Examination of Witnesses (Questions 20-39)
DEPARTMENT FOR
WORK AND
PENSIONS AND
JOBCENTRE PLUS
31 MARCH 2008
Q20 Keith Hill: You say it is a good
one but let me just address your attention to paragraph 3.15 on
this outcome system, where it says specifically in terms that
there were concerns when the system was introduced about how staff
would be incentivised and their performance measured because of
the remove between the way in which the assessment was made and
the immediate results they saw on the ground, as it were.
Sir Leigh Lewis: There are two
points. Firstly, even for Priority Group 4 which, as you say,
only has a standard point tariff, if you will, of two points,
you get extra points if the individual who is able to take work
is in either a disadvantaged group ward or in what is called a
disadvantaged area ward, and the first of those specifically relates
to, amongst other things, the average ethnic minority population
in the area. So even within the standard structure there are further
additional incentives for people living in disadvantaged groups
and disadvantaged areas. The second point is the broader issue
of the change from what used to be called the job entry target
to what is now called the job outcome target. The job entry target
was very immediate; you submitted a person that day to a job,
you sought to get in touch with the employer to find out if they
had got the job and, if they had, you scored a point or two points
or four points or whatever for the group of the individual. It
did have an immediacy; it did also, though, have some serious
downsides in that it encouraged very much attention to those people
who were perhaps furthest away from the labour market because
they were least likely to get the jobs, and it also caused there
to be a very large industry, I have to say, of people and resource
simply in following up submissions to employers, which was not
a hugely value-added part of the Jobcentre Plus business. The
job outcome target.
Chairman: You are so well briefed that
you go on too long, and it is not fair on my colleague. Let him
have a chance, now, to ask his question.
Q21 Keith Hill: I would just like
to hear, in a nutshell, as it were, about the job outcomes system.
Sir Leigh Lewis: The benefit of
the job outcomes system is it incentivises the work we do with
people who are furthest away from the labour market.
Q22 Mr Bacon: Sir Leigh, may I start
by asking about the language courses which are referred to on
page 29? The right hand column refers to the need of many ethnic
minority customers to learn English, and to the need for English
for speakers for other languages, ESOL. Under the third bullet
point it says: "Training providers are of variable quality
. . . personal advisers told us it can take a considerable time
for quality issues they raise to be addressed". Slightly
above it says that the quality of some courses is good and in
high demand but the quality of others is sometimes very poor.
"For example some customers finish courses with the same
level of language skills as they started with". That is very
worrying. I once worked as a volunteer teaching English as a foreign
language, and I found that the tuition was not frequent enough
to result in anything other than what is described there, that
the students at the end would have the same level they started
with. These are presumably more frequent courses than the volunteer
one that I was involved with, and yet in some cases customers
are finishing courses with the same level of language skills they
started with and contract management does not appear to be doing
anything about it.
Sir Leigh Lewis: I certainly do
not want to suggest that every course that is provided for us
is perfect because it is not, but we certainly do manage these
strongly. It is worth saying that all our New Deal primary contracts
are inspected by Ofsted.
Q23 Mr Bacon: How often?
Sir Leigh Lewis: I do not know
the frequency, so I would need to drop you a note on that.[1]
Q24 Mr Bacon: It strikes me that perhaps
some of them do not need that much inspection but some of them
probably should be inspected every 6-12 weeks. You should not
really be waiting a year after a personal adviser tells the Department
something is wrong and there are still serious problems to be
addressed. It is as if somebody is ticking a box saying that they
are on course, and that will do.
Sir Leigh Lewis: I do not think
it will do. Perhaps, again, I could hand over to Chris on this.
Mr Hayes: We have regular meetings
with our providers who provide a range of services, including
language services, and to each of those meetings we invite the
relevant manager of that district, so we have the ability to raise
issues within a few days or weeks of issues on the ground being
raised about quality.
Q25 Mr Bacon: According to this it
just does not always happen. You have the ability to do it within
a few weeks but still, twelve months later, nothing has happened.
That is what this is saying.
