Sheila Gilmore
Main Page: Sheila Gilmore (Labour - Edinburgh East)Department Debates - View all Sheila Gilmore's debates with the Department for Work and Pensions
Jobcentre Plus
Sheila Gilmore Excerpts(9 years, 10 months ago)
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Sheila Gilmore (Edinburgh East) (Lab)
The other side of the question of what is being measured is the lack of any measurement and follow-up on people who are not moving into work—it appears that no record is kept. A large number of people flow off benefit, but not only do they not flow into sustainable employment, they appear not to flow into employment at all.
Dame Anne Begg
I think people would be surprised to learn that Jobcentre Plus does not routinely record the reason why someone leaves benefit. As far as JCP is concerned, because the primary focus is on benefit off-flows, the important thing is that the person is no longer on a job-seeking benefit. However, as my hon. Friend says, why are they no longer on a benefit? It could be because they have a new job—that is what we hope—and it is possible that they have transferred to a different benefit because they have become ill, but they might be in prison or have gone into the black economy. We do not know, and nor does JCP because it does not gather that information or track claimants’ destinations. We think it is important that JCP does that in order to judge how efficient and effective its work is.
At some point, hopefully in the not-too-distant future, off-benefit is likely to cease to make much sense as a performance measure, particularly with the introduction of universal credit. I think Members agree that a system that merges out-of-work benefits and in-work tax credits, and in which benefits taper off gradually as earnings increase, would be a huge step forward. That is what universal credit is intended to do, but it will require creative thinking from the Government about new performance measures for JCP.
The Department says that it will think about how to formulate such measures once universal credit is implemented—whenever that is going to be. We think that it should be thinking about and testing them now, not leaving it until much later. Even if universal credit continues to slow down, the Committee certainly thinks that the development of a new measure is worth while anyway, whether in conjunction with universal credit or not. The Department must pilot more meaningful performance measures that track JCP’s effectiveness at getting people into work and helping them to stay there for the long term. I hope that the Minister can reassure us that the Government understand the importance of achieving longer-term positive employment outcomes.
Another part of our report that has received quite a lot of attention—perhaps because many Members have experience of it in their constituencies—is Jobcentre Plus’s use of sanctions. There is an inherent tension in what JCP does, between helping and supporting people to find work on the one hand, and, on the other, enforcing strict rules, including financial penalties for claimants deemed not to be trying hard enough to find work. Such is the everyday experience of the Jobcentre Plus adviser and the job-seeking benefit claimant, and it can make for an uneasy relationship.
Anne Marie Morris (Newton Abbot) (Con)
I am pleased to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Amess. It is always a great pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Aberdeen South (Dame Anne Begg), who is a first class Chairman of our Select Committee. It is to her credit that she looks at these issues in such detail and manages to ensure that we have a reasonably fair debate across both sides of the House.
The issue has been well put forward and well summarised. One challenge in debates such as this is that a Select Committee report is inevitably a glass half empty rather than half full. Select Committees are not there to look at what is going well; by and large, they hold the Government to account and consider what is not working.
In many ways, it is not being forcefully said that jobcentres and Jobcentre Plus work remarkably well. The hon. Lady said that the National Audit Office stated that they provide value for money and we need to listen to that, because the NAO does not often dish out praise. We need to remember that and give the Jobcentre Plus offices the proportional support and credit that they deserve. It is with regret that I say that many jobcentres are on strike today. However, I am pleased to report that in Newton Abbot we are open for business.
As has been mentioned, the key role for Jobcentre Plus is administering working-age benefit—that is its first purpose—and providing public employment services for the unemployed, and it seems to me that it does well on both counts. Let me discuss first its role as an employment service. It needs to do three things: effectively advise and support those looking for work; ensure that claimants fulfil their responsibility to look for work; and support an efficient and flexible labour market, matching employees to jobs.
As I said, the NAO stated that the Jobcentre Plus organisations delivered value for money and that they responded efficiently to policy changes. I note, as a Committee member, that there are concerns about universal credit, because—steady as she goes—it will be a major change. None the less, the NAO must have been aware of that when producing its report. It was also positive about the ability of Jobcentre Plus to respond to fluctuating numbers, which is a real challenge: managing resource, particularly the numbers that are going to change as the benefits system changes, is a challenge. Again, the NAO was complimentary—and in a time of recession, when Jobcentre Plus would be expected to be under significant pressure.
On Jobcentre Plus’s aim of being an employment service, let me look at the issue of effectively providing advice and support. Much of what the Committee Chairman said is right; there is a need for some sort of tool to ensure that those who really need help the most get it. In our debate, we talked not just about more help for those furthest away from the workplace, but about trying to save time in respect of those who will clearly find it easy to find a job. There was discussion about some people getting lots of face-time support, although they did not need it, and about using that time better for those who are much more needy.
