Examination of Witnesses (Questions 60-79)
JOBCENTRE PLUS
30 April 2008
Q60 Mr Mitchell: Does that reduction
in staff and smaller premises leave you ill-equipped to face the
bringing in of disabled job search? Will that strain the service?
Mrs Strathie: Is the Employment
and Support Allowance roll out at the beginning of October and
dealing with more customers in that way at the heart of your question?
The Pathways programme is now completed and 40% of coverage in
the country is led by Jobcentre Plus and 60% by the private and
voluntary sector.
Q61 Mr Mitchell: You can cope?
Mrs Strathie: Yes.
Q62 Mr Mitchell: In these straitened
circumstances—smaller premises and staff—can you also
cope with any substantial upturn in unemployment?
Mrs Strathie: I believe that we
are better equipped because we do not rely on one single channel,
that is, the delivery of service to a customer who comes into
a local social security office or Jobcentre Plus. So much of our
business can be done through the self-serve channel and via the
telephone now and the work-focused interviews are done through
a range of private and voluntary sector bodies as well as Jobcentre
Plus. We always look at expansion capacity in any of these programmes.
Mr Davies: It is 20%.
Q63 Mr Mitchell: You have now had
the good years and it may be that unemployment will increase.
Why when you are reducing staff and office space do you have to
pay Trillium, Billion or Million—whatever they are called—in
compensation? How did you decide what compensation they were to
get? To put it another way, you had a provision in the contract
to dispose of 10% of the estate, so that is not part of your costs;
it is written in, paid in advance and is not part of the contract,
but you then have further reductions and you want to reduce by
another 20%. Why do you have to pay compensation in that situation,
and how do you assess it?
Mr Groombridge: The reason is
that the contractual relationship between the department and Land
Securities Trillium is such that, for a proportion of buildings
designated in a particular way, we have to pay a penalty. That
recognises that if we leave early there would be an ongoing rent
from which the company would gain. Therefore, we have to recognise
that effectively in a penalty payment. That does not apply to
all of the buildings. To go back to your earlier point, I stress
that the 800 or so network enables us to deliver the required
services to our customers but even though we have closed some
outlets we are also very much more active in different outlets
that we do not necessarily own, for example children centres and
a lot of outreach work that we now do. Therefore, we are in a
very different kind of business from before.
Q64 Mr Mitchell: The other fortuitous
development was that you decided to opt for centralised calling.
You had 79 places. That decision was taken in the course of implementation
of the programme. Obviously, that saves money. Can you quantify
how much that saved?
Mr Groombridge: I do not have
with me all the numbers for the savings from centralisation, but
originally we did processing at about 650 locations in different
parts of the country. It was almost a cottage industry, if I may
put it that way. We needed to make that a more efficient way of
delivering benefits in order to improve customer services and
so, as you rightly say, we reduced that to 79.
Q65 Mr Mitchell: Has it improved
customer services? Essentially, it shifts the costs onto the customer.
I am getting complaints from CAB and Howard Place, a homeless
centre in Grimsby, that they have to allow clients to use their
telephones to ring in, hang about and wait for a reply; otherwise,
if they do not own mobile phones—most of them do not—the
only alternative is some vandalised telephone box. You are shifting
costs onto the customer by centralised call centres like this.
Mrs Strathie: It is important
to point out that for our main claims to benefit we have an 0800
free phone number. We did not have that when we started; it was
something that we changed. Therefore, anybody calling from a landline
calls free. Additionally, if somebody rings from a mobile phone
and it is something we cannot tackle because of the different
networks and pricing we will immediately call back that customer.
We have the facility to do that. People do go to Citizens Advice
Bureaux and other places and sometimes receive decisions around
main benefits there, but the vast majority of customers can make
claims to benefit on the free phone number.
Q66 Mr Mitchell: I still get complaints
that they do not receive a response and it takes time to get through.
Again, that is wasting the customer's time.
Mrs Strathie: The world will never
be perfect on any given day. On any given day we are dealing with
very large volumes. I can tell you that our contact centre operation,
which is now a virtual one—you call a single number and
calls can be routed around—has been accredited by the Contact
Centre Association. It is the first entire government network
to be accredited to that standard. It is quite a long time since
we had complaints about people not being able to get through on
the telephone and we did not recognise that some customers needed
to be handled in different ways and through different channels.
If you are still getting complaints in specific areas I will be
very pleased to look at them.
Q67 Mr Mitchell: Despite improvements
in the service which I do not deny—they are visible certainly
in Grimsby—the level of customer satisfaction has hardly
increased. It has gone up by 6% but it is lower than it was under
the old social security system. People say they are getting a
better service on social security benefit issues than they are
in job search. Why has there been no substantial increase in satisfaction
given all this improvement?