Sir Leigh Lewis: Clearly there
is a case there with which I am not familiar but the system is
we meet with our providers on a monthly basis and we discuss with
them any problems of quality or of managing volumes that have
occurred in the previous month. They are very responsive to looking
at their own quality within that cycle of meetings, and that is
outside and in addition to any regular inspections by Ofsted.
Q26 Mr Bacon: Sir Leigh, it says
here that contract management is undertaken by five operational
procurement units within the Department. How much does each of
those units spend on procurement from these providers?
Sir Leigh Lewis: We spend overall
many hundreds of millions of pounds on our employment programmes
right across the entire Department.
Q27 Mr Bacon: And those operational
procurement units cover the whole piece?
Sir Leigh Lewis: Yes. Our contracting
used to be done by Jobcentre Plus and we have moved it within
the last couple of years into the core of the Department. One
of the reasons for doing that was that it was always in some senses
going to be incidental to Jobcentre Plus' main business to run
a contracting and procurement function, whereas we believe we
have a genuinely professional procurement and contracting function
within the main Department which scores very highly on cross-government
capability review tests and so on, and we think we are now getting
more professional at contract management than we were.
Q28 Mr Bacon: That is good to hear.
I would like to move on so perhaps you can send us a note particularly
on this issue of language training, because I am of the view that
good training is priceless, so not only if it is not good is it
a waste of taxpayers' money but it is worse than useless because
it may create the impression that something is being done when
it is not, so can you send us a note on what is going on, how
many courses there are, how many students, and how much money
is spent on it right across the country.
Sir Leigh Lewis: I have some of
those facts here, but I can happily write to you.[2]
Q29 Mr Bacon: I wanted to ask Nahid Majid
a question. You are a British Bangladeshi, according to your CV,
and, if I may say so, obviously very successful so you must, to
some extent, be a role model for your community. It is quite clear
from figures 4, 5 and 6 on pages 14 and 15, and the clearest one
is perhaps the economically inactive by gender, figure 6, where
the light grey line, that is economically inactive women, is highest
by far for Pakistani and Bangladeshi. Is that mostly due to age?
Is it older women from a traditional background who came to this
country in adulthood, and that is why there is a skew there?
Ms Majid: It is probably referring
to first generations of people, yes, and some of the work we have
been doing has been to look at that figure and looking at the
perceptions and misconceptions in terms of why Bangladeshi or
Pakistani women may not be entering into the labour market. We
have done an interesting piece of work with MORI and the EOC working
with local employers, which Caroline Flint, our previous Minister
of State, hosted, which was looking at the misconceptions between
employers and Pakistani and Bangladeshi women about why they did
or did not want to work, and there are a lot of misconceptions.
Q30 Mr Bacon: If you were to break
down this chart by age into, say, whatever the standard age classifications
are, 18-24, 24-30, whatever, would it reveal a very different
picture? For British Bangladeshi women under 30 what would the
rate be, for example?
Ms Majid: I would think the rate
would be much higher in terms of employment definitely.
Q31 Mr Bacon: Do you have any figures
you can send us across the piece, broken down by age? That would
be interesting. The age data is something you have, is it?
Sir Leigh Lewis: The honest truth
is I do not know if we have it so we will look and, if we have,
we will gladly send it to you.[3]
Q32 Mr Bacon: Sir Leigh, it says in your
CV that you are an active member of the Jewish community, and
I think I am right in saying there are only 270,000 Jewish people
in the UK, it is a very small community, and in the chart on page
17 if there were a line there for a Jewish community it would
be quite near the bottom, between Bangladeshi and Chinese, except
it is not there because I do not think anyone thinks the Jewish
community is discriminated against in a systematic way and that
recruitment is phenomenally successful. What do you attribute
that to? Because it is not simply the case that the Jewish community
has been here a long time. As ethnic minority campaigners will
tell you, there have been Black people in Liverpool for 400 years,
Indian people from the south continent here for 200 years, and
many Jewish people who have only been here for 50-70 years, in
many cases people who fled continental Europe in the 1930s. What
is the secret of the Jewish communities' success?
