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Delegated Legislation Committee Debates



The Committee consisted of the following Members:

Chairman: John Cummings
Allen, Mr. Graham (Nottingham, North) (Lab)
Baron, Mr. John (Billericay) (Con)
Barrett, John (Edinburgh, West) (LD)
Beckett, Margaret (Derby, South) (Lab)
Blackman, Liz (Erewash) (Lab)
Crausby, Mr. David (Bolton, North-East) (Lab)
Gummer, Mr. John (Suffolk, Coastal) (Con)
Hodgson, Mrs. Sharon (Gateshead, East and Washington, West) (Lab)
Kelly, Ruth (Bolton, West) (Lab)
Kilfoyle, Mr. Peter (Liverpool, Walton) (Lab)
Knight, Jim (Minister for Employment and Welfare Reform)
Moffatt, Laura (Crawley) (Lab)
Selous, Andrew (South-West Bedfordshire) (Con)
Shepherd, Mr. Richard (Aldridge-Brownhills) (Con)
Stunell, Andrew (Hazel Grove) (LD)
Yeo, Mr. Tim (South Suffolk) (Con)
Ben Williams, Committee Clerk
† attended the Committee

Seventh Delegated Legislation Committee

Wednesday 27 January 2010

[John Cummings in the Chair]

Draft Jobseeker’s Allowance (Skills Training Conditionality Pilot) Regulations 2010
2.30 pm
The Minister for Employment and Welfare Reform (Jim Knight): I beg to move,
That the Committee has considered the draft Jobseeker’s Allowance (Skills Training Conditionality Pilot) Regulations 2010.
The Government seek powers to test, in 11 Jobcentre Plus districts in England, making skills training a condition of receiving benefits. We believe, and research has shown time and again, that having the right skills is the best way to get a job. The Government want people to work and to find jobs with opportunities to progress, and we want to support them to get the skills they need to get such jobs.
Under the current system, people are given a skills assessment early in their claim and can be referred voluntarily to a series of basic skills courses, such as literacy and numeracy or interview skills and job search techniques. More than 70 per cent. find work within six months, but at that point they should widen their job search, and we carry out a more comprehensive skills assessment focusing not only on basic skills, but on the local labour market, the customer’s interests and the courses available locally. Working with the customer, we make a judgment about their best possible route into work.
In the pilots, after someone has accepted that they have a skills need and has worked with their adviser to identify a suitable training course, they will be expected to attend that course. If they miss a session, money can be deducted from their benefits. The rationale behind the pilots is simple: the benefits system is not a something-for-nothing deal. It looks after the weak and vulnerable. There are no requirements on those who genuinely cannot work, but those who can have responsibilities.
The global recession led to an increase in unemployment all over the world. Lots of people are looking for work and doing their best to find a job. People are looking at their own skills and proactively finding courses to help them to learn the skills that they need to find work. The pilots will not make a difference to the vast majority of people who are motivated to find a job as quickly as possible. They will make a difference to the people furthest from the labour market—people who believe that training and even work are simply not for them. Whether that is down to lack of confidence or complete unwillingness to engage with the system, the possibility of losing some benefit is enough to get most to attend. Once there, they should learn as much about themselves as about the world of work while picking up skills that will be useful in work.
This is new territory for the Government. We know that skills training works, and we know that applying benefit sanctions can work. For example, 73 per cent. of people sanctioned are sanctioned only once. However, the question is whether we can use that knowledge to encourage people to improve their skills and subsequently find sustainable work, which I hope everybody in the Committee agrees is a good thing. That is the question the pilots hope to answer. I commend the regulations to the Committee.
2.33 pm
Andrew Selous (South-West Bedfordshire) (Con): Welcome to the Chair, Mr. Cummings. It is a pleasure to serve under you. I thank the officials in the Minister’s Department for their excellent explanatory notes. They are always much appreciated, particularly by the Opposition. We always learn a great deal from them, and they play an important part in helping us properly to scrutinise legislation before Parliament.
I do not intend to go on at excessive length, but I shall speak for slightly longer than did the Minister in introducing the regulations, as there are important issues involved and I want clarity from him on a number of points.
The Conservatives welcome the direction of policy in the regulations and the principle is absolutely right. As the Minister said, the welfare state is not a something-for-nothing concept; it involves a two-way responsibility. If the state is there, quite properly, to help people when they fall on tough times, there is an onus on the people being helped to do the right thing to help themselves. We have no problem with the concept—indeed, we welcome it.