The problem is, however, that if there is no tool at the outset to enable people to work out who needs what, those details are difficult to find out. I support what the Chairman said: we need to look properly at such a tool. The Government have considered the matter, but at the moment we have no clarity about what they are doing and what the options are. We need to know, because it is an important issue, and not only from an economic point of view. Why spend time and resource on those who least need it, when those who need it are not being best helped to get to the workplace?
The Chairman’s second point on advice and support was about the particular challenge of employment and support allowance claimants—particularly those in the work-related activity group, those with fluctuating conditions and those with mental health problems. In a sense, whatever tool we come up with, that group clearly needs particular support. There should at least be some means of identifying that group and considering what we can do for it, because as a Committee we share a concern that the work-related activity group is incredibly wide. It probably would be better to narrow it, if we could find a better way to make decisions about which of the three groups individuals fall into.
On the plus side, the feedback that we received about support—the Get Britain Working tool, which contains six schemes—suggested that it was working well. That is a positive.
I am particularly concerned that youngsters—and, indeed, those who have been made redundant and seek to enter the marketplace again—should have the opportunity to consider self-employment. The all-party group on micro-businesses, of which I am chair, did a piece of work looking at all the Work programme providers, to see how many were able to help people start up their own businesses. It found that fewer than half were.
Certainly, from the feedback that we have received, and my experience with the jobcentre in my constituency, there is now a significant amount of support to help people set up their own businesses. Indeed, specialist advisers are doing that in my local jobcentre. That is positive. There are good stories of people who have set up some interesting, innovative new businesses.
Sheila Gilmore
Obviously, there has been a big increase in the number of people who have become self-employed in recent years and there are a lot of advantages for people in being self-employed. However, does the hon. Lady share my concern that the average earnings of self-employed people have substantially dropped over that period? There is a danger that, although some people are regarded as being off benefit because they have gone into self-employment, self-employment is poorly remunerating them.
Anne Marie Morris
Having set up and run my own business, I know just how hard it is. Nobody here would say that setting up a business is the way—for most of us—to become a millionaire; there will be one or two, but by and large it is a real challenge and the income from doing so, certainly in the early years, cannot be compared to what people might get later. However, it is much better, both psychologically and economically, to be in work, whether self-employment or employment. I do not really share the hon. Lady’s concerns.
The Chairman mentioned the claimant fulfilling their responsibilities. Overall, the claimant commitment, which I believe has been entered into by 600,000 individuals, is positive. I think we all agree that that is a good thing, because it provides a feeling of self-worth, and because more people should be in work than not in work—quite apart from the economic issue. If there is better understanding between the claimant and the adviser about what exactly is involved, without a sense that it is a choice or option to be on benefits, that is the right thing by the taxpayer and by the individual. That is a positive step, of which the Government should be proud.
Of more concern to me and the Chairman, on the issue of those who have agreed with an adviser what steps they might take to get back into the workplace, is the sanctioning process. The Select Committee met a number of individuals for whom the process simply had not worked, and that is certainly reflected in the constituents who come to my surgeries. That issue cannot be ignored, and it needs to be sorted out. I agree with the Chairman on that point.
From all the evidence we took from Ministers and officials, I get a sense that, although we might not have the clarity we want on exactly what sort of review might take place—it might not be the type we want—the Government recognise the problem and want to do something about it. It will be interesting to hear from the Minister exactly what she is doing and why she thinks it will be the best way of resolving the problem.
The very fact that the Government listened and introduced the new exemption on the homeless, so that the sanctioning process would not operate in the draconian and, in many ways, wrong way that it has, is a good thing. There is a recognition—much to the credit of Shelter, who I think put forward the campaign—that the homeless have particular problems in getting to appointments, because they do not have a home and all the facilities that those with homes enjoy.
Another aspect of Jobcentre Plus is its role as an employment service. Clearly, one of the main things it needs to do is provide a flexible labour market. The Chairman sensibly referred to the challenges of the Universal Jobmatch programme. I found it interesting to listen to both sides of the debate on that. It is clear that the organisation that operates it is, as she said, welcome to look at changes and improvements to ensure that it functions better, but I will be very surprised if I hear the Minister telling us anything other than, “The Government are on the case and the tool must work appropriately.”
One concern, expressed by some of the witnesses, is the challenge of getting a greater range of jobs on the system. Without that range, we will not be able to meet the needs of all the different jobseekers. A little bit of marketing needs to be done to ensure that employers up and down the different sectors and sizes of business see Universal Jobmatch as a useful tool. We had evidence from a couple of individuals who said that it was a fantastic tool that saved them money in recruiting and delivered able people, willing to work, who they would not have otherwise found. People came to us to say that it is a good tool.
