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8 July 2009 : Column 843W—continued
Local Employment Partnership Awards 2009
Mr. Harper: To ask the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions pursuant to the answer of 5 May 2009, Official Report, column 123W, on local employment partnerships, what the final cost was of the Local Employment Partnership Awards 2009; and how much (a) each of the 11 local award ceremonies and (b) the grand final cost. [285074]
Jim Knight: The Local Employment Partnerships (LEPs) Awards 2009 are an integral part of our strategy to support the delivery of LEPs across Great Britain. We want more employers to work through LEPs so that unemployed people have a better chance to get back to work.
The Awards have been established to highlight the major benefits that LEP participation has brought to employers and partners and to celebrate the success of individual employees who have found sustainable work through the programme.
An overall budget of £663,000 was allocated to support this work and we have delivered the events under budget due to cost savings negotiated with suppliers. Final figures for the cost of each event are listed in the following table:
| Cost breakdown for the 12 country/regional and national awards | |
| LEP awards | Event costs (£) |
New Deal Schemes
Mr. Harper: To ask the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions what her most recent estimate is of the number of (a) short-term job outcomes defined as 13 weeks of employment and (b) sustained job outcomes defined as 26 weeks employment likely to be achieved by flexible new deal providers for Phase 1 in (i) 2009-10 and (ii) 2010-11. [277222]
Jim Knight: The performance offers of each provider for the flexible new deal (FND) contracts are commercially sensitive. We have notified bidders of the results of the FND competition and we intend to award contracts in good time to begin delivery in October 2009.
Social Security Benefits
Dr. Kumar: To ask the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions what the average processing time for claims received for (a) pension credit, (b) jobseeker’s allowance and (c) winter fuel allowance in (i) the UK, (ii) the north-east, (iii) Teesside and (iv) Middlesbrough South and East Cleveland constituency was in the latest period for which figures are available. [282940]
Angela Eagle: Information is not available in the format requested.
Pension credit information is not available broken down geographically. Information on the national average actual clearance times (AACT) for pension credit for 2008-09 is in the following table.
| Pension credit clearance times: Great Britain, 2008-09 | |
| Working days/number | |
| Note: The AACT is calculated by dividing the total number of working days taken to clear cases by the total number of cases cleared. Source: Pension Service Legacy System. | |
Information for jobseeker’s allowance is not available by local authority district or parliamentary constituency. The available information for jobseeker’s allowance is in the following table.
| Jobseeker’s allowance average actual clearance times, June 2008 to May 2009 | |
| Working days | |
| Source: Management Information System Programme. | |
Information is not available for processing times for winter fuel payments as the process is largely automatic.
Winter fuel payments are made to eligible customers aged 60 or over, each year to provide help with fuel bills.
During 2008-09 DWP delivered automatic winter fuel payments to over 99.9 per cent. of eligible customers by the end of December, and as a result, over 12.5 million customers received their payment before Christmas 2008.
We paid over £2.7 billion in winter fuel payments to over 12.6 million customers.
Social Security Benefits: Medical Examinations
Mrs. Moon: To ask the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions if she will make an assessment of the merits of introducing mechanisms for the monitoring by independent assessors of doctors conducting medical assessment interviews for the work capability assessments of vulnerable claimants. [271106]
Jonathan Shaw: Robust mechanisms already exist to monitor the quality of the Work Capability Assessments. Monitoring is carried out by Atos Healthcare, the company which is contracted to provide medical services to the Department for Work and Pensions. The Department also carries out a range of quality checks independently.
Justice
Consultants: Ministry of Justice
Mr. Garnier: To ask the Secretary of State for Justice how much and what proportion of his Department’s expenditure on external consultants in 2008-09 was incurred on each project or programme. [281154]
Mr. Straw: The Ministry’s provisional expenditure on external consultants in 2008-09 is £53,600,000. This is disclosed in the Ministry of Justice departmental annual report 2008-09 on page 72 which can be found in the link:
This amount covers the Ministry of Justice HQ, HM Courts Service, Tribunals Service, and the National Offender Management Service. This figure is an early estimate and will be subject to change.
The Office of Government Commerce (OGC) collates data on consultancy expenditure as part of its Consultancy Value Programme which assists Departments in driving greater value from Government’s use of consultants.
The finalised figures for 2008-09 will be available on the OGC website (see link) in due course. A manual data collection exercise for this period is scheduled to begin in the summer of 2009 with the data expected at 31 October 2009.
The information requested for each project or programme is not held centrally and would involve a manual trawl of each unit at a disproportionate cost.
Crime: Justice
Mr. Garnier: To ask the Secretary of State for Justice how many and what proportion of offences committed in each of the last 12 years were classified as offences brought to justice within 18 months of the offence being committed. [283856]
Claire Ward: The number of recorded crimes and offences brought to justice (OBTJ) for the period year ending March 1999 to year ending December 2008 (latest available) are given in Table 1.
It is not possible to directly compare recorded crimes and offences brought to justice. Crimes and offences brought to justice are not measured in the same way. The Home Office Counting Rules for Recorded Crime provide a framework for the consistent recording of crimes by police forces based on reports from victims and witnesses, whereas offences brought to justice are a count of the convictions, cautions, penalty notices for disorder and cannabis warnings given to individuals for separate offences in law, or the number of separate
offences taken into consideration. As such, it is not possible for published statistics to directly link individual recorded crimes to the offences for which the offender is subsequently brought to justice.
In addition, there is an inevitable time lag between a crime being committed and the offence being brought to justice at court, so the level of recorded crime in a particular period is not directly comparable to the number of offences brought to justice in the same period. However, in the vast majority of cases offences will be brought to justice within 18 months of the crime being recorded.
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