I am somewhat disappointed, however, by the regulations. Frankly, they are not up to the task that is facing the country, considering the number of people out of work. They represent a top-down, unpersonalised approach. I do not understand, as this is essentially a pilot in a Department stuffed full of pilots, why there has not been an attempt to model different ways of proceeding. Would not that have provided a better evaluation at the end of the two years? To my mind, it would be better to have a number of providers trying out different concepts around the country. The evaluation would then show which ones worked better than others.
Jim Knight: It would help me if the hon. Gentleman gave a little more detail about those concepts. He talks about different providers, but what are the different concepts that he thinks we could usefully pilot?
Andrew Selous: I will come on to that as I develop my remarks.
People around the country and in my constituency are telling me that much of the training provided by Jobcentre Plus—the courses that JSA claimants are sent on—are one-size-fits-all courses. They are often not appropriate for the people being sent on them. I shall give three brief examples of that. I am worried that the regulations may not provide the specific help that individuals need.
I think of the young engineering graduate in my constituency who contacted me a couple of weeks ago. He is a highly motivated graduate who searched all day for jobs using the internet at home—he had access to his own computer. He wrote to me very discouraged because he was put in a room with 26 other people and only three computers. His job search was more difficult during that time and he did not learn anything.
If you will forgive me, Mr. Cummings, I shall briefly read one paragraph from an e-mail that I received from a constituent only two days ago—the e-mail is relevant to the regulations. It is from a 20-year-old lady who has been on JSA for the past six months and has spent the past three years in college. It reads:
“I was told by my adviser that I would have to attend a Gateway to Work programme in Luton town centre for 2 weeks. I was given no other option than this, I was told I had to attend this or I would be ‘sanctioned’. I did some research on this and found that most of what is taught on the G2W is things I am already familiar with, like writing a CV and accessing the internet. Apparently there are also team-building exercises like rock-climbing or ten-pin bowling, which seems somewhat farcical to someone who has been in college for the past 3 years.”
I think the Minister would agree that that is not appropriate for a highly motivated person who has been in college for three years.
We have before us regulations that proceed along similar lines. I am concerned that those courses will again not be entirely appropriate as they are not sufficiently directed at the people who will attend them. We may have highly motivated graduates in the same room as people with basic literacy skills—where is the differentiation? What reassurance can the Minister give me that people who are literate, numerate and motivated will be put on appropriate courses and not on inappropriate courses such as that on which the young lady believes she is being sent?
I am extremely worried about the time it will take to evaluate the pilot. We are in the middle of a severe recession. Unemployment is much higher than any of us wants—in my constituency, 50 per cent. higher than when the Government came to power—yet we are about to have an 18-month pilot, the evaluation of which will take two years. We shall not receive the results of the evaluation until 25 October 2013 at the earliest. That is too long. We need to learn lessons more quickly than that. In response to the Minister’s intervention, I say that we want a model whereby welfare-to-work providers are allowed to trial various ways to do things in different areas, so that we can see which approach is the most effective.
The monitoring and review process referred to in the explanatory memorandum is rather vague, and paragraphs 12.1 and 12.3 do not even mention job outcomes. In fact, job outcomes is the last of the four bullet points in paragraph 12.2. Should not the evaluation be done simply and clearly? It is about getting people into work, ensuring that they stay at work for at least a year and seeing whether they make progress in that work. We should concentrate on people being in work for a sustainable period and on their progression.
Jim Knight: I am most grateful to the hon. Gentleman for giving way a second time. I do not disagree that sustainable job outcomes is an important measure of success, but I refer him back to the previous point about the time taken for evaluation. If we were to evaluate on the basis of, say, a person still being in work 12 months after he had come off the training programme, and we intended to run the pilot for more than a minimum, which would be six months, we would be approaching the period referred to for evaluation in the regulations.