The other challenge is on trying to make the tool more accessible and attractive to the smaller business. The bigger business, in a sense, understands these systems—they have human resources departments and it all makes sense. For very small SMEs, it is a different ball game. We all know that much of the growth and recruitment is in that area, so we need to find a way to attract more smaller businesses to use Universal Jobmatch. The Chairman referred to the challenge with jobs that have been filled, spoof jobs and so on. My understanding is that the Government are already looking at that, but she is right that the issue is serious and needs to be addressed.
Another thing that Jobcentre Plus administers is working-age benefit. Despite the NAO report, there are clear concerns about resource and whether the universal credit and the influx of people who have been unsuccessful on the Work programme—and have to be placed on community work places, found training courses or asked to sign on daily—will increase the work load. It will be interesting to hear the Minister’s prediction of the additional need for resource. How can that be met in a flexible way?
At the end of the day, one of the important things in administering a working-age benefits system is to ensure that it works. One of the Chairman’s key points was that if we are simply measuring the number of people off benefit, which is how it works now, we are not getting any insight into where those who are no longer claiming have gone. At the end of the day, we are trying to get people into jobs or self-employment, rather than just getting them off benefit.
Clearly, there are challenges, but I am hopeful that the Minister will explain what those are and why there is a reluctance to look at them. If a system is about trying to get people into employment, we need to have a measure that shows that people have got into employment.
Overall, Jobcentre Plus works extremely well and, frankly, it is to the credit of all parties—the system has been going for some time—that it does work so well. Although we need to address some of the challenges for the minority who use it, we must never forget the strength of what we have.
Nigel Mills
That is exactly the problem—how we motivate engagement on both sides, which we will need with universal credit and any in-work conditionality. We have to find a way of gathering reliable data. It is similar to a high-level instinct, or perhaps real-time information will provide something. Perhaps the RTI feed will show that the person is still in employment or even at the same employer—if we wanted to track the data that far back—but that looks to be a pretty clunky and limited way of checking things. Unless there are flags that show when employment has stopped, flagging it back to the jobcentre, we would not know that people had ceased to be in sustained employment, perhaps meeting the 12 or 26-week target, or whatever was set in that situation. I am not sure that there is an easy solution to anything, but for us to find a set of targets and work routes that work in such a situation will be important to how the jobcentre role develops.
The next area that I want to touch on is one that was topical last summer, when we started the inquiry: what happens to people when their two years on the Work programme finishes and they become the jobcentre’s responsibility again. This time last year, I remember speaking to the staff at my local jobcentre and they were not entirely sure what they were going to be doing with people in that situation when the first Work programme cohorts finished. Jobcentres have an important role to play, because we are talking about people who have not got a job in their first year of unemployment and who then got through the Work programme for two years and have not found sustained work. We could expect them to need some intensive support, but it is a little hard to see that jobcentres would be geared up for that, having not been doing it for people in that key two-year period previously. So what would we do with them?
Last week, I was pleased to meet a new subcontractor, Acorn, which is in Derbyshire dealing with what I think are now called community work placements, a new set of rolled-out private sector providers offering a different type of Work programme service that is not the Work programme and does something subtly different. I confess that the procurement of the service and how we chose the providers has passed me by, but in the east midlands, for example, we have G4S. Luckily for the east midlands in some ways, it is not one of the Work programme providers, because we have a completely separate, third firm in Derbyshire to do things. We have, however, found a sensible programme of community placements that are not meant to be free labour for unscrupulous private sector operators, but are meant to be getting people who have gone through three years of support finding something that at least gets them used to working normal working hours and some skills on their CV, making them more employable.
Sheila Gilmore
Obviously, it is early days to know how the post-Work programme arrangements are working, but a complaint of many of my constituents about the Work programme was that it was not particularly intensive. If anything, it was very light touch—“Come in every seven or eight weeks”, and sometimes the only contact was by phone. It seemed to concentrate everything on CV writing and applying for jobs. If the more intensive approach is important, should it not be starting much earlier than three years into unemployment?
Nigel Mills
I agree. I was trying to explore with G4S when I had that meeting with it and Acorn exactly what the financial remuneration was for successful outcomes under the community work placement, and how that compared with the rewards under the Work programme for some of the harder-to-deal-with people who are further from the labour market. I was trying to work out whether we could expect Work programme providers to do such work placements if they had someone whom they were struggling with on the Work programme. Is there a need to tweak the contracts or to change the incentives slightly? We could try to get such support provided during the two years, not after the two years. For some reason, they were not totally inclined to give me a clear answer on those numbers. Perhaps it was the wrong time to ask them.
