Welfare Reform and Work Bill (Second sitting)

Debate between Emily Thornberry and Peter Heaton-Jones

Thursday 10th September 2015 Public Bill Committees

[Peter Heaton-Jones]

No.

Matt Oakley: I will answer in a different way. I am not sure that it is necessarily a question of money. I am not sure that £60 million or £100 million, in the grand scheme of things, will raise that 8% to 16%, 24%, 32% or whatever. At the moment we are treating people too much by their benefit type when they go through to the Work programme, which means that they have a set amount of money attached to them. Frankly, that is not accurate enough. What we need to do is say, “Okay, you’re in the ESA WRA group. You’ve been there for a very long time. You’ve had huge problems in the past. You’ve never been employed. Let’s get a huge amount of money to you,” versus the person who potentially has far fewer barriers to work, has just moved into the WRA group, is very keen to work and has a prognosis that is actually very good. Why are we paying the same amount in the Work programme for those two people? It just does not make any sense. Extra money is great, but we need to fundamentally rethink how we are funnelling that money to the hardest-to-help people.

[Emily Thornberry]

Q 78 I may have misunderstood your evidence, because you seem to be accepting that there are people in the WRA group—the employment support group—who will not be able to find work because there is something wrong with them; they really will not be able to find work and have been unemployed for a long time. You heard Sophie’s evidence about how hard it is to live on JSA for any period. As a matter of humanity, do you not think it is wrong in those circumstances for people who we know are on long-term sick leave or are long-term unemployed to be put on to jobseeker’s allowance? They simply will not be able to cope.

Matt Oakley: I would make the same argument for jobseeker’s allowance. There are people going on to jobseeker’s allowance who go into a jobcentre on day one and frankly, we should know that they are not going to be employed for the next three years. There is no more reason to give them less money than the WRA group people you are talking about. My point is that, money aside, we should be making sure that the employment support they are receiving is fit for purpose and that we are targeting support at them on day one, day two and day three to make sure they are tackling the barriers to work they face, so that people are not spending three or four years either in the ESA WRAG or on JSA.

Welfare Reform and Work Bill (First sitting)

Debate between Emily Thornberry and Peter Heaton-Jones

Thursday 10th September 2015 Public Bill Committees

[Emily Thornberry]

Q 33 My next question is: if you are an unskilled lone parent with a three-year-old and you are trying to find work, are you likely to be able to get work available during the day, or are you more likely to get the sort of work that might be early morning cleaning, bar work or zero-hours contracts where you are expected to be available? How does that fit in with setting up a new form of childcare?

Emma Stewart: At the moment in London, the majority—over half—of part-time jobs pay below the London living wage. A high proportion of them are precarious employment-related—zero hours or shift patterns. The challenge is multiple. There is sometimes no guarantee of regular work and regular shifts. It is very difficult to organise childcare if you are working in a supermarket and you do 9 am to 12 pm for three days and then 10 am to something else for the other two days. Retail works in such a way that shift patterns are often rotated on a monthly basis, so it is very hard to align childcare with certain sectors. We know that within health and social care, there are significant issues in relation to that type of work.

The conversation about part-time work needs to focus on permanent part-time work. There are huge wins for business to consider, in terms of how it can build efficiencies in the way that jobs are done and redesigned to facilitate better retention rates and better talent attraction rates. Even within lower-paid sectors, we know that social care is facing a huge nightmare with retention issues at the moment because women are not able to sustain the kinds of shift pattern that they are having to work and it is very, very difficult to find childcare arrangements. We also know that women in retail often share childcare with their partners and families, because it is just not possible to find the right kind of childcare.

Thirty hours a week in principle is fantastic, but when and how it is made available and how it is aligned to current employment patterns is critical. A classic example is summer holidays. We know from some recent research that about one in 10 parents leave their jobs in the summer because they cannot find childcare.

[Peter Heaton-Jones]

Q 34 Can I pick up on the issue of the proportion of childcare costs that are covered? It is currently about 70%, but under the new arrangements it will probably be about 85%—is that right?

Emma Stewart: Yes, that is correct.