Q
151Meg
Munn (Sheffield, Heeley) (Lab/Co-op): I want to follow up
a little on that. The Minister helpfully confirmed that the way in
which Professor Gregg described the sanctions regime operating on
Tuesday is how he envisages it will work. I want to mention the
particular issue of people with a learning disability because obviously
this process provides an opportunity for many such people who have
never worked to do so. However, clearly, when we start talking about
sanctions, people become concerned about what that might mean. When
considering personal advisers’ understanding of whether somebody
has a learning difficulty, the situation is perhaps analogous to that
of drug users. Someone who has a relatively mild learning difficulty
might not have a great deal of support from services and they might
just not understand what is being asked of them. How are you going to
ensure that personal advisers have the training and support to find
that out, and that they make sure that people are getting chances,
rather than being sanctioned when they are not clear about what is
happening? Sharon
White: For many people with learning disabilities,
the route will be the employment and support allowance, with which I
hope a few people are familiar. The first person who they see will be a
specialised disability employment adviser. Those advisers are among the
most well-trained and experienced providers in Jobcentre Plus. However,
there is a whole programme behind that—particularly through
pathways to work, which has been our most successful employment
programme since 1997. At least in theory, there is the gateway into
Jobcentre Plus and the initial interview and discussion, but there
would then be a whole series of routes into specialist
support.
As you say,
for people with learning disabilities, there is a particularly complex
and wide spectrum of needs. The condition management
programme—another acronym—is one of the core elements of
pathways and deals with the issue of confidence building. For many
people, the real barrier is not their disability—their medical
condition; it might be their skills, or the fact they have never worked
or have been out of work for a long time. The pathways programme, in
particular, ought to be a critical part of the process for
them.
There are
sanctions alongside that and the Bill’s powers will mean that
the individual will need to agree a job plan with their adviser. They
will need to agree specific activities that are part of that action
plan and potentially sanctionable. However, there needs to be
personalisation. Mr. Mason’s comment about
non-monetary sanctions touched on something that is potentially
powerful for not just single parents, but some disabled people, because
you are not talking about a financial sanction, but perhaps talking
about spending a week or a period of time doing an activity that might
be quite helpful for assisting such people to get back to work. The
poverty angle and the worry about people not necessarily understanding
the discussion with their adviser has led us to look at a wider range
of sanctions that are less punitive and potentially quite helpful for
people’s job destinations.
Q
152Meg
Munn: Where might advocacy fit into that? I am not
decrying the skills of personal advisers who have had training, but
there is a difference between a personal adviser and an advocate whose
role is to help the person with a learning disability to put across
their views and concerns. What will happen in parts of the country
where advocacy services are thin, or people have just not had access to
them? Jonathan
Shaw: I will develop the picture of how a number of
policy areas are developing. You are right to highlight people with
learning disabilities, because the majority of them want to find a job,
but that group of people is the furthest from the labour market. We
have not seen the progress that we would like on securing
employment. That is why we are transforming the way in which we contract
our supported employment scheme, which will be outcome-focused and use
some primary providers. Specialist sub-contractors will be involved,
and there will be measures to address a concern expressed by several
people by ensuring that the larger primary contractor is not able to
cherry-pick.
The point
about advocacy brings us back to the right to control and people being
able to make informed decisions with support. You are right to say the
situation is patchy across the country, and we are changing the way in
which we provide support and use our budgets to ensure that there is a
more strategic approach. We want to see the centres for independent
living developing more uniformly so that there is far more capacity in
the community and people can rely on that. That is one of the themes of
the reform and part of our wider programme. Kitty was talking about how
the situation with credit unions is patchy, and the powers will provide
an opportunity to build up capacity. I think that there is a consensus
that we cannot do everything from the top down. How do you develop what
is best? We all see examples of best practice, either in our
constituencies or up and down the country, and we very much want that
to be spread across the country, so we can use the procurement process
and the levers of Government and local government to ensure that the
level of service is far more complete across the
picture.
