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UNCORRECTED TRANSCRIPT OF ORAL EVIDENCE To be published as HC 472-i House of COMMONS MINUTES OF EVIDENCE TAKEN BEFORE THE COMMITTEE OF PUBLIC ACCOUNTS Monday 31 March 2008
Increasing employment rates for ethnic minorities
DEPARTMENT FOR WORK AND PENSIONS SIR LEIGH LEWIS KCB, MS NAHID A MAJID OBE and MR CHRIS HAYES
Evidence heard in Public Questions 1 - 82
USE OF THE TRANSCRIPT
Oral evidence Taken before the Committee of Public Accounts on Monday 31 March 2008 Members present: Mr Edward Leigh, in the Chair Mr Richard Bacon Keith Hill Mr Don Touhig Mr Alan Williams Phil Wilson ________________ Mr Tim Burr, Comptroller and Auditor General, and Mr David Woodward, Director, National Audit Office, gave evidence. Mr Marius Gallaher, Alternate Treasury Officer of Accounts, HM Treasury, gave evidence. REPORT BY THE COMPTROLLER AND AUDITOR GENERAL INCREASING EMPLOYMENT RATES FOR ETHNIC MINORITIES Examination of Witnesses Witnesses: Sir Leigh Lewis KCB, Permanent Secretary; Ms Nahid A Majid OBE, Deputy Director/Head, Area Initiatives & Communities division, Department for Work and Pensions; Mr Chris Hayes, Director for London, Jobcentre Plus, gave evidence. Q1 Chairman: Good afternoon. Welcome to the Committee of Public Accounts, where today we are considering the Comptroller & Auditor General's Report on Department for Work and Pensions Increasing employment rates for ethnic minorities, and we welcome back to our Committee Sir Leigh Lewis, Permanent Secretary of the Department for Work and Pensions. Perhaps you would introduce your colleagues, Sir Leigh? Sir Leigh Lewis: On my right is Nahid Majid, who is the Deputy Director for Area Initiatives and Communities in the Department, and on my left is Chris Hayes, who is the Director for London for Jobcentre Plus. Q2 Chairman: Perhaps I can introduce my questions for you and, if you want to pass them over, you can do so. If we look at page 13, figure 2, the economic inactivity rates of ethnic minorities and the overall population, we can see pretty well a flat line, with about a third of the ethnic minority population inactive, about a third in 1997 and about a third now, and if we go to paragraph 1 on page 6 we read there that the gap costs the economy some £8.6 billion annually, just 1.3 percentage points lower than the level in 1987. That is dealing with employment rates. So you have obviously made a lot of effort over the last ten years, nobody denies that, but what is going wrong? Sir Leigh Lewis: This is a tough and difficult issue, Chairman, and it would be absolutely wrong to say otherwise. We have made some serious headway over that period and if you take the two last Spending Review periods, we hit our Spending Review 2002 target to close the employment gap and to increase the employment rate as it affects ethnic minorities, and we are on course to do so in relation to our SR04 target as well. There is no doubt, however, that this remains a difficult and challenging and multifaceted issue, and there is a very good table right at the back of the Report showing a number of international comparisons -- Q3 Chairman: I read that. Sir Leigh Lewis: -- to show that we are not remotely unique in western advanced societies in having a substantial gap in both unemployment levels and employment rates as between the white and indigenous population and ethnic minority populations. Q4 Chairman: You have made some progress, you mentioned in the last two Spending Reviews, but how much of that is due to a strong economy and, now that we may be facing difficulties in the economy, how are you going to cope with that? Are you claiming credit for a following wind? Sir Leigh Lewis: There is no doubt that part of the success that we had has been as a result of stable macro economic policies. There is a lot of evidence to show that ethnic minority employment rises, and rises disproportionately, when the economy is doing well, and that the rate tends to fall disproportionately in a downturn. Q5 Chairman: That is obvious but I just wonder how much difference your initiatives made? Sir Leigh Lewis: We believe that there have been three factors at work. One has certainly been stable macro economic policies -- Q6 Chairman: That applies to everybody, of course. Sir Leigh Lewis: It does, absolutely. Secondly, effective mainstream labour market policies, and the OECD and others have consistently complimented the United Kingdom on that, such as the New Deal and the core Jobseekers' Allowance regime, and there is no doubt that we believe that they have benefited, both ethnic minority people and our mainstream employee labour market, and, thirdly, our area-based policies, increasingly focusing resource and attention and effort on those areas of the economy where the employment rate tends to be lowest, unemployment tends to be highest and inactivity levels, to come back to your very first question, tend to be highest, and those areas tend to be ones where there are disproportionately large proportions of the ethnic minority population. Q7 Chairman: If we look at the evaluation of your various projects, which is summarised in paragraph 4.2 on page 36, we see phrases