It is always about the sequencing of things—how do we step up the intensity of support at the right time? I am sure that we want a system in which if somebody really needs the most intensive support, they get it early in the process, rather than one in which we see how long we can demoralise them before we give them what they probably needed in the first place.
It is intriguing. When looking at the role of the jobcentre we thought, perhaps slightly competitively, that we had a real chance to prove that where a Work programme provider has failed, the jobcentre can help people and sort the situation out. But we have ended up with another outsourced programme. Does that suggest that in many ways we do not feel that the jobcentre’s role is to provide any intensive support to people—that its role is enforcement plus some coaching in the early days and some relatively light-touch support? I am not saying that that is my view, but it appears now that for every situation we come across we find a different outsourced programme.
Finally I want to touch on Universal Jobmatch and the role of IT. I see Universal Jobmatch as a great success. I played with the old job search system in jobcentres and looking at the new one it is clearly much easier to use—for example, people can work it at home—and looks like the right direction of travel. I share the hope that Monster has managed to fix the problem of the artificial, unethical or non-existent job placements that had been going on to Jobmatch, to try to make it as effective a system as possible. I suspect that there is no way that these things can be perfect, and that people will always be able to get through any filters to put rogue jobs on, so it is a matter of how effectively we can monitor the service and get those taken off once they are found. But clearly the problem should not have been on the scale that it got to.
As for IT, having enough computers in jobcentres—and enough staff to support people using them—is quite important, especially when we are requiring IT job searches and will sanction people who do not do them. The library in Heanor, a town in my seat, had to close for reasons of maintenance—or the lack of it—and we lost the IT provision in the town centre. It then became quite hard for claimants who did not have IT access at home and had lost their library. Trying to convince the jobcentre that it needed to find at least some temporary solution to get IT provision back into the town and to support people while the library was finding an alternative site was not as easy as I might have liked it to be.
I suspect the vision for modern jobcentres is for them to have lots of computer terminals so that IT job searches are perfectly possible. I know that one of the jobcentres in my seat was down for an early upgrade to get extra IT, but we need to make sure that every jobcentre has IT provision. If we are expecting people to use the service themselves and will sanction them if they do not, we have to make IT facilities available to them.
We can do more with the Universal Jobmatch system, as the Chair of the Select Committee remarked earlier. We ought to be looking to see whether we can make all the data on it flow two ways. Surely it can be a great tool. If someone has put their CV on it and has applied for 100 jobs but has never, ever been put forward into the best 50 applicants—or whatever number get prioritised—for the employer to see, that must surely say to somebody that that person’s CV is not good enough and they either need to produce a better one, or they need to have some training urgently to get more skills to put on it, or they are applying for completely the wrong jobs.
There ought to be a way of using the system to spot that some individual jobseekers need that kind of support—a better CV or some more skills—or perhaps even to spot that, say, there have been no jobs within a 20-mile radius that match the skills on a person’s CV in the last year, so there is no point in them keeping on applying for things that they are not going to get. That could then create a flag back to their jobcentre adviser, to say, “Something needs to happen with this person.” If we can find innovative ways of using the system to provide extra support—rather than just forcing people to go on it and mandating them to do so many job applications, some of which they are not too enthused about anyway—we might get a far better result for the investment we have made than if it is used purely as a job search tool.
Overall, the conclusion of the report is clearly that jobcentres do great work and have an important role. To share my own experience, when I have held jobs fairs in my seat the two jobcentres have been extremely helpful in getting employers and jobseekers there. They are working practically to try to tackle the problem, which is a pleasure to see in my seat.
Sheila Gilmore (Edinburgh East) (Lab)
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Amess, and to speak on this very important matter.
One thing that has come out of this report, and has been clear in speeches from across the Chamber, is a recognition that in fact on the whole jobcentres are doing a good job and should be retained for the purposes that they have. A few years ago there was some uncertainty about that. I know that the coming of the Work programme and the change of Government meant that some people—particularly people working in jobcentres—were concerned that the jobcentre’s role could be ended.
Things had already changed substantially in jobcentres. The bad old days—going into a grim office with rows of chairs that were firmly battened down to the ground so that they could not be lifted, to talk through a glass screen to somebody who was behind that glass screen in case someone became extremely angry—had been replaced by an attempt at a more informal atmosphere. People were sitting at a table with their adviser rather than the adviser being on one side and the person using the service on the other, which had felt quite hostile. In some quarters there is concern that taking a heavy approach, through some of the things that I suggest have been happening, could bring that sort of atmosphere back. That would be regrettable. I very much want us not to go back to those days.