Q
153Meg
Munn: I want to ask a question about joint birth
registration. I think that all children have a fundamental right to
know who their birth parents are, provided that someone actually knows
who they are. Are the measures in the Bill robust enough to deliver
that? Kitty
Ussher: I think so, as far as is possible. As you
said, there will always be circumstances in which that will not be
possible, and there will also be rather extreme circumstances when that
will not be in the interests of the mother or the child for specific
safety reasons. However, we envisage that the number of such cases will
be very small, and a father could override that if he wanted
to. The
balance will shift away from the child’s right being intertwined
with the parents’ relationship and its complications, and
towards the rights of the father and the rights of the child. At
present, unmarried parents who wish to register as birth parents must
either attend a registry office together, which can be practically very
difficult, even if they are functioning as a normal couple, or there
must be a kind of court order whereby the father is able to make a
declaration of paternity. We will get rid of that bureaucratic hurdle
to the child and father having all the information on the birth
certificate. In
direct answer to your question, I do not think that the measure will
lead to 100 per cent. joint registration, but I hope that there will be
a very significant reduction in the number of children—45,000
every year—who have only one parent on their birth certificate.
I am happy to go into the
details.
Q
154Meg
Munn: I am as concerned as the next person about the
safety of children, but it is really important to divorce the issue of
the name of the father and who he is from the issue of protecting
children from a father with whom they should not have contact.
Dealing with the issues for a child who has not had contact with their
father, when that father is somebody who should not have contact with
children, is entirely separate from the right to have that person named
on the birth certificate. I am a little worried that some of the
dialogue and discussion on this seems to focus on saying, “You
can’t possibly have the name of the father on the certificate
because that will pose a risk to the child.” That should not be
the case. Adopted children can, at a certain stage, see their original
birth certificate and find out who their birth parents were, even
though, for whatever reason, they no longer live with them. Can you
respond to that and put my concerns to bed, as it
were? Kitty
Ussher: That is a really important point. Let us take
the hypothetical situation of a very dangerous father. If both parents
register the birth together, both names will be on the birth
certificate, even if the legal process then prevents the father from
seeing the child or the mother. If the father decides, even though he
is not in contact with the mother, that he wants to be on the birth
certificate, he can make a declaration to the registry so that when the
mother turns up, both names will have to go on the certificate, as long
as she confirms that he is the father and he is able to prove
it. This
provision may come into force only in the following situation. The
mother will go in to register and be told that she has a duty to
provide the name of the father, and she will do so. The registrar would
then normally contact the father independently to say, “You are
the alleged father. Is that true?” By law, he then has to
confirm or deny that. However, if professional opinion was that the
very act of the registrar contacting the father could lead
to violence against the mother or the child, the process would be
stopped, but even then the father could still proactively put his name
on the certificate. Obviously, however, if it is reasonably thought
that the father is of such character that the very act of contacting
him would lead to aggression towards the mother or the child, it is
right that the state should not do something that would probably have
such an unfortunate outcome. However, the father will still have the
right to go on the birth certificate, and can achieve that
proactively.
Q
155Mr.
Harper: I want to go back to the drugs treatment
provisions. I think that Mr. McNulty was present for most of
the questioning of DrugScope in our session on Tuesday, so he should
now be clear, even if he was not before, that we are certainly very
supportive of the direction of travel of this aspect of the Bill, as we
always have been. However, I have specific questions on the
detail. First,
what exactly do the Government mean by treatment? Is the objective of
the treatment to get someone off their drug habit, or is it to manage
that habit? From looking at the treatments already provided, it seems
that around half of people on drug treatment programmes receive a
replacement drug. That solves the criminal justice part of the problem,
but does not get them off an addictive substance. From the point of
view of work, we want to aim at fixing the addiction
problem. My
second question is about capacity. Will the Minister give us an idea of
the modelling that the Department has done? How many people does it
think will be picked up with the carrot-and-stick approach, and does
the
required capacity exist? Will he give us more detail about this in the
devolved parts of the country? I know from a visit to Wales that there
is a problem there because the Welsh Assembly Government and the Welsh
health service do not give the same priority to drug treatment services
as happens in England. There is a problem with getting drug treatment
in parts of Wales. We are running the programmes with a DWP remit that
covers the UK, and that remit needs to be sensitive to the availability
of treatment in all parts of the UK. Clearly, it would help if the
Welsh Assembly Government and the Scottish Government were absolutely
aligned with what was happening England, but if that is not the case,
the DWP needs to take into account what is deliverable in those parts
of the
UK. Mr.