there such as stop-start and lack of continuity. When are we going to have a consistent long-term strategy to deal with this problem? Sir Leigh Lewis: We have one, Chairman, actually. It was one of the very few areas of any disagreement between ourselves and the National Audit Office in relation to this Report in that the National Audit Office said that our strategy had lacked continuity. I do not think there is any doubt between us that there was a particular period in the run-up to the launch of the deprived areas funds where there were some transitional difficulties, but I think we have been following now as a Department a pretty consistent policy for at least the last three years focusing increasingly our effort, resources and commitment on those areas both where overall concentrations of worklessness and unemployment are highest but also where disproportionately larger proportions of ethnic minority people both live and work. I think that policy, which is going in a sense to go to a new level with the creation of the Working Neighbourhoods Fund from this April with one and a half billion of committed expenditure over three years, is a consistent long-term directional policy. Q8 Chairman: If what you say about the continuity of your programmes is right, why do we read in paragraph 4.12 that, for instance, the Ethnic Minority Outreach programme was discontinued in 2006, why has the City Strategy not been rolled out nationwide? Sir Leigh Lewis: Let me take those two separately, because they are rather different. A number of the pilot programmes we had here and which the Report comments on were just that, pretty small-scale pilot programmes which were never announced or intended as going nationwide, and we learnt lessons from them all. Nevertheless we concluded, very clearly from around 2006 onwards, that the long-term direction of travel was to focus on the big areas of disadvantage, and that is the City Strategy. The City Strategy was never intended to be a nationwide programme. The City Strategy is very much a programme which is targeted at areas where there are disproportionately large amounts of worklessness. Just to give you one indication of what I was speaking about, the fifteen City Strategy Pathfinders comprise in total about 10% of the working age population, but they also include within them over 40% of the total ethnic minority working age population, so it is a very deliberate example of our strategy being targeted on those areas where both worklessness overall is disproportionately concentrated but worklessness amongst ethnic minority people is even more concentrated. Q9 Chairman: In your answer you pass quite quickly over these pilot schemes - "Well, that was something we did and we did not want to follow it through" - but after spending £40 million on them, which we see from paragraph 2.7 on page 23, what have you learnt from them? Sir Leigh Lewis: I think a lot, and in relation to 2001 there were clear lessons learnt and of course achievements in that period from each and every one of those pilots. But they were pretty small scale and would never on their own have done a huge amount to dent the employment gap that, as you pointed out in your very first question, continues to exist between the overall working age population and the ethnic minority working age population, so I do think we learnt lessons, but I do not think more widely we should ever be wholly apologetic about trying some things on a relatively small scale to see what works, what does not, and to learn the lessons. Q10 Chairman: Do you agree with your staff who say, and this is in paragraph 3.8 on page 31, "...in all the six case study conurbations we visited, where there are high concentrations of ethnic minorities, Jobcentre Plus staff told us that discrimination by employers was not a major barrier and was rarely reported to them". Do you agree with that? Sir Leigh Lewis: It is certainly true it is rarely reported to them. We know that the number of reports that are made to Jobcentre Plus total around 80 per month, though the Report does most certainly say that, where it is reported, Jobcentre Plus takes greatly effective action. I do believe discrimination is a very serious issue, to be absolutely clear. All the evidence, and there is a lot of research evidence -- Q11 Chairman: So these people are out of touch, are they? Sir Leigh Lewis: No, they are not out of touch; they are in touch with their reality. The issue is whether they are having discrimination reported to them or whether they are seeing it in their day-to-day contacts with job seekers and others, and I think they are reporting back very faithfully what they see and, as I said, there is a relatively small number of allegations of specific discrimination reported back to Jobcentre Plus month-by-month, but all the research estimates that up to half of the overall gap between the ethnic minority employment rate and the overall employment rate is attributable to discrimination. Q12 Chairman: There is a particular problem with some communities. One report which was given to me, and one should obviously not take this as Gospel, was that 72% of Bangladeshi children live in poverty, so