Despite some of the remarks that get thrown about in other debates—particularly when we are in the main Chamber—I think we all share the aim of wanting as many people as possible to have the opportunity of employment; we also want to avoid a situation in which people are having long spells of unemployment. It has never been my party’s policy to want people to be unemployed or to think that that is in any way a good thing. Indeed, I have campaigned and argued—and marched, in the past—precisely because we see it as a bad thing. We know it is bad for people’s income, and therefore for their well-being in lots of ways. It is also bad for their mental health and well-being, and their feeling of being a valued part of society. There are a whole host of reasons why we want to see low unemployment.
My party recognises—and again, I hope it might be a shared recognition—that employment is a necessary but not always a sufficient way to get a decent standard of living. That has been one of the differences. It is a simple argument that if people get into employment, all will be well, but, as we have seen of late, that is not necessarily the case with very low-income work and the problems that come with that.
Where we differ sometimes is on the means of achieving the end. That perhaps arises partly from the different perspective there sometimes seems to be about why people are unemployed and their attitude towards employment. Neither the hon. Member for Newton Abbot (Anne Marie Morris) nor the hon. Member for Amber Valley (Nigel Mills) made this sort of comment, but sometimes there is a feeling that the assumption is that there are plenty of jobs out there—in many areas, there are not—and if only people would get a bit of backbone, which we can give them by whipping them into line, they would no longer be unemployed.
I would argue that that is not the case. An interesting piece of research has been published on universal credit. There was a very early survey of two groups of people: one of people who were about to be claimants of universal credit—it was in its very early days—and one of claimants of jobseeker’s allowance. They were matched for similar areas, ages and experience, and they showed remarkably similar attitudes. There were asked whether it was better to be employed than not employed and so on. I do not think there is a fundamental difference of opinion.
The Select Committee’s report is a serious attempt to find ways of improving performance. In its initial response, the Government seemed to be less than sympathetic to some parts of it, but I hope that as we move forward there may be an opportunity to take such matters into account.
The Chair of the Select Committee spoke at length about what the performance targets should be, and the measure of performance being benefit off-flow. We know, and I think the DWP knows that only some of those who leave benefit go into employment. There is a whole host of reasons why people may leave benefit without going into employment. A few retire because they reach retirement age. Some lose their entitlement to benefit but do not necessarily become employed. After 26 weeks on contributory JSA, people cease to be entitled to it if they do not qualify for income-related JSA. Many people will not qualify for income-related JSA because they are living with someone who is in employment, even if it is only part-time employment. If there is a source of income in the household they will cease to be entitled to benefit. They may be off benefit, but they will not necessarily have progressed into work.
It is significant that the unemployment figures produced by the Office for National Statistics and the figures for claimant count are moving quite widely apart. Of those who are unemployed on the unemployment count, 47% are not in receipt of an out-of-work benefit. We are talking about almost 1 million people because the number who are unemployed is still over 2 million—2.1 million people are still unemployed according to the general definition of unemployment.
It is tempting for people to say that the claimant count is down in their area, and for Ministers to say that the claimant count is down in someone else’s area, but there is a serious issue with people who are not being counted. Not only are they not being counted, they are not being helped. We should deal with the serious issue of why the gap is growing. There are other reasons. Some people on employment and support allowance lose that allowance after a year if they are in the work-related activity group. They may be off benefit, but they are not receiving assistance towards resuming employment.
When ESA was introduced, the previous Government commissioned an ongoing survey of those found fit for work. It looked at a group of people after three months and after a year. The significant finding was that 43% of those who had been found fit for work after a year were neither in employment nor on an out-of-work benefit. I do not know whether things have got better or worse. I do not know where those people are now and whether they eventually got fit and found work, or found themselves back on ESA—I suspect that that was the case for many of them—and DWP does not know either. That research did not go further than that and was not recommissioned. If we do not have such information, we have no way of telling whether policies are helping or working.
As I said during a debate I had on employment and support allowance, I suspect that quite a lot of people are not getting better and their health is not improving, and that they reclaim ESA sooner or later. That may be an explanation for the fact that the total number of those on that benefit has not fallen as much as the fit-for-work decisions. There is a mismatch there.
That ties in with some of the other things we have said here about jobcentres and DWP’s attitude to following through what happens to people, and we should look at that. Even if it becomes easier in future to track people in employment through things such as real-time information and, as the hon. Member for Amber Valley (Nigel Mills) said, some of those who now go off benefit stay on benefit with the universal credit, those who come off benefit for other reasons are simply lost in the system.
