Examination of Witnesses (Questions 60-79)
DEPARTMENT FOR
WORK AND
PENSIONS AND
JOBCENTRE PLUS
31 MARCH 2008
Q60 Phil Wilson: The first paragraph
on page 30 is about employer satisfaction. It says it has improved
over the years, but it is still only 45%, on the way to 50%, that
are most satisfied with the quality of candidates provided, although
this was an improvement on the previous year. What are we doing
to get that figure down? Why is it at that level?
Sir Leigh Lewis: I will say a
word or two just on some of the numbers, and then perhaps ask
Chris Hayes, who is closer to Jobcentre Plus's employer customers
day by day. It is worth saying that the last survey we did of
employers that used Jobcentre Plus services in 2006/2007 found
that three-quarters were satisfied with the overall levels of
service. I have a lot of detail here that I will not bore you
with. On almost every specific indicator within the survey the
level of employer satisfaction with Jobcentre Plus had increased
compared with the previous survey, which was done in 2004. We
certainly seem to be seeing Jobcentre Plus's standing with employers
improving.
Mr Hayes: We do have a specific
target within Jobcentre Plus to measure employer satisfaction
with particularly the candidates we send to them, and that is
done by independent survey. We get the results on a monthly basis.
We are very aware and very responsive to the results that we get
from those surveys. Those show on average that we are achieving
about 73.5% of satisfaction from employers that we survey on that
basis in terms of the candidates we provide for them. We are now
trying to move to a different relationship with employers through
the local employment partnership initiative, and that is where
we are asking employers to work with us, particularly with our
priority groups, to have a much more longer-term strategic understanding
with us. The simple deal there is that we will try and understand
their training needs over a longer term; and we will then get
from them a commitment to look seriously at people from our priority
groups in considering recruitment into the vacancies they have.
In that way, we are getting a much better relationship with employers;
and they understand that in some cases some of our priority group
customers are a bit further away from the labour market, and we
might both need to do a little bit more to help them into employment,
and into sustainable employment.
Q61 Phil Wilson: There is another
survey that I want to ask a couple of questions on, which is on
pages 34-35, the survey that you have done on satisfaction amongst
people from ethnic minorities. There are some issues that have
been raised which I found interesting. One of the main concerns
amongst ethnic minorities claiming incapacity benefit and income
support relates to staff attitudes, which is the most common cause
of potential complaint across the ethnic groups. Can you extrapolate
from that or do anything to change it?
Sir Leigh Lewis: Let me say something.
If the Committee would find it helpful, we have a little bit of
recent data that was not available when the Report was put to
bed, because we have had now the 2007 Jobcentre Plus customer
satisfaction survey, which we published earlier this month. Overall,
in that survey ethnicity seems to play a relatively minor role
in the extent to which people are or are not satisfied with Jobcentre
Plus services; so it does not vary very much by ethnicity. There
is some good news—a lot of good news actually. The report
said that the overwhelming majority of Jobcentre Plus customers,
80%, said they were either satisfied or very satisfied with the
service. One in five felt that the quality of service had improved
over the previous 12 months; and only 5% felt it had declined.
This is worth saying, I think: customers from non-white groups
were amongst those most likely to have perceived an improvement
in the service. So 80% felt they were satisfied or very satisfied,
which still leaves 20% who were not. That is not sufficiently
good; but these are quite encouraging results that we have been
getting.
Q62 Phil Wilson: This might also
be an update, but paragraph 3.23, the last sentence, reads: "Although
overall more ethnic minorities than whites felt service had improved
over the past year, more Mixed and Black Caribbeans felt the service
had got worse." Why would they have a different view to the
other ethnic minorities?
Sir Leigh Lewis: That is hard
to say. One thing which goes into these technical difficulties—I
have explored some of this in preparing for this hearing at great
length and the more you explore in some senses the less you are
clear that you really understand it. What we get down to here
is some very small sample sizes, even with a big survey, when
you are trying to get down to communities within communities,
if you will; you end up with some quite small sample sizes. So
while there are some differences between different parts of the
ethnic minority group overall, I do not think we should put too
much weight on relatively small differences amongst communities.