obviously there is a particular problem with the Bangladeshi community. How proactive are you being, and how focused are you? This is much less of a problem with the Indian communities, I think. Sir Leigh Lewis: I will perhaps ask Chris Hayes, who is the director for Jobcentre Plus for London, and London contains a very large proportion of the Bangladeshi community in this country, to say something about that. Mr Hayes: There are a number of examples where we engage with particular groups and we perceive particular problems engaging with the mainstream services. I can think of two programmes in London, HopScotch is one in central London, where we aim a particular programme at the Bangladeshi community and Bangladeshi women, and there are a number of others where we, through the community organisations, try and understand why they sometimes are not engaging, what the issues are, and how we can help them move into training or into work. Q13 Chairman: One last question from me. We have concentrated a lot on the ethnic minorities and the minority community itself. What about employers? There is a very interesting case study 2 here from Leicester, on page 25, who seem to be quite successful when they go out in a proactive way into the local business community and make progress. Are you learning from this? Sir Leigh Lewis: We are absolutely up for this and absolutely up for contact with the employer. It is, in a sense, the lifeblood of Jobcentre Plus. It is its business. Without employer contact its business does not exist, and we are seeking proactively to encourage employers to widen their recruitment pools and their recruitment practices, and where we do believe that knowingly - which is rare - or unknowingly employers have recruitment practices that may be inhibiting recruitment of people from ethnic minorities, we really do want to work with them very energetically indeed. Q14 Keith Hill: I would like to take up that last area by the Chairman about the importance of outreach, particularly to the economically inactive, who are obviously amongst the hardest-to-reach section of the communities, as the Report says, and I agree with you that we ought to carry out pilots and ought to take some risk. What do we learn from the ethnic minority outreach programme? Sir Leigh Lewis: Firstly that it can work very well in individual cases, and that any attempt to deliver our services in 2008 simply from behind desks in our own offices will certainly not reach all of the people we want to reach. I have seen only in the last month or so two very successful examples of outreach in Jobcentre Plus. We took ourselves to a children's centre in Stockwell last week, where Jobcentre Plus staff are engaged in a children's centre supporting low parents, not exclusively from ethnic minorities but a very high proportion of those taking advantage of this centre work from ethnic minorities, and I spent a day myself with a charity for the homeless at Broadway in west London where, again, Jobcentre Plus are in that charity at one of its drop-in centres on an outreach basis. So what we have learnt is that outreach is really important. Also, we have learnt that to attempt to set down a set of rules for outreach from a head office in London or Sheffield or, for that matter, Edinburgh is not going to work. You have to let these things grow organically at local level because it is at local level that people know what kind of outreach is going to deliver most. Q15 Keith Hill: I have prepared all sorts of questions on the success of ethnic minority outreach, but what is replacing that kind of programme now? Sir Leigh Lewis: In one sense I am not sure that anything is replacing it, in a sense I think it is taking place, and we still have just a small programme continuing for outreach for partners of ethnic minority people, but what has changed is not that we were doing outreach and now we are not doing outreach, to say that would be a complete misunderstanding of the position; what has changed is that as part of our City Strategy programmes, as part of the Deprived Area Fund, as part of what is going to be the Working Neighbourhood Fund, we are trying to put far more of the decision-making and the resources and control into the hands of local partnerships in key areas where there are very high proportions of both workless and ethnic minority workless people precisely so they can tailor outreach programmes to the needs of those communities. Q16 Keith Hill: Give me some examples of the work, then, that is being done under this new decentralised approach? Sir Leigh Lewis: Well, just to give you that Stockwell example, there is a children's centre; it is providing regular two week courses for lone parents typically who have been out of the labour market for some considerable period of time. As it happens those courses are delivered in a children's centre which happens to be adjacent to a local primary school with also a day care centre on site, so it is a very effective venue where lone parents feel very comfortable. What was very interesting there was that, although the predominant proportion of people on the course we saw and on the courses they are running were from ethnic