That brings me to sanctions and pressure on people. It is not necessary to exaggerate the position because this is really happening to people and we all have examples. The fact that so often when people ask for a decision to be reconsidered, especially if they ask through their MP or an advice agency, that decision is often overturned, and overturned quite quickly, suggesting that something was wrong with the initial decision making. That must give pause for concern because if the initial decision making was right, that would not be happening. In the meantime, people are finding themselves without income. Their housing benefit, if they had it, will be suspended at the very least and they will have to contact that department to get it sorted out
What worries me is the people who do not come to us or to an advice agency. What happens to them? Many of them will not be aware of sources of help. I had a constituent who eventually came for help, but he had been sanctioned for six months. He had a learning disability that was not fully acknowledged by his family. He was not a young man—he was in his late 30s or early 40s—and he had just given up. He was not signing on. He would not have been receiving any money anyway, but he was no longer part of the system, and that is a worry. He had family. His pensioner parents were supporting him from their own limited income. He was not destitute or on the streets, so there was not that sort of high drama, but the family were struggling to support him. He had fallen out of the system because of his learning disability. That was why he had not done what he should have done and co-operated. Somehow, that was not picked up. We need to know how many such people there are.
Many people would be concerned that the pressure to get people off benefit also applies to people on ESA. We thought that eligibility for ESA was tested for. We all know about the issues surrounding the work capability assessment, but people who have gone through that, been awarded ESA and been placed in the work-related activity group are not, by definition, fit for work at the present time. They do not need to be hounded back into work because the system has said that they are not ready to go back into work. So why are so many of them being sanctioned?
The number of people on ESA who are being sanctioned is rising. The latest available figures are for December 2012 to December 2013 when there was a fourfold rise in the number of people in that position being sanctioned. The number rose from 1,102 a month to 4,789 a month, but that was not because there had been a similar increase in the number of people in that group, so we cannot just say it is the same number. The number of people in the work-related activity group had gone up by considerably less than that. Many of these people were sanctioned for failing to co-operate with the Work programme, and the number of people on ESA being referred to the Work programme seems to have been going down during the same period in which the number of sanctions have gone up. That is a matter of considerable concern, especially if these people are the least likely to get help and to be able to reinstate their benefit position and will be counted as some kind of success for a jobcentre. They are likely to be people with mental health problems or learning disabilities.
There are what are often regarded as scare stories, in some respects. Yesterday, an article in The Guardian had yet another apparent whistleblower from among Jobcentre Plus employees saying that their performance was indeed measured by the proportion of people they got off benefit, and that included people on ESA. This is not just a JSA matter. It may not be a specific target that is stuck up on a wall, but it is about the performance of that employee, and they are expected to get people off benefit, including people who, by definition and by test—who have already been through the work capability assessment—are not regarded as being fit for work, and I think that is a matter of considerable concern.
I hope that the Minister tells us that the Oakley report will be published shortly. We have been waiting for it now for some time and I understand that it has been completed. It was recognised that that report’s terms of reference were relatively limited, which is why the Select Committee asked for a more far-reaching report to look at such things as whether the sanctions actually work. Are they having the desired effect? If they are not, they become particularly pointless.
It is interesting that a report, called “Smarter Sanctions”, was published earlier this year by the Policy Exchange. The Policy Exchange is not known as a particularly left-wing or radical think-tank—at least in the left-wing sense; it is radical in other senses—and it, too, felt that there were real problems with the sanctioning system. I would not necessarily agree with some of its recommendations and conclusions, but it was clear that too many people were getting low-level sanctions—those might be just for one month, but one month, as my hon. Friend the Member for Oldham East and Saddleworth (Debbie Abrahams)said, is considerable when someone is on a very low income—and that they were given inappropriate sanctions and wrong decisions were made. Despite the fact that we are still waiting for the Government-commissioned report to come through, it is significant that that organisation has given voice to some concerns that people have. I hope that the fact it comes from that source would give it considerable weight.
The Select Committee recommended—and these Select Committee recommendations are unanimous—that the
“DWP take urgent steps to monitor the extent of financial hardship caused by benefit sanctions, including by collecting, collating and publishing data on the number of claimants ‘signposted’ to food aid by Jobcentres and the reasons”
for that. The Minister has to give a real explanation why that comparatively modest recommendation was rejected.
If the Government are right that, as they said in their response to our report:
“The use of food banks is not exclusive to benefit claimants”—
which it probably is not—and that it somehow has nothing whatever to do with welfare reform changes or sanctions, surely co-operating with the request to publish that kind of information might answer those points, so I would argue that doing so is in their interests as well.