Mr Groombridge: I am surprised
that you are not seeing higher levels of satisfaction. The levels
of satisfaction being expressed to us are in the high 80s. I accept
that in about 2005 there was a period when we were not responding
as well as we should have been in our contact centres, and we
have also learned a lot from that. Colloquially, as a management
team we look back on it as our summer of discontent because we
recognise that we did not handle it very effectively, but since
then the rate of answering calls has been well into the 90% range.
Q68 Mr Mitchell: The average is 86%
and it was 88% under the social security system.
Mr Groombridge: I am talking about
response rates. Further, our clearance times in the benefits processing
area went through a difficult period but they have also improved
significantly, so the overall story is one of improving customer
satisfaction.
Mrs Strathie: The most recent
research shows that 21% of our customers thought the service had
improved, which is worth knowing. It is also quite important to
remember that we have customers in active regimes as well as those
who just rely on benefit. The lower satisfaction levels tend to
emerge among jobseeker's allowance customers where there is considerable
responsibility on individuals rather than those in active benefits.
Q69 Geraldine Smith: I begin by congratulating
you. Like Mr Bacon, I put quite a lot of it down to your experience
because it helps if you know and understand an organisation. One
or two weaknesses have been shown in the Report. Looking at paragraph
4.18 on page 29, people seem to be relatively happy that you have
helped them understand the benefits but they do not feel that
it has made much difference to how helpful, confident or motivated
they are to find a job. What do you think can be done to improve
that?
Mrs Strathie: My initial response
is that it depends on whether they are motivated initially. Many
of the customers we help through our personal adviser service
are those who do not believe they would ever work or work again
and part of the service is to build a rapport with the customer
and understand the barriers to work. Many of the barriers are
confidence-based; some are skills-based, and there are lots of
other factors like debt, drug and alcohol problems, criminal records
and a whole range of barriers to work. It is the job of the personal
adviser to get the customer to a point where there are goals and
aspirations towards work and then to get that individual job ready.
Many customers come to us because they are motivated and are looking
for their next job because they have become unemployed.
Q70 Geraldine Smith: You appear to
have had more success with lone parents but there still seems
to be an issue around carers; they seem to be the group with which
you have the least success. Do you think that is due to their
circumstances? What else can Jobcentre Plus be doing to assist
them?
Mrs Strathie: I go back to the
work-focused interview regime. We have customers who come to us
voluntarily and those who come for welfare benefit and work support.
We also have those who are not yet required to participate in
any active work regime. For example, lone parents have moved from
no requirement to engage in a work-focused process to a voluntary
programme and then incrementally, depending on the age of the
youngest child, they are moved into mandatory work-focused interviews,
though not mandatory work. Carers are not required in that way
as a group to participate in any specific regime. Generally speaking,
unless a carer comes to us looking for that support there is no
requirement.
Q71 Geraldine Smith: When you were
making the changes it must have been very difficult because you
were changing culture and joining the Benefits Agency with Jobcentres.
I know that staff at the time raised some concern. One of the
problems was that old-style benefit offices were pretty well reinforced
to stop abusive customers having a go. Because of the open plan
and new environment have there been any problems, or has that
helped people? Do people get less angry and aggravated?
Mrs Strathie: We put a huge amount
of effort into staff programmes as we rolled it out. We had a
staff programme called New Beginnings which was the start of the
cultural change. Although this was a massive construction programme
it was also a matter of keeping the day job going and preparing
for a step change in customer service and all of our ambitions
for the customer. We also had a programme called Pulling Together
where relatively small amounts of money were given to people locally
so they could themselves work out how best to deliver in that
environment. Open plan working was a big issue in terms of health
and safety and was really dependent on our staff having advanced
customer handling skills to be able to operate in that way. We
now have more incidents recorded because we put a huge effort
into asking our people to record every incident that takes place.
The majority of them are verbal incidents rather than serious
ones. In the main the offices have an incredibly calm environment.
We also have other security measures including customer care officers
in most of our Jobcentres.
Q72 Geraldine Smith: But there has
been a rise in the number of incidents involving injury to staff?
Mrs Strathie: The majority of
incidents do not involve staff. If you are talking about serious
incidents they are often customer against customer rather than
our people. Very often it involves people who know each other
and know the regime of attendance at one of our Jobcentres. That
is one of the points of interest. Bearing in mind that people
were behind counters and screens in about two-thirds of the organisation,
in the past we never had the recording and reporting we now have.
All serious incidents are now reported directly to me.
Q73 Geraldine Smith: Would it be
possible to let the Committee have details of the incidents? [4]
Mrs Strathie: We can give you
the figure from 2003 onwards.