Q63 Phil Wilson: The last sentence
of paragraph 2.35 states: "Focus group participants were
unaware of the range of Jobcentre Plus programmes available to
help them into work and thought there should be more advertising
and provision of services out in their communities." How
are you getting round that, to advertise?
Sir Leigh Lewis: Again, Chris
might want to say something at a local level. At a national level,
we are trying to promote very hard the programmes that are there.
It goes back to our outreach question; it is not just through
ourselves but through a whole range of our partners with whom
we work, because quite often they can be better advocates for
some of these programmes than can we.
Mr Hayes: Each district manager
who would manage a fair proportion of a geographical area has
very specific partnership plans, and, in that, very specific guidance
about how to ensure that communities are aware of services and
how they are accessing services. A good example is the children's
centre we went to in Stockwell where our advisers are on site,
talking to parents as they come in; and also we have got various
literature on site that parents who maybe do not see the advisers
can pick up, with contact numbers. We are increasingly trying
to get out into community centres and children's centres, and
also we are trying to operate some of our services for lone parents
in particular from employer premises so that we can bring lone
parents into employer premises so that they can understand what
the workplace is like. Those messages can go out to their peer
group, and they can influence their peer group to access our mainstream
services.
Q64 Phil Wilson: Moving to the same
kind of area about how people from ethnic minorities, when they
go into Jobcentre Plus, are approached and how they interface
with the staff that are there, paragraphs 3.19 and 3.20 are about
how you disseminate good practice. Paragraph 3.19 mentions conferences
et cetera, which you no longer do; but now you try and disseminate
information on best practice through the Internet, which all seems
great. Then we read in paragraph 3.20: "At local level we
found that few staff in Jobcentre Plus offices accessed examples
of good practice." So the information is there and in theory
it sounds great, but in practice it does not seem to be happening.
How do you square that circle?
Mr Hayes: We considered that comment
and in any event we were refreshing the material we had on the
internal intranet site for our people to make sure that there
is a range of information available to them; and that it contains
all that they need to be aware of services, both that Jobcentre
Plus provides but also as importantly other organisations provide
in that area. We also have a training programme whereby each new
advisor within the first three months will undertake at least
three modules, which talk to them about diversity, discrimination
and cultural awareness. Once the adviser has gone through that
programme we then obviously regularly measure the quality of engagement
that they have with customers through various mechanisms. One
is that their manager will sit with them through interviews and
pick up any training needs—not just training technically
but also in terms of general awareness. Also every Wednesday our
offices open a little later and we use this time to feed in information
there, and we often invite organisations from the community to
these sessions to keep our awareness up to date. We are very conscious
of the fact that we need to constantly reinforce these messages
and keep them up to date. In that particular area we are about
to launch a new intranet site, which will hopefully help our people
to have that up-to-date information.
Q65 Phil Wilson: In paragraph 3.16,
on personal advisers; it basically says they do not have the time
anyway; they are too busy to sit down and access the information.
In some areas it does not effectively cover the diverse cultures
of the customers that they are dealing with on a regular basis.
Again, it is the theory and the practice; we still have the same
issue whereby once you have revamped the products suite it is
getting the staff to sit down and do this in a practical sense,
rather than listening to all the theory.
Sir Leigh Lewis: Can I just say
a word on this? As ever, and I have used this phrase before this
Committee before, there is always a bottle half full and a bottle
half empty. The half-full bottle is that we have 9,000 Jobcentre
Plus advisers; and the report in a number of places said how impressed
it was with what they do and what they succeed in doing. I have
no doubt at all that there are thousands upon thousands upon thousands
of people who are in work and employment today who would not have
been there without the support of some incredibly dedicated personal
advisers in my Department. But, as always, there could be more.
You could give them more time for everything. There is always
a trade-off in the end between the resource that you can provide
and the need that ultimately they could deal with. The fact that
we have 9,000 advisers in Jobcentre Plus who, by common consent—and
indeed the National Audit Office did a report only recently on
advisers themselves—every report says that these are impressive
people with real commitment, who change people's lives for the
better every working day—I think this bottle is a long way
more than half-full.