Earlier speakers spoke about an issue that the Committee thought was important, which was the mismatch of aspiration and ability to deliver. A good proposal will often be made, such as that people, when they are first unemployed, should be given longer with an adviser. We all know that sometimes appointments with advisers are very short and they become routine—it is a matter of ticking the boxes and asking, “Have you done the right number of applications?”, without going into any real depth. Longer meetings sound very good, but there is a severe doubt whether they are feasible. The last speaker touched on that in relation to the arrangements that had been made when people came back from the Work programme. The sort of intensive help that is promised may not be feasible. If people are going to be asked to sign on every day, for example, how does that affect the rest of the jobcentre’s work? Will it be about someone just coming in, signing their name, and then going away again—in which case, how will it help? How will it improve the situation, unless it is intended to make people get fed up and give up? It is all very well to come up with these ideas, but we need to make them work, which may need a greater resource.
It is a sign of the failure of some of what we have been doing to date that so many people are coming off the Work programme and are still very far, it would appear, from employment. I think the employment Minister herself said, during one debate we had on the issue, that there were people in that situation who still had poor rates of literacy and numeracy, and one thing her Department wanted to do was to help those people overcome those obstacles. That is all well and good, but what has the Work programme been doing for two years, and indeed, what may well not have been happening before that?
It is a criticism of the Work programme that it really is not delivering what we were promised it would deliver. The criticisms made by many of my constituents have not necessarily been that they have been hounded. In some cases, it is almost the opposite: that it was very light touch, that they were not given much help and assistance, and that the idea of specialist help—I remember it was said that people would get help with health problems, debt problems, educational problems and skills problems—just is not happening. People are not able to get skills training and they are being told, “There isn’t the money to do that. We can’t afford to put you on that course. We can’t afford to pay for child care to let you go on that course and improve your chances of getting employed.”
The return of so many people, out of the Work programme, apparently still very far from being employable, is a very serious issue. As a Select Committee, we are looking at issues relating to people who have disabilities and long-term conditions and illnesses, and at what other things we could put in place for them. There is a concern that at jobcentre level, there are not enough specialists to help, and that the number of disability advisers is just not sufficient to help people at an early stage and not wait until very much later.
As I said, I hope that we will see further progress on many of the report’s recommendations, because if we share the same end, as I think we do, we have to will the means and the resources to make it happen.
Esther McVey
I appreciate the hon. Lady’s request, but she has just taken the question from the right hon. Member for Birkenhead (Mr Field). I will not be taking questions until I have finished responding to everything. I appreciate what she is doing, but I will continue.
We are also increasing technology: we will be delivering wi-fi across all jobcentres, with 6,000 new access devices. All that is key in helping to get record numbers of people into work.
Many Members mentioned segmentation, which is, of course, important and one of our aims. How do we support people best, help them and target support at them? We looked closely at the Australian jobseeker classification instrument and tested it against our own version in 2010. We found that it was not accurate enough at predicting whether someone would become long-term unemployed. For every accurate prediction, it made two wrong predictions. For that reason, it was better for us to pursue what we were doing and make our system better.
That is why we have done things such as introduce the claimant commitment. We are getting people ready for work straight away and really focusing on day-one support so that we can see whether someone needs extra IT support or NVQ maths and English training. That is what we are now doing from day one so that we understand people’s ability, or perhaps lack of ability, and how to support them.
Esther McVey
I presume that the hon. Lady wants to ask the question passed to her by her right hon. Friend the Member for Birkenhead, but go on.
Sheila Gilmore
I wanted to ask this: to what extent is the claimant commitment really a substitute for a segmentation tool? Is the Minister now saying that she has given up on looking at such a tool?
Esther McVey
Nobody has given up. That is the whole thing about welfare to work—we continue trying and we continue pilots, to see how we can best support people who need to have a job. No, the claimant commitment is not a substitute, but what we have brought in to give both sides greater certainty and it is working very well. It is also about empowering the individual who is looking for a job. Equally importantly, within it we can look at what the barriers are. They could be disability or health barriers, but we would modify the claimant commitment to reflect what somebody needs to do, so that it really is tailor-made for them.
What we have seen with the claimant commitment is that, despite what has been said today about how people who work at Jobcentre Plus feel, actual engagement and positivity within the work force has gone up by six percentage points. Again, that has to be praised, as well as being a positive step in the right direction.
Many people today have brought up the issue of sanctions. We all know that, as the right hon. Member for East Ham said, sanctions have always been a part of the benefit system, ever since it began. We know that there is a balance to be struck between providing support and expecting claimants to meet the conditions for receiving benefit. What the Government have done more than ever before is to increase that support. The number of traineeships has gone up in the past year—by more than 39%, I think. We have changed the rules and regulations, so that it is not only 16 hours that someone has to do for their traineeship; the figure can go up to 30 hours. We are looking at these practical, pragmatic steps that can be taken. We are doing all these things.