Andrew Selous: If the Government ran the pilot for a year and did the evaluation after one year, we would find out whether it was working a little more quickly. The urgency of the current situation is not reflected sufficiently in the pilot. In contrast, we want the Department and the welfare-to-work providers to stay with people for three years and to check that there is sustainability in work, as well as progression.
I draw the Minister’s attention to paragraph 7.2 of the explanatory memorandum. I read the four bullet points yesterday when I was preparing for our debate, and really wondered about the meaning of these words:
“Basic Skills and English language for speakers of other languages;
Employability skills;
Short, job focused training of up to eight weeks; and
Other job related provision”.
It is all vague stuff.
I asked myself whether the person would come out of the pilot with a skill, trade or technical qualification that would put them in a better position in the labour market. It is unclear exactly what is involved. Will the Minister give us a little more detail about the type of training that will be provided? How does he envisage people being in a better position to get jobs afterwards?
Paragraph 4.3 of the explanatory memorandum mentions data sharing. Given the various recent blunders with data going into the public domain when such details should not have been released, will the Minister please explain what level of security such data sharing has cleared within the Department?
The regulations also refer to the Learning and Skills Council, and Ufi Ltd, which trades as learndirect. I understand that the LSC is to be abolished on 1 April and that, in its place, we will have the Young People’s Learning Agency and the Skills Funding Agency. [Interruption.] The Minister speaks from a sedentary position, but will he let the Committee know whether the successor bodies are to take over the role given to the LSC in England? Will he explain why Ufi Ltd has been selected as the only other named training provider, alongside the LSC, which anyway will not exist after April 1?
Will the Minister also explain why the regulations apply only to England and not to Wales and Scotland? The regulations have been introduced by the Department for Work and Pensions, whose responsibilities have not been devolved to the Scottish Government or to the Welsh Assembly. I am aware that the Department deals with skills training, which is a devolved matter, but is there a new principle that some DWP areas of responsibility may be devolved in certain circumstances?
Regulation 5 says that if a claimant moves out of one of the pilot areas, the sanction will no longer apply, which is reasonable, but can we at least have an assurance that the training will still be open if someone has to move halfway through a course? They may have to move for a host of reasons—a family member might get a job elsewhere—and it would be a great pity if they were unable to continue training.
I would be grateful if the Minister responded to those points. My concerns focus on quality, appropriateness, individualised and bespoke training, and outcomes, as well as ensuring that those lead to sustainable jobs and progression in work. Progression is important if we are to deal with poverty, inequality and social mobility, which, as we learned from this morning’s news, have sadly got much worse in recent years.
2.47 pm
Andrew Stunell (Hazel Grove) (LD): It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship for the first time, Mr. Cummings.
From the Liberal Democrat perspective, the regulations are well intentioned. As the hon. Member for South-West Bedfordshire said, they go in the right direction, but we have finished up with something poorly designed and with very few friends. I want to pick out the points that at least require amplification from the Minister before we can allow the regulations to proceed beyond the Committee.
I said that the regulations are poorly designed. The Minister might like to comment on the provision made for control groups, as explained in paragraph 7.4 of the explanatory notes. One would not have known it from what has been said in Committee so far, but perhaps half the people who are eligible for the scheme in the pilot areas will not be allocated to the compulsory sanction regime. They will be directed into what is described as a control group, which will have access to training but not to the sanctions.
One can see that that will provide a way to measure whether the sanctions are the key feature in pilot areas, but I notice that the Merits Committee of the House of Lords quickly put its finger on the point: it is one thing to have a control group that has training and sanctions and one that has training but no sanctions, but we need a third group with no training and no sanctions. The Government might save an awful lot of money if they found it was providing inappropriate training, never mind whether sanctions were applied in those cases.
