—whose difficulties are greater and those who are
lesser and selfevidently it is harder to help somebody, say, who
suffers from a serious mental disorder than somebody who suffers
from a relatively minor mental disorder, and to do the latter
there is going to be the need for a wider range of agencies and
interventions but, no, our services are on offer to all of those
who seek our help, and if you look at the Pathways programme,
which is specifically directed and is going to be extended nationally
for all new claimants to incapacity benefits, that will be available
to and offered to all of those who ask us for our help or who
we think can conceivably benefit from it. So, no, we are not simply
seeking to cream off the easiest to help.
Q45 Angela Browning: Is it not the
case though, Sir Leigh, that it is not just harder to get people,
for example with autistic spectrum disorders (ASD) and mental
health problems, into work, it is also more expensive? The per
capita cost of putting a programme together that is going
to be successful and sustainable for those people is not just
about effort, it is about cost, but we know from the Report here,
particularly on page 27, that for somebody who is on long-term
disability benefit to get them into work—and I was looking
at 3.11—that is still more cost-effective. I am putting
to one side the humanitarian argument, on which I could wax lyrical,
but just on the cost side, it is still, is it not, worthwhile
to invest the money in getting people who have the ability to
work, however difficult, into paid employment but it requires
something rather different from what you are offering at the moment?
Sir Leigh Lewis: I think I agree
with the broad thrust of your questions. In a sense, I think what
you are saying to me, with which I agree, is that the cost and
the effort of helping that person into a job may be higher but
the long-term potential benefit is also higher. I think that is
something that we accept and I think more than ever we are reaching
out and offering real help with a whole range of partners including
working much more closely with various bodies in the NHS than
ever before. We are reaching out to help those people with more
serious barriers to overcome. Inevitably there comes a point where
for a given individual the problems may be so severe that it becomes
difficult to provide unlimited resource to help that individual,
but we certainly do not start from a point of view of making a
narrow, cost-based calculation.
Q46 Angela Browning: If you look
again on page 22 at paragraph 2.14 where it talks about the Workstep
programme, which I am familiar with, I wonder why Workstep does
not meet the need that is clearly identified in paragraph 2.13,
because one would have thought that if it is properly run and
if it is an appropriate application that to give tailored support
to find, secure and retain jobs for disabled people who have more
complex barriers would work. What can you tell us about Workstep?
Why is that not then dealing with the sort of people you have
just described?
Sir Leigh Lewis: I am not going
to pretend that I can give you a detailed answer on Workstep.
Lesley Strathie may be able to but I may need to write to you.[3]
What I can say is that the research that we have done and commissioned
on the New Deal for Disabled People as a whole has estimated that
the net benefits to society of participation on that programme
are around £3,000 per participant. I think again that underpins
the point that you are putting to me that actually although the
investment is significant the potential returns are high as well.
Once again—and I do not want to overuse the analogy—there
is good news here. We have for the first time, either in our history
or certainly in recent memory, more than half of disabled people
in work, and that is not a position that we have ever been in
before, but this is challenging and it is tough. That is why we
genuinely believe that the Pathways programme is a better programme
than we have ever been able to offer before in this area.
Q47 Angela Browning: Would you reflect
on whether you think there is still significant disability discrimination
among employers, particularly in the grouping that would be encompassed
by learning disability and mental health?
Sir Leigh Lewis: I think certainly—and
of course it has just been merged into the new CEHR—the
Disability Rights Commission would have said that is a fact and
that there is discrimination. It is something that we seek to
tackle and that Jobcentre Plus would very much seek to tackle,
in the sense of helping employers to understand that though in
the first instance it may require more effort on their part to
take somebody with a disability into work, or to retain someone
who becomes disabled in their employment, the potential gains
to them, as you yourself will know, can be very substantial indeed.
Q48 Angela Browning: Is Workstep
not designed to reassure employers because it is flexible and
it is not about full time or part time, it can be as low as four
hours a week? Why is Workstep not meeting the needs of those more
difficult, if I may use that expression, people to place in employment?
What is it about Workstep that is not actually working?
Sir Leigh Lewis: I do not want
to pretend that I have a deeper knowledge of Workstep as an individual
programme than I do, so I would prefer to write to you about that.