Sir Leigh Lewis: I am rather hard
pressed to answer that because although I am Jewish, and proud
to be, just as I am very proud to be British, I have never studied,
if you will, my own community in the level of detail perhaps that
would be required to answer your question. At the risk of generalising.
Q33 Mr Bacon: I do not mind generalising.
I am after a generalisation.
Sir Leigh Lewis: At the risk of
generalising the Jewish community has always had a characteristic
of placing a considerable value within the family on learning
and on advancement. My own grandparents came into this country
as refugees at the turn of the 20th century and even with communities
which came in and were at that time impoverished and living a
difficult existence, there was always a sense of seeking to promote
the benefits, of learning and of skills and of advancement within
a kind of a family structure which gave recognition to those elements,
and that may be part of the reason.
Q34 Mr Bacon: What data exists in
the senior Civil Service about the ethnic minority composition
of the senior Civil Service? Can you give us details about that?
Sir Leigh Lewis: We do know quite
a bit about that.
Q35 Mr Bacon: Because one of the
other noticeable things is that over the years since I have been
on this Committee, since 2001, we have had many witnesses from
an Asian background—and I mean countless witnesses, I would
not be able to count them—but witnesses from an Afro-Caribbean
background I could probably count on the fingers of one, perhaps
two, hands.
Sir Leigh Lewis: If I just give
you the figures I have in front of me, if you take Whitehall as
a whole, last October just under 9% of all civil servants and
3.5% of the senior Civil Service were from ethnic minorities.
Q36 Mr Bacon: It is the senior Civil
Service I am interested in, the top 3,000.
Sir Leigh Lewis: 3.4% of the senior
Civil Service were from ethnic minorities. In our own Department
it is a little higher than that, just over 4%, and that is slowly
inching its way up.
Q37 Mr Bacon: Do you have a breakdown
in the same format as this Report of those 3.4%?
Sir Leigh Lewis: Again, because
these are Cabinet Office statistics, I would need to check and
see if I can provide them for you. [4]
Q38 Mr Bacon: That would be helpful.
I am just wondering, and this may be a question for the NAO, whether
it would be possible to get similar figures, for example, for
the number of directors of FTSE 250 companies which would be roughly
a similar size of cohort as the senior Civil Service. Is that
possible?[5]
Mr Burr: I do not know whether
those figures exist, but we could check.
Mr Bacon: That would be very helpful.
Q39 Mr Touhig: Sir Leigh, the pilot
schemes begun by your Department in 2002 appear to have met with
some success. We see in figure 15 on page 24 the figure for Ethnic
Minority Outreach, over 13,000 job entries, and for the Ethnic
Minority Flexible Fund the "Planning assumption" was
500 jobs and two and a half thousand job entries were achieved.
You described these to the Chairman as small scale, as pilot schemes,
and you said you spent £40 million on them, but you also
told the Chairman you never intended to roll them out, so what
was the point?
Sir Leigh Lewis: What I was seeking
to say was that we did not start off with an absolute commitment
that they were going to roll out, and in small scale everything
is relative. The Working Neighbourhoods Fund is going to spend
£1.5 billion over three years targeted on 60 or so local
authorities at most disadvantage. What we were trying to do in
that era, because we were recognising that the employment gap
for people from ethnic minorities remained persistently large,
even though we were having some success, was to see whether, by
targeting specifically ethnic minority people, we could do something
in a sense which would make a step-change improvement in their
position. It is fair to say that nothing we did persuaded us that
we could through that route alone, and that is why increasingly,
from early 2006 onwards, we have moved towards focusing a strategic
way on those areas of the country, particularly our cities but
not absolutely exclusively our cities, where there is the highest
concentration of both workless people overall and workless people
from ethnic minority communities.
1 Note by witness: The current Ofsted inspection
cycle is 4 years. In essence, this means that every New Deal Prime
Contract in England will be inspected once in that 4 years. If
a provider has several New Deal Prime Contracts in different geographical
areas, each contract will get a separate inspection spread out
over the 4 year cycle. Back
2
Ev 13¸14 Back
3
Ev 14 Back
4
Ev 14¸15 Back
5
Ev 15 Back
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