minorities they were not exclusively from ethnic minorities, and I think that was a very good example. Perhaps, again, I might look to Chris, who is closer inevitably to London and individual projects, to say something about that as well. Mr Hayes: There are a number of examples. In general Jobcentre Plus advisers operate in most children's centres, so we have programmes operating in areas where there are high concentrations of customers. We have particular routeway examples where we are working with ethnic minority communities and with employers in the area to try and build a line of sight, a path, between being out of work and, through training, into work and there are numerous examples of where we are involved with faith communities, because there are communities that we cannot ourselves directly engage with or would not want to engage with, so we need to go through intermediaries. Q17 Keith Hill: Let me interrupt you there, because one of the criticisms made by the NAO is that in abandoning a programme like ethnic minority outreach you were precisely putting at risk the relationships that Jobcentre Plus has developed with community and voluntary organisations. Mr Hayes: I see this as an evolutionary approach in that we have tried a number of things to understand how best we can engage with communities, and ethnic minority outreach really outlined for us how it was important to go via representative groups and community groups to get to the customers. Q18 Keith Hill: But do you accept the criticism that, by dint of abandoning a programme like that, you are losing that involvement of voluntary and community sector organisations in outreach. Mr Hayes: It is true to say that a number of programmes, because the funding was not there, were wound up but the relationships remain. Some programmes were continued and different funding streams were sought and agreed, but I think the key lessons and the key achievements in those programmes were to build relationships with local communities, and that has continued through the Disadvantaged Ward Fund programme, it will be continued through the Working Neighbourhoods Fund, and through the local area agreements which we now agree with local authorities. Q19 Keith Hill: Can I now take you to specifically the economically inactive, those not claiming benefits and the approach to those and to page 32, paragraphs 3.13-15 of the NAO Report, which deals with outcome targets? It appears to me that, to say the least, there is some complexity about the measures of success of these outcome targets and, in particular, if you look at paragraph 3.14, it observes that 47% of non employed ethnic minority people fell into Priority Group 4, where the incentives are considerably less, that is to say the incentives for the Jobcentre Plus system to acquire points in terms of its PSA target, et cetera. I need to obviously ask you whether you are satisfied that a targets arrangement where half the potential customers fall into the lowest priority band can be justified? Sir Leigh Lewis: I have sat on both sides of the target setting regime, if you will, because I was the Jobcentre Plus chief executive and, therefore, I was responsible for delivering targets and as the Permanent Secretary I am responsible for advising ministers on the targets, and for any set of targets you have to work quite hard to get the right incentive structure. The target structure we have for Jobcentre Plus is a good one; it certainly resonates on the ground, there is no doubt, with individual members of staff. Q20 Keith Hill: You say it is a good one but let me just address your attention to paragraph 3.15 on this outcome system, where it says specifically in terms that there were concerns when the system was introduced about how staff would be incentivised and their performance measured because of the remove between the way in which the assessment was made and the immediate results they saw on the ground, as it were. Sir Leigh Lewis: There are two points. Firstly, even for Priority Group 4 which, as you say, only has a standard point tariff, if you will, of two points, you get extra points if the individual who is able to take work is in either a disadvantaged group ward or in what is called a disadvantaged area ward, and the first of those specifically relates to, amongst other things, the average ethnic minority population in the area. So even within the standard structure there are further additional incentives for people living in disadvantaged groups and disadvantaged areas. The second point is the broader issue of the change from what used to be called the job entry target to what is now called the job outcome target. The job entry target was very immediate; you submitted a person that day to a job, you sought to get in touch with the employer to find out if they had got the job and, if they had, you scored a point or two points or four points or whatever for the group of the individual. It did have an immediacy; it did also, though, have some serious downsides in that it encouraged very much attention to those people who were perhaps furthest away from the labour market because they were least likely to get the jobs, and it also