I want to hear more about the control group and the measuring and evaluation that will flow from it. I do not share the concern expressed by the hon. Member for South-West Bedfordshire about the time it will take to complete the evaluation, but I have concerns that the wrong thing will be evaluated or it will be difficult to establish that what has been evaluated is connected to the resources that were put in.
Interestingly, when the Under-Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, the hon. Member for Bishop Auckland (Helen Goodman), gave evidence to the Merits Committee of the House of Lords, she was interrogated—perhaps that is the way to put it—about the sanctions. She said that the pilots will give an opportunity to prove or disprove “once and for all” that sanctions work. If that is an intention of the pilot study, let us arrange a control group so that we can achieve that aim, rather than be left still uncertain and confused at the end about whether we have a working model for getting more people back into work sooner.
Looking at the statistics, we see that well over 900,000 young people—those not in education, employment or training, the so-called NEETS—are seeking work, and from our point of view, anything that we can do that is effective and constructive for that group, let alone for those further up the age demographic, is to the good.
My first question is, can the Government produce any evidence that sanctions are effective in getting people back to work? One can say that not many people come back for a second dose of sanctions, but that does not tell us that those sanctions got them back into work. Secondly, has the Minister taken account of his own Department’s research reports? Research report No. 511, “The effect of benefit sanctions on lone parents’ employment decisions and moves into employment”, shows clearly that the people who incurred sanctions were those who had greater levels of ill health and were more likely to be in debt. We do not know the cause and effect, but clearly there is a connection between the difficulties that individuals face and the likelihood that they will incur sanctions. Incurring sanctions may not have anything to do with willingness or unwillingness to work. Those are serious issues.
Something else that emerged from the research report produced by the Minister’s own Department was the fact that a high percentage of people who had sanctions applied against them did not have the foggiest idea why. They were not expecting it and did not understand the explanations, and as far as they were concerned, it was yet another thing that dropped on their heads from a great height—without explanation and to their serious detriment. How do the Government plan to ensure real awareness among those taking part in the pilot project?
I made the point that perhaps the Minister needs two different control groups, and in a pilot area where not everybody will be under a direct sanction regime, it will be important to make those who are under it aware of that fact. If they were not fully aware that they were subject to such a regime, the whole enterprise would be invalidated.
My queries about that point are, in some ways, counter-intuitive. It seems obvious that if we gave somebody a good clip round the ear, they would amend their behaviour and not do it again, but they would have to know what the clip round the ear was for. We also have to consider the carrot, as well as the stick. When the Social Security Advisory Commission looked at the pilot scheme, one if its comments to the Department was, “You’ve tried it twice before, in 2001 and 2004, and it produced less good outcomes as far as people getting jobs was concerned.” What reassurance can the Minister offer the Committee on that point?
On the application of sanctions, never mind whether people know that they will get a clip round the ear. Will they know why they have got a clip round the ear? Citizens Advice, in evidence to the SSAC and the Department, said:
“Case evidence reported by bureaux to Citizens Advice highlights that many claimants are sanctioned apparently inappropriately; others, it is clear, do not know why they have been sanctioned, and get no explanation or warning in advance of the sanction being applied.”
It goes on to say that
“they do not get the help with training that they would like, often because either they, or the course they want to do, does not fit particular criteria.”
The second point is the one that the hon. Member for South-West Bedfordshire made. All those things certainly resonate with me and my casework. I do not wish to quote specific examples, but I hope the Minister will acknowledge that, no doubt even in his own casework, he has examples that illustrate the same problems.
 
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