Q
111John
Howell: There are culture change elements to your
weddedness to the black box approach. Do you think there is enough
acceptance of that being a black box approach, both amongst the DWP and
the market as a whole, so that it is a pure black box? It has always
struck me that you cannot have a half-black box in this. That position
is probably the most comfortable for officials.
Professor
Gregg: Yes. There is a desire for control and that
will come from politicians and from senior officials in Jobcentre Plus
or the DWP. It is hard for central Government to let go in that kind of
black box way, so maybe they need a bit of re-education as well. That
is the way to go. We have tried a few experiments with it and they have
generally been positive. My view is that when JC Plus is given a new
task with a new set of rules, it tends to do almost as well as an
outside provider. It has some inside knowledge and it knows the game,
whereas the other groups are probably going to innovate. They are going
to learn and push, and a rules-based system crushes innovation.
Although in the first instance they may be reasonably comparable, my
argument is that the productivity—the learning—is much
greater in a black box model than in a rules-based model. That is what
we need to try to
release.
Q
112John
Mason: Earlier, you were discussing monetary and
non-monetary interventions. That is interesting. I think a lot of
people are open to conditionality, but they are asking, if there are
financial sanctions and people are already on a fairly minimum income,
what happens to those people and how can they live if their minimum
income is taken
away? Professor
Gregg: They are a vulnerable
group.
Q
113John
Mason: So, are you saying that you would not use monetary
sanctions at all on a vulnerable group such as
that? Professor
Gregg: My view is that for the JSA job-ready people,
there should be monetary sanctions. For the rest—the progression
to work group, which is the harder-to-help group—I am suggesting
minor monetary sanctions as a short, sharp shock, a slap across the
wrist. However, those should not be escalated into—as happens
with the jobseeker’s allowance people—what might be
considered very severe sanctions. In relation to jobseeker’s,
you can get disallowal, disentitlement and severe monetary sanctions
going on—four, six or multiple weeks of sanctions. I
am
saying, I do not think that that is the best approach for this group;
can we look at doing it somewhat differently? By which I mean
non-monetary sanctions.
You have a
basic slap across the wrist—12 quid in the first
instance—and you make sure that the person knows about it.
However, when we are looking at real breakdown and the high-conflict
end of the business, we do not go into heavy financial sanctions for
the reason you are describing. We try to do it rather differently. To
put it slightly differently, as someone else was saying, you do it more
through hassle, bringing the person in and ensuring that they are there
pretty much every day doing something, rather than using monetary
penalties. That is for exactly the reasons you are
describing.
Q
114John
Mason: Okay. Even for the job-ready group, would there not
be a knock-on effect on children, for example, and child poverty
aims? Professor
Gregg: Yes, there are two points to make. For most
people with children, their own benefits make up a relatively small
proportion of the total income—housing benefit and tax credits
and so on are the biggest ones. We really should be talking to people
at the extreme end. What I tried to describe was a series of steps
ranging initially from warning through to something more
serious.
I am not
against the idea of non-monetary sanctions for the JSA population. That
is an eminently sensible idea, which we should try out. Because they
are job-ready, the range of things that you could ask them to do could
be much wider. In my head, I have the idea of community service where
you have to go and look after old people’s gardens or whatever.
Doing that for your dole money is, as far as I am concerned, a
punishment. I am open to that idea and I would like to see that
experimented with, but it is very novel so it needs to be done
carefully and we need to know the implications. As a direction of
travel, I would like to see us trying out non-monetary sanctions for
both populations and learning a few lessons about whether they are
effective in getting people to
engage.
The
Chairman: Are there any other colleagues who wish to put
any questions to Professor
Gregg?
Q
115Meg
Munn: As we have time, I shall follow up the issues in
relation to people with learning disabilities. For a long time I have
been concerned about the tendency to find things for people to do that
are not necessarily related to their capabilities or what they can do.
I have seen some good examples in my own city of people doing voluntary
work that could perhaps lead to paid employment. There is still a real
need for a change of mindset, so that we see people as having some
skills and capabilities, rather than just finding them something to do
with their days. I should be interested to hear your views on that.
Because there is such a lot of discussion about these issues, including
sanctions and the like, often people who have not been in work and have
not had any help to identify how they could do something, either in the
paid sector or the voluntary sector, end up being extremely frightened
of what might happen to them in this process. I should also like to
hear your thoughts on how that can be dealt
with.
Professor
Gregg: To be totally honest, this started for me when
thinking about adults with learning difficulties. I have a close
personal friend who was one of the early developers doing the early
work on the personal adviser advocacy role for adults with learning
disabilities. Rather than each profession having a columnar
relationship with the individual, you sit down with them and ask,
“What do you want? How can we negotiate it?” Often, they
want different things from those provided by the various agencies: they
want to learn to drive, to live independently and to start the process
of getting into work. They want diverse things. So you sit down with
them and try to work out, as an advocate, in a sense, how to negotiate
the package of support and so on, to try to get them where they want to
go. That is very much at the heart of what I am talking about here. I
see strong parallels between those models and bringing some of those
ideas into welfare to work services for those with such large barriers.
I regard those things as very much
meshed. Pushing
slightly further, into an area that we have not discussed, perhaps
because it is beyond the scope of the Bill, with hard-to-help people,
lots of agencies will be dealing with any individual. A homeless person
obviously has housing problems and is likely to have alcohol problems
too, and some will have mental health problems. There can also be
long-term disconnection from work and problems with basic skills. How
do we start to make this a journey that deals with all the problems of
the individual, rather than each agency working
independently? I
am trying to open up a starting point in the debate. On welfare to
work, let us talk a little bit more holistically about the
individual’s needs and capabilities. I would like to conclude by
saying that we are opening up how we can try to join that approach up
with the other objectives so that, in a particular case, we have the
retention, advancement and progression stuff coming after the first
welfare to work stuff. So the Department for Innovation, Universities
and Skills and DWP are trying to link up to say, “It’s
not just welfare to work. It’s welfare to work and then
we’ve got retention, advancement and progression on the table,
funded, potentially, from different sources, but maybe with the same
agency working through the
process.” I
am not sure that I have answered your question. I have probably rambled
off on to something completely different. But that area is next. That
is why I say that this is the forward-looking bit. The bit that we need
to crack next is how to get Government funding agencies to link this
progression across the person’s journey, rather than have
everybody dealing with a little bit of
it.
Meg
Munn: That does make
sense.
The
Chairman: Thank you very much indeed, Professor Gregg, for
the time that you have spent with the Committee this afternoon and for
your evidence. We are very
grateful. Ordered,
That further consideration be now adjourned.—(Helen
Jones.) 6.19
pm Adjourned
till Thursday 12 February at Nine
o’clock.
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