What I would say is that our overall range of disability programmes—take
another one which is the Access to Work programme which helps
employers meet the cost of adaptations in the workforce so they
can retain employees with disabilities—is not necessarily
meeting every need but it is undoubtedly being successful. In
my own Department as an employer—and we are a direct employer
of over 100,000 people in the Department for Work and Pensions—there
is no doubt that the Department I am now privileged to head is
light years more advanced than the Department I joined 30-plus
years ago in the support it will give to employees who either
are disabled or become disabled in order to retain them in employment,
and we do not do that for narrow social "let's be a good
employer" reasons; it is because those people have an enormous
amount to contribute to the success of the Department.
Q49 Angela Browning: Would you accept—and
I would be interested in Ms Strathie's answer to this—if
you have somebody with a physical disability, and I do not wish
in any way to downplay the importance of that, once you have dealt
with the practicalities of the workplace, mobility and those types
of things, people with physical disabilities make very few demands
on what I would describe as management time, but the disincentive
for people with mental health learning disability or ASD is that
there is still the need for some management or supervisory involvement
in the workplace, however well placed they are to fulfil the functions
of the particular job. How are you addressing that in your programmes
of getting these people into work? I sense with this group particularly
there is what I would regard as a "revolving door" process.
In other words, many of them go on to one scheme after another.
What they do not actually get is what really matters and where
they need the most help, not so much just work prep and preparation
for interviews but somebody who is alongside them on the job search,
the interview and then the sustainability in employment. It is
this group that needs that and that is going to cost money.
Ms Strathie: I think you touch
on one area which is really important, regardless of whether it
is a person with a disability or any other customer, and that
is the employer. At the end of the day they provide the opportunity
for our customers to move into work and I think we are building
a stronger relationship with employers. I myself am a large employer
and I am a member of the Employers' Forum on Disability, so I
work with a number of employers who are making a determined effort
to help more people with disability into their workforce. I think
the point you make about Workstep and programmes like the New
Deal for Disabled People is quite separate from Pathways to Work,
so we started with those customers who were normal Jobseeker's
Allowance customers who present and declare themselves with a
disability, or other people who come to us through other partners,
that we were trying to help manage their disability, find employers
who would give them a chance, if you like, because we do address
market failure, and then look at the programmes we have to help
both the employer and the customer make that deal and keep them
in work. Pathways to Work has been a programme that we have developed
for those customers who are on incapacity benefit, ie not actively
looking for work but signed medically unfit. There we have taken
the approach of confidence-building and condition management,
so with a whole range of partners in health and the labour market
and employers we help people learn how to work and manage their
condition as they go. I think we have quite a number of programme
but the employer and the local employment partnerships that Jobcentre
Plus is forging ahead with now are critical to the success of
all of our programmes and our customers.
Q50 Angela Browning: I may ask the
Chairman if I can come back afterwards on one more issue, but
if I may just say to you Jobcentre Plus needs people with specialisms
of understanding in how to get this particular group into work,
and if they had those people—and I have to say from where
I am sitting they have not got them yet—then that figure
could be dramatically changed.
Ms Strathie: Thank you.
Q51 Mr Bacon: Sir Leigh, I think
the last time you appeared in front of our Committee you were
Mr Lewis, so many congratulations. You have been knighted in the
interim; is that correct?
Sir Leigh Lewis: It is indeed.
Q52 Mr Bacon: Many congratulations.
What did you get it for?
Sir Leigh Lewis: I think I am
going to leave others to judge that and not seek to respond.
Q53 Mr Bacon: Many congratulations
anyway. You mentioned 850 Jobcentre Pluses up and down the country
with two-thirds of a million jobs at any one time. Could you send
us something that shows clearly where those jobs are geographically,
perhaps with a map attached so that we can see numerically where
the jobs are. I remember Mr Touhig saying in a debate on Armed
Forces recruitment recently that whereas ten years ago there were
plenty of people in his constituency who when you knocked on the
door in a by-election were in; now nobody is in because they have
all got jobs and that has a big impact on Army recruitment. My
sense is that there are jobs pretty much in all parts of the country,
including the areas where previously you would have expected there
not to be, Liverpool or perhaps parts of the North East and so
on, but presumably there are still hot-spots of unemployment compared
with the South East, say. Where are the worst areas?