Q74 Geraldine Smith: Are you confident
that some of the problems with the telephone have been resolved?
This was touched on earlier. That seems to be an area where we
get most complaints and people have difficulties. It is not just
Jobcentre Plus; it seems to be any telephone system. Nowadays,
people spend a long time queuing. Is it not just a case of insufficient
resources or staff being put into it?
Mrs Strathie: I do not believe
it is a staffing issue. Running telephone-based services and managing
a network in that way requires a completely different skill set,
career path and development for the individuals who deliver the
service. That is why we have moved from tactical contact centres
in the original pathfinder days and built up a virtual network.
Now in Sheffield my network manager manages all those telephone
calls for first contact for claims to main benefits right across
GB and the next available agent takes the call. When we started
these contact centres one was simply trying to match whatever
was the peak volume in the town where the Jobcentre was located.
That has been one of the big improvements. What we have built
in Jobcentre Plus now in contact centre delivery we shall roll
out right across the department in our telephone-based operations.
I cannot say we will never have a day when there is more demand
at any particular time, but we have worked really hard to change
the work patterns of our staff to match the business volumes.
Q75 Geraldine Smith: With the change
in culture you have gone into children centres. I know this has
happened in my own area and it has been very successful. What
else do you do where you are out in the community?
Mrs Strathie: We have a mix of
what I would describe as inreach and outreach. In some locations
we have other partners and providers who come in and deliver in
our Jobcentres. Equally, we deliver in partnership. For example,
the city employment strategy partnerships we are developing provide
a range of funding by Jobcentre Plus and local authorities with
a number of partners to try to deliver right across. That is a
mix of services provided where people live, within our Jobcentres
and in other job brokerages in partnership.
Q76 Geraldine Smith: Referring to
paragraph 4.22 on page 29, one sees: "Jobcentre Plus may
be well placed to facilitate the delivery of other government
organisations and agencies. . ." Do you have any plans to
do so, and what government services do you have in mind?
Mrs Strathie: I speak here as
the chief executive of Jobcentre Plus. I have huge ambition for
this asset within the government network which is of high standard.
We are already piloting In and Out of Work.
Q77 Geraldine Smith: What about working
families' tax credits?
Mrs Strathie: That is not within
my gift, but what I can say is that we are working very closely
with HMRC on a whole range of activities. For example, we already
provide weekday contacts central services for HMRC. We have identified
about 19 sites where HMRC will deliver in Jobcentres. We have
ambition to roll out with local authorities and HMRC the entire
In and Out of Work process, but at the moment customers are still
required to go to their local authorities for housing benefit
and to HMRC for working families' tax credits and child tax credit.
We are very successfully piloting that in six locations at the
moment and we are going through the evaluation process. That is
delivering benefits much, much faster and is another step change
in customer service. Now we have built the platform we want to
give the best possible service we can over a period of time.
Geraldine Smith: That sounds extremely
good. Congratulations!
Q78 Phil Wilson: I visited the Jobcentre
Plus office in Newton Aycliffe in my constituency and thought
it was excellent; it was a hundred times better than my experience
a good number of years ago when I was a customer of the local
Jobcentre. I am pleased to see that things have changed over the
years. One matter that impressed me was the touch screen terminals.
How accessible and productive are they in finding jobs for people
who use them? Is it one of the main avenues that you provide in
Jobcentre Plus offices?
Mrs Strathie: My current Minister
of State recently described this as the best example of technology
in modernising public service, and has been for some time. Our
customers really like them. I have been in Edinburgh and watched
customers going into the Jobcentre. They try to pass each other
to get to their favourite job point. That is how popular they
are. Once customers know that they can choose they tend to go
for self-service. Incrementally, more and more people will use
that from home. It tends to be an introduction to it. But we can
draw management information from any of the job points, of which
we have almost 9,000, not all in Jobcentres but some in flexible
delivery, and we are able constantly to review their usage.
Q79 Phil Wilson: In paragraph 4.6
of the Report it says that "Jobcentre Plus was rated most
highly on `friendliness and politeness of staff' . . .and least
well on `staff knowledge' and `finding out about benefits.'"
What kind of training do you have to keep staff up to speed with
changes in benefits and improving their knowledge?
Mrs Strathie: We have a mix of
learning depending on what we are training people for from very
basic modules. For example, if you were one of 9,000 personal
advisers you would have training in basic advisory skills and
incrementally work your way up through different modules that
would help you to deal with different customer groups and people
suffering from multi-disadvantage in the labour market. We have
developed quite separate training for our contact centre operation
and an accredited routeway programme for our managers. If I look
at just this particular programme, we spent between £1,400
and £1,500 per head on investment in our people to deliver.
4 Ev 15 Back
| 