McNulty: In terms of the first part—or the
first parts—of the questions, it is both. Clearly, the agreement
between the adviser and the problematic drug user is about getting them
to a stage of work-readiness or back into work. In the first instance,
one of the key barriers will be chemical dependency and addiction, so
this is about treating that—not simply managing it, but
eventually getting rid of it—so that people can get back into
work, on the starting premise, at least in this instance, that a crack
or heroin dependency is probably not a good feature of work-readiness.
I am not getting into whether people can maintain such a dependency and
work at the same time—I have no doubt some can—because I
simply do not know. For these individuals it is about management and
control in the first instance, but the end journey is to be off
problematic drug use and into work. Both elements will be part of the
treatment plan agreed between the individual and the adviser. That
means, as Sharon was saying, much more work with the national treatment
agency and others to get the proper medical assessment of individuals,
not instilling such expertise in personal advisers, who have an
entirely different role.
In
England, all those things come under one heading, whereas in Scotland
and Wales they are devolved. As I have already said, there has been
discussion with both Scotland and Wales. We think that it is right to
pilot throughout the UK, rather than just in England, where all those
levers are to hand. There are ongoing discussions with our colleagues.
It is not for me to say for whatever reason the availability of
treatment in Scotland and Wales is less developed, but clearly we do
not want to pilot in a situation where there are substantial waiting
lists for treatment. We need to work with colleagues over the next
couple of years to get to a stage at which a pilot in a Welsh or
Scottish context will have some meaning and the provision of treatment
will be there. We do not want to build an entire system and treatment
plan around an individual knowing that there is one key
barrier: treatment not being readily available. I hope that we will get
to the stage with Welsh and Scottish colleagues where there will be
pilots, but that might be some way down the line, when other strategies
to develop and enhance their treatment provision come to
fruition.
Q
156Mr.
Harper: What work has the Department done to model how
many people it foresees being covered? The question from Mr.
Rowen was about the fact that we clearly were not going to leap from
current treatment capacity to addressing everybody who has a drug
problem. What kind of modelling have you done on expectations, and how
do you see this rolling forward?
Mr.
McNulty: The key reason behind piloting is to look at
the sort of throughput you can achieve with such a model in particular
areas. Some of that needs more work. The latest information for
Scotland, for example, goes back to about 2003. We are working with
colleagues in Scotland—sometimes with civility and sometimes
with handbags through the press or whatever—and we will get
there. You need to know in each context—English regions,
Scotland and Wales—the potential pool for problematic crack and
heroin users before deciding where it would be most appropriate to
pilot, while also taking into account dimensions such as treatment
provision.
Q
157Mr.
Harper: Would be fair to say that the piloting is going to
be partly a process of data gathering to assess the success of the
measures in the Bill at effectively helping problem drug users on
out-of-work benefits to turn their lives
around? Mr.
McNulty: Partly, but only partly. If I pursue the
Scottish example, given that those data are relatively old, we want to
work with academics and the Scottish Government to establish what the
potential pool in Scotland is, and then pilot within that. It is not
necessarily that the pilot is part of the data gathering, but almost
the other way round. We need to establish the parameters more clearly,
as you imply, such as what is the extent of treatment provision now,
and what is the potential pool of crack and heroin users. As I am sure
you know, the Bill draws very wide powers. Essentially, it covers
everything classified under the Misuse of Drugs Act 1971.
On Tuesday,
Mr. Rowen, I think, referred to prescription addiction and
tranquilizers, benzos, and all that sort of thing. Those prescription
drugs are defined, but we have made it clear that we want to focus on
the problematic drugs in the first instance. Not only are they
problematic for the individual, but there is the slight difficulty that
they are illegal, so there is a nexus between crime and
worklessness.
In the very
broadest sense, we take a power around alcohol, too. Everyone will know
that alcohol dependency is a significant feature of worklessness in
some instances. Sometimes there can be a cocktail of all three:
prescription drugs, illegal drugs and alcohol. We draw the power
widely, but we have made it very clear—again, this relates to
Mr. Rowen’s point about numbers—that we will
limit it to crack and heroin users in the first instance.
Regarding
your point about the interface with colleagues in devolved
Administrations, anything will be overcome. After three and a half
years in the Home Office, I am a perennial
optimist.
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