Vinovium House

Debate between Jim Shannon and Helen Goodman

Wednesday 8th March 2017 Commons Chamber

[Helen Goodman]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right. There is a lot of anxiety, and I will read out an email from someone who works there to explain to the Minister why:

“On the day the closure was announced to us, we were told there would be an option between a job if we were prepared to travel, or an exit package if not—a small lifeline to me that may have cushioned the closure up to my pension age, but the next day the package offer was revoked with a statement that failure to accept a compulsory transfer could result in disciplinary action.”

Will the Minister please tell us exactly what is going on? What offers are being made to people?

[Jim Shannon (Strangford) (DUP)]

I congratulate the hon. Lady on bringing this issue to the House for consideration. Surely, if someone has a contract of employment with a Department and that contract is changed, the rights of the individual must be retained. Therefore, should not the option of a package to leave still be on the table? Should not the Government endorse and deliver that earlier commitment?

[Helen Goodman]

The hon. Gentleman makes an excellent point. I agree, which is why I want to know what is going on in the Department for Work and Pensions.

The underlying issues are travel times and costs, the lack of affordable childcare and the fact that most people who work at Vinovium House combine their job with some caring responsibilities. Many work part-time close to home, as they have caring responsibilities for children or elderly parents. The Tory party claims to be the party of the family. This change will adversely affect at least 85 families and will have a devastating impact.

Let me give one example. I talked to a woman who was very young—well, I think she was very young because she was in her 30s—and a widow with two children. Unfortunately, her partner died a year ago. At the moment, she drops her children off at school, gets to work by 9 o’clock and works until 6 o’clock, but she is given time to pick her children up at 3.30 pm. If she has to go to work in another town or another place, there is no possibility that this arrangement can continue. Her children are beyond three and four years old, when free childcare is available, but are too young to leave at home after school.

One thing Ministers need to bear in mind is the pay. The highest full-time pay is £18,000, and many of these people are on £12,000. They simply cannot afford to take home less, because they have to fork out on travel costs or childcare. There is also little other office work in the area, which is why the DWP is a valuable employer.

As my hon. Friend the Member for Sedgefield (Phil Wilson) suggested, a third of these people come from other villages round about. There is currently a bus connection into Bishop, but if the Bishop office closes, there is no guarantee people will be able to get transport onwards to other locations. The Department’s Darlington and Peterlee offices are already scheduled for closure. I strongly suggest that the Minister’s officials stop looking on Google Maps and that she send them up to the north to start looking at the geographical problems. Let them try to get a bus at 8 o’clock in the morning to Washington, near Sunderland, or to Newcastle, and get back in time to collect children from school at 3 o’clock. It is frankly impossible; it is a five-hour trip, including eight different buses. Of course, there is the massive devastation of public transport. What is being proposed is intolerable for these families.

There are many unanswered questions. The DWP guideline for staff travel times is one hour. How many sites are available for the staff to transfer to that are within an hour’s travel by public transport? What happens to people who received travel costs for three years if they go to work at another site? What happens after that? I suppose they will have to pay for themselves. Is there capacity in other offices nearby to take on these workers? Will they need to be retrained? What will that cost?

I am extremely grateful to the Public and Commercial Services Union for arranging for me to visit the office in February. I met a large number of staff, and they said things like this: “My husband is due to leave the armed forces later this year, so that could be two of us without a job,” “I moved here specifically to be close to my elderly parents,” “There is no childcare for children over 10-years-old,” “I have a child with disabilities, which results in lots of appointments. I couldn’t manage to meet them if I had to travel further afield,” “I’m dependent on my mum for childcare. If I had to leave earlier to travel further, she might not be able to manage, because she is dependent on getting to my children on the bus,” “I’m on maternity leave. I’ve worked here for nine years, and my future is up in the air. Will I have a job to come back to?” “I live in the Dales, where there is limited and often no public transport. How could I travel further afield? If I finished work in Newcastle at half-past seven, it would be physically impossible for me to get home at night,” and “I have a child starting university in September. How can I afford to support my child if I lose my job?”

The Minister must understand that these are significant problems for people. These people are not simply cogs in a machine or units of production; these are real people with real families. Many of the staff said that, in effect, they had to put their lives on hold, because they do not know what the upshot is going to be. They have had to cancel their holidays and things like that.

I want to propose a better way forward to the Minister. Historically, the jobcentre was in Vinovium House, and it would be much better in the long term if, instead of the medical assessment team moving to the jobcentre in the marketplace, the jobcentre people moved to Vinovium House and held on to the lease with the CSA people. There is already information and communications technology, telephones and security. That move would be much more cost-effective than what is being proposed at the moment.

There is, of course, another aspect: the impact on the rest of the town. I have had a letter from the Auckland Castle Trust. I do not know whether the Minister is aware that a philanthropist called Jonathan Ruffer has put at least £50 million into restoring and regenerating Auckland castle, with a view to building up the tourist industry. The Auckland Castle Trust says that it has moved into the upper five floors of Vinovium House, and it requires that office space until 2020. It has been told that if the DWP moves, it will also have to move, and that will cost it a great deal of money. If it has to spend money moving, it will have less money for the regeneration project that it is undertaking.

The DWP decision is doubly bad; it threatens unemployment for the 80 people employed by the DWP, and at exactly the moment when the trust is bending every sinew to regenerate the town, the DWP is pulling the rug from under it. The staff are 100% committed to the local area. They have done a lot of work for local charities, and they have counted up how much they spend every week, which is about £2,000. We know from that that local shops will be extremely badly affected and there will be job losses there, too.

I think the Government should take a more holistic approach. The problem is that Whitehall lives in departmental silos, but people do not. I understand the pressure to save money, but I do not understand why Bishop Auckland is always at the sharp end. We have lost our magistrates court. We have lost our driving test centre. We have lost an HMRC officer. For once, if there is going to be centralisation, could it be into Bishop Auckland instead? I simply do not believe that the Minister can find a place where rents are cheaper than they are in Bishop; that is not credible. People in Bishop Auckland feel very strongly about this, and thousands are currently collecting signatures for a petition. As a hard-working, long-serving staff member said to me,

“It’s become about the building not the service and the staff”.

I am sure the Minister will agree that that is not the right approach.