Sir Leigh Lewis: We can certainly
send you the information that you have asked for and we will certainly
do that. My own experience—and then, with the Chairman's
indulgence, I will pass over to Lesley Strathie—is that
the world in terms of unemployment and employment is a different
one from the one when I first entered the then Department of Employment
in the early 1970s. Then there were large parts of the country
which were unemployment black-spots and large parts of the country
which were prosperous and there were north-south divides and so
on. It tends to be different today. It tends to be that there
are micro economies within prosperous areas within some of our
prosperous cities where within micro economies, often individual
wards, individual estates, you have very high concentrations of
unemployment and worklessness.[4]
Q54 Mr Bacon: And that is seen geographically
right across the country?
Sir Leigh Lewis: That is seen
right across the country, yes.
Q55 Mr Bacon: A map and some figures
and information on that would be very helpful. You mentioned lone
parents and earlier on, in answer to the Chairman, you said it
had gone from 45% of lone parents working to 57%. You made is
sound almost tectonic in its importance, a generational shift.
Obviously it is encouraging to see more lone parents able to work
but it is only going from four and a half out of ten to five and
a half out of ten. There are therefore still four and a half out
of ten who are not working. Of those, are they mostly people who
have chosen to stay at home to look after their children? Are
they mostly people with children under the age of 12? How do you
break them up?
Sir Leigh Lewis: By definition,
if they are lone parents and claiming income support as lone parents
they will be lone parents whose youngest child is under 16, because
above that age you would not be entitled to income support as
a lone parent, so they will be in that range. I think again we
can provide you with some detailed figures. They will include
lone parents with children right across that age range. The point
I was making was not remotely that 57% is now good enough because,
as you say, that still leaves 43% of lone parents who are not
in employment. Actually in a world in which we have at times measured
our progress in one per cents and two per cents, because some
of this is tough to do and tough to achieve, I think over that
period to have seen an over 10% change in the employment rate
for lone parents is a significant success, but I think it should
provide the spur for us to want to go further and repeat that
success and more. [5]
Q56 Mr Bacon: Could I ask you just to
look at page 21, this chart in figure 10. The biggest gap is between
those who are identified for work-focused interviews and those
who are booked for interview. It is a huge gap, much bigger than
any others on the chart. Is that because once they are identified
as candidates for work-focused interviews and then they are phoned
up or contacted, that the officer then decides perhaps they are
not actually candidates for work-focused interviews after all
so they do not get booked for an interview? How do you explain
the huge gap between those who are considered suitable and those
who actually get booked for an interview?
Ms Strathie: I think one of the
issues that we have wrestled with and has been a big focus of
our adviser refresh and the way that we have been dealing with
this customer group has been to ensure that those who are eligible
for interview are correctly identified, properly invited, and
then, much more importantly, provided we have a telephone contact,
that we ring them up and remind them that they have a work-focused
interview to come to. There is a requirement to invite people
in writing to the interview. There is a requirement to follow
up and to invite them again if they fail to attend and then to
take action on a third attempt if they do not turn up for that
interview, so there is a process of trying to persuade people
and remind people to come in for those interviews.
Q57 Mr Bacon: These are people who
fall into the category of not working and not looking for work
and/or not available? For example, stay-at-home mums may not wish
to work, they choose not to, and they come within the figures
of economically inactive. At which point are they cast out of
the equation of those who you are contacting?
Ms Strathie: Incrementally we
have been inviting more people for a work-focused interview if
they are lone parents depending on the age of the youngest child,
so gradually more people are being brought in. The purpose of
that single work-focused interview is to sell the benefits of
it.
Q58 Mr Bacon: I was asking a question
about stay-at-home mums.
Ms Strathie: As opposed to lone
parents?
Q59 Mr Bacon: I was not talking about
lone parents. I was talking about housewives and I do not know
what the proportion is of househusbands, those people who are
presumably included in the economically inactive statistic because
they are not working, they are not looking for work but also who
are not choosing to. How do you get them out of the system when
you are trying to target who is a candidate for a work-focused
interview?
Ms Strathie: Candidates identified
for work-focused interviews in this context are those claiming
income support, so some of the people you are talking about may
be partners, which we have talked about earlier, but these are
essentially lone parents in receipt of income support.
3 Ev 15 Back
4
See map on p 8 of the Report. Back
5
Ev 17 Back
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