Q66 Mr Williams: The Chairman referred
earlier to the fact that you piloted a substantial number of initiatives
which never really went anywhere. You completed pilots, but, as
he said, they were not rolled out. The NAO suggests that they
got off to a slow start, were too short, and failed to reach their
full potential. Is that not a diagnosis of waste?
Sir Leigh Lewis: I do think that
in some cases, over a long time in Government, we have tended
to run too many small initiatives. Any small initiative takes
time to get off the ground and gather momentum, and it takes time
to deliver results. That takes us back to the conversation that
I was having with your colleague Mr Touhig; I think that actually
we are on a more sustainable long-term strategic direction now,
which is focusing on those areas where worklessness is at its
highest.
Q67 Mr Williams: C&AG, do you
think that they were premature in killing some of these schemes
off?
Mr Burr: I think that there certainly
might have been more mileage in some of them, yes.
Q68 Mr Williams: But you choose to
disagree. Have you had discussions between yourselves about the
different value judgments?
Sir Leigh Lewis: It is fair to
say we have. There is only one judgment of any seriousness in
this report which is disagreed, in a report that is otherwise
wholly agreed, which would normally be the case, which is that
we did not accept the view of the National Audit Office that there
had been a lack of continuity in our programmes. We did accept
that there were some transitional difficulties in one particular
year. That was the one area of disagreement between us.
Q69 Mr Williams: Again, with Mr Touhig
you explained the absence of a public service agreement target,
with some reference to general policy about reducing public service
agreements or targets and so on, but you reduced the absence of
them in relation to ethnic minority employment. Are you absolutely
sure they would not be helpful, these targets?
Sir Leigh Lewis: I can give this
Committee an absolute assurance that there will be no diminution
of the effort that my Department is applying to supporting people
from ethnic minorities into work. Indeed, the Report does say—and
we were grateful to it—that there has been huge commitment
from my Department over a very long period of time, and much impressive
achievement. The target structure is different because, if you
like, the over-arching way in which the Government has designed
targets for the SR07 spending round is different; but the fact
of the matter is that within one of the only two PSA targets which
we lead on in Government, there is an absolutely clear indicator,
without which we cannot succeed in delivering that target, which
is a narrowing of the gap between the employment rate for people
of ethnic minorities and the overall rate. That is exactly where
we have been in SR04 and SR02 and there will be no diminution
of effort whatsoever.
Q70 Mr Williams: Was it your decision
or was it a decision imposed on you not to have a target?
Sir Leigh Lewis: The decision
to have a new structure for public service agreements was a collective
Government decision taken across Government.
Q71 Mr Williams: If it had not been
for that, would you have continued—
Sir Leigh Lewis: I am not sure
if it is pleading the Fifth Amendment, Chairman, at this point,
but I do not think I am going to set out hypothetically my own
views. I think the Government took a decision to have a smaller
number of public service agreements precisely because of a view
that actually having a very large number of PSA targets was probably
not helping in the real intention of joining up Government. That,
I think, is actually—for what it is worth, and I think it
was the right decision—is having benefits in causing departments,
including my own, to work together more closely. I just want to
come back again—because it is an important issue—there
will be no diminution of effort from my Department in this respect.
Q72 Mr Williams: I noticed the dubiety
at the start of your comments there. Without targets your practice
of devolving funding surely makes it much more difficult for you
to judge effectiveness!
Sir Leigh Lewis: I probably need
to say, so that it is there on the record, that we are not without
targets. The target is the same target; it simply sits under a
different structure, so I think it is just important to say that.
As Nahid Majid explained earlier, if you take our city strategy
areas almost without exception they have targets that they have
arrived at locally, which are for reducing the gap between ethnic
minority employment and other employment or increasing the employment
rate for people from ethnic minorities. There can actually be
a very good reason—will you bear with me for a half a minute—for
not imposing targets from the top. Remember, I said that I have
been at both ends of this. If you set a target from the top down,
you simply say: "Here is a target. I have decided it is a
good thing. Now you go and deliver it." You may get buy-in
or you may not. The great thing, I think, in terms of our city
strategies is that by giving that authority, giving that ability
to create targets for people locally within the framework of what
they believe to be important, we have much more chance that we
will have targets that people genuinely own and will be striving
to deliver.
Q73 Mr Williams: How do they devise
their targets and how do you know they are right?