We also know that more than 70% of claimants say they are more likely to follow the benefit rules because of the sanctions that might be applied to them. So claimants themselves know that sanctions are key. Academic studies from across Europe show that when there is a sanctions system and regime, people remain in work for longer too. All these things are key in what we are doing.
Sheila Gilmore
The hon. Lady has just thrown in a statistic about attitudes of claimants, saying that 70% of people say that sanctions will make them do things differently. Is that part of some published research? Is it perhaps part of the research that we still have not seen? If so, when are we going to see it?
Esther McVey
I will give the hon. Lady a copy of that research, and there are other debates—various debates—in which it has been used. I will provide her with that information if she would find that helpful.
Most claimants do not get sanctioned. In an average month in 2013, around 5% of jobseeker’s allowance claimants and fewer than 1% of employment and support allowance claimants were sanctioned. We know that those people who follow the rules and take up all the support—
Esther McVey
We do, indeed.
We are concentrating on the hardest to help and focusing our efforts on them. As I have said, the Work programme is part of that and we have seen the results from the 1.5 million people who have gone on it: 550,000 have had a job start and 300,000 of those are in sustained jobs. Equally, our Help to Work programme is helping another 200,000 people, whom our coaches will be working with to assess their needs and refer them to further intensive support, whether daily signing or community work placement, to find out what limiting factors are not helping them into work. Is greater support needed? Is it about employability skills? Do they need more work skills? Those are the things that we are really trying to get to grips with, understand and reach out further on. Early trailblazing of this approach shows that continuing this support has a long-term positive impact on claimants. Participants spent less time on benefit and more time in work over a 21-month period.
Many questions have been asked. I shall answer some of those asked by the right hon. Member for East Ham. We have talked about good cause and personalisation, the claimant commitment and extra support, and about the whistleblowers. Yes, the Prime Minister met the Trussell Trust, as did I. I have also been to my local food bank. We will all agree—there is no doubt—that those organisations are doing a good job, supporting people, but we have to look at the bigger implications for society as a whole, which is why it was right that the Prime Minister met the Trussell Trust. We know that it was set up in what was regarded as a boom time, when things were going well, before 2007. That was back in 2002 and the organisation increased tenfold, just as it was setting up, up to 2010. It went to the then Labour Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, asking, “Would you signpost?”, but the Labour Secretary of State said, “We will not”, because the Government did not want it growing even bigger and did not want to help people out, because it was growing on the ground. However, when it approached the Secretary of State in this Government, he said, “I will signpost people to those, if need be, because you need to help people as best you can.”
So many things come into play, as the people who run food banks say: understanding how to cook; prioritisation of bills; debt; and debt cards. So many things are tangled up with this issue that we have to educate and support people, as well as doing things right in an emergency. However, this Government and Jobcentre Plus are getting it right on taking the first step to get people out of poverty, by any standard and according to all parties in the House, because we are seeing record rates of people getting into work.
Esther McVey
I have always agreed. I have met the Trussell Trust in my area and the food bank. We decided that the Prime Minister should meet him to discuss the issues.
We are increasing the percentage rate for our processing and getting more people into work.
Esther McVey
I am afraid that I will not at the moment.
When we talk about a change in culture at Jobcentre Plus, about reputation and how people feel about doing their job, the response is that there has been a significant culture change, in that staff are, ever more than before, helping people who come through the door into training and into a job. With the claimant commitment, they are really personalising that support. Yes, there has been a culture change, for the benefit of everyone.
Sheila Gilmore
Is the Minister aware of considerable research evidence showing that people on low incomes are good at budgeting, and that her attitude—that many people need somehow to be taken by the hand and taught to do basic things, such as budgeting—is intensely patronising and quite unnecessary?
Esther McVey
I certainly do not believe that I have such an attitude. I disagree on that point.
The people who come into Jobcentre Plus need help and support, and we have been led by many of those who have been in debt and have not been so good at looking at their finances, for one reason or another. Perhaps some hon. Members in this Chamber have not always been great at looking at our budgets, or support, and may have been caught unawares, if not in work and if they had been expecting a wage and not had one. It does not matter whence you come; you can always have difficulties with finances, fall on tough times and be out of work.
I certainly do not have an attitude. I always say, “Don’t pass comment on anybody else. You haven’t walked 12 miles in their shoes,” and “There but for the grace of God go I.” I work on a completely different premise to the one suggested by the hon. Lady.
We are pushing ahead with changes to our welfare system and those changes are already paying off. We are rolling out universal credit. By 2016, all new benefit claimants will be for universal credit. The majority of existing claimants will move on to UC by 2017.
I thank the Chair of the Committee and praise all the people who work in our Jobcentre Plus offices.