Sir Leigh Lewis: Because each
of the city strategy pathfinders has a board, one of whose tasks
is, as part of the overall strategy, to decide within the overall
framework what they believe to be the targets that are right for
their area.
Ms Majid: Can I give you some
examples? The Birmingham pathfinder, which has an ethnic minority
population of 37%, has agreed a target reduction of 1.3% per year,
a reduction in terms of the unemployment rate. In another case,
for example, South Yorkshire has developed six local targets and
they aim to achieve a 60% employment rate of their ethnic minorities
by 2010 by narrowing the ethnic minority gap by 7.2%. If we did
impose a target, it would not be specific to individual localities
and the issues around those localities.
Q74 Mr Williams: On page 32 in banner
headline it states, "Personal advisers play a key role in
getting ethnic minority customers into employment". Yet those
very same advisers who spoke to the NAO said that they did not
consider they were given adequate training. Are they right or
are they wrong?
Sir Leigh Lewis: I am not going
to say that any member of my staff who says something to the NAO
is simply wrong. What I would stress is that we invest very, very
substantial amounts in training for our Jobcentre Plus advisers.
Chris Hayes has already set out specifically, but we have two
days for a new adviser and equal opportunities awareness training,
two days tackling race discrimination and valuing cultural diversity
training. I think we have a very good record in the DWP in investing
in the training of our staff. I dare say if every employer in
the country invested in training of their staff to the degree
we do, we would see some benefits in the wider economy. You can
always do more. You never get to the point where it is perfect
or it is absolutely enough. I am sure that at the level of individual
advisers there is still a feeling they would benefit from more,
but there is a very heavy investment in the training of advisers,
as in having advisers at all.
Q75 Mr Williams: The Department argues
that there is plenty of training material available for them,
but they come back and say they just do not have time to access
it. What are you going to do about that?
Sir Leigh Lewis: Chris Hayes has
already in a way tried to respond to that issue. Again, there
is no perfect issue here. We cannot rely solely in a large organisation—and
I was Chief Executive of Jobcentre Plus and the Employment Service
before it—on people accessing Internet guidance. As Chris
was describing, we do lots of other things, bringing community
organisations into our offices and giving the time for people
to have away from their desks to discuss, learn and concentrate
on those issues. In any large organisation today there is a slight
sort of romantic-looking back to an age where all training was
chalk and talk, all training was done away from the workplace,
in effect the classroom, et cetera. That world has moved on, and
I do not think there is a major organisation, public or private,
today which does not use the Internet or in our case the intranet
for part—by no means all—of the training of its people.
Q76 Mr Williams: It says that the
Jobcentre Plus disseminates good practice, but what is the point
of disseminating if people do not have time to absorb it and apply
it?
Sir Leigh Lewis: This is a fair
question. I do not want to pretend I have got an absolutely perfect
answer for you. One part of the task is to put good material,
to make it available; but the other is to encourage people to
use that material and to make it available. I would say, however,
that I spend a lot of my time out in my Department and a lot of
that time in Jobcentre Plus—I was in one of our offices
in Glasgow on Friday. What I see there is some brilliant advisers
and brilliant staff, who have an enormous amount of skill and
knowledge about the local communities in which they are operating.
Q77 Don Touhig: You gave us targets
for Birmingham and South Yorkshire. Can you give me the target
for Newport in Gwent?
Ms Majid: Newport Gwent is not
a strategy pathfinder.
Q78 Don Touhig: Am I right in thinking,
then, that you have thresholds, and if communities do not have
a population of 20% ethnic minority, say, they are not going to
get any targeted support?
Sir Leigh Lewis: The position
is that the city strategy pathfinders operate in 15 areas of the
country, and outside of those areas we do not have the same structure
of a separate pathfinder with a separate board, et cetera. But
in those areas, Jobcentre Plus will still have its targets, which
are national—
Q79 Don Touhig: Is there a threshold,
Sir Leigh? Does a region or a community or a city have to have
an ethnic minority population threshold before you put in those
kinds of resources? I am arguing all the time that you are not
being specific, and you say you are. Do you have a threshold?
Sir Leigh Lewis: There is no one
specific threshold that says that you become a city strategy pathfinder
with—
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