caused there to be a very large industry, I have to say, of people and resource simply in following up submissions to employers, which was not a hugely value-added part of the Jobcentre Plus business. The job outcome target -- Chairman: You are so well briefed that you go on too long, and it is not fair on my colleague. Let him have a chance, now, to ask his question. Q21 Keith Hill: I would just like to hear, in a nutshell, as it were, about the job outcomes system. Sir Leigh Lewis: The benefit of the job outcomes system is it incentivises the work we do with people who are furthest away from the labour market. Q22 Mr Bacon: Sir Leigh, may I start by asking about the language courses which are referred to on page 29? The right hand column refers to the need of many ethnic minority customers to learn English, and to the need for English for speakers for other languages, ESOL. Under the third bullet point it says "Training providers are of variable quality...personal advisers told us it can take a considerable time for quality issues they raise to be addressed". Slightly above it says that the quality of some courses is good and in high demand but the quality of others is sometimes very poor. "For example some customers finish courses with the same level of language skills as they started with". That is very worrying. I once worked as a volunteer teaching English as a foreign language, and I found that the tuition was not frequent enough to result in anything other than what is described there, that the students at the end would have the same level they started with. These are presumably more frequent courses than the volunteer one that I was involved with, and yet in some cases customers are finishing courses with the same level of language skills they started with and contract management does not appear to be doing anything about it. Sir Leigh Lewis: I certainly do not want to suggest that every course that is provided for us is perfect because it is not, but we certainly do manage these strongly. It is worth saying that all our New Deal primary contracts are inspected by Ofsted -- Q23 Mr Bacon: How often? Sir Leigh Lewis: I do not know the frequency, so I would need to drop you a note on that. Q24 Mr Bacon: It strikes me that perhaps some of them do not need that much inspection but some of them probably should be inspected every 6-12 weeks. You should not really be waiting a year after a personal adviser tells the Department something is wrong and there are still serious problems to be addressed. It is as if somebody is ticking a box saying that they are on course, and that will do. Sir Leigh Lewis: I do not think it will do. Perhaps, again, I could hand over to Chris on this. Mr Hayes: We have regular meetings with our providers who provide a range of services, including language services, and to each of those meetings we invite the relevant manager of that district, so we have the ability to raise issues within a few days or weeks of issues on the ground being raised about quality. Q25 Mr Bacon: According to this it just does not always happen. You have the ability to do it within a few weeks but still, twelve months later, nothing has happened. That is what this is saying. Sir Leigh Lewis: Clearly there is a case there with which I am not familiar but the system is we meet with our providers on a monthly basis and we discuss with them any problems of quality or of managing volumes that have occurred in the previous month. They are very responsive to looking at their own quality within that cycle of meetings, and that is outside and in addition to any regular inspections by Ofsted. Q26 Mr Bacon: Sir Leigh, it says here that contract management is undertaken by five operational procurement units within the Department. How much does each of those units spend on procurement from these providers? Sir Leigh Lewis: We spend overall many hundreds of millions of pounds on our employment programmes right across the entire Department. Q27 Mr Bacon: And those operational procurement units cover the whole piece? Sir Leigh Lewis: Yes. Our contracting used to be done by Jobcentre Plus and we have moved it within the last couple of years into the core of the Department. One of the reasons for doing that was that it was always in some senses going to be incidental to Jobcentre Plus' main business to run a contracting and procurement function, whereas we believe we have a genuinely professional procurement and contracting function within the main Department which scores very highly on cross-government capability review tests and so on, and we think we are now getting more professional at contract management than we were. Q28 Mr Bacon: That is good to hear. I would like to move on so perhaps you can send us a note particularly on this issue of language training, because I am of the view that good training is priceless, so not only if it is not good is it a waste of taxpayers' money but it is worse than useless because it may create the impression that something is being done when it is not, so can you send us a note on what is going on, how many courses there are, how many students, and how much money is spent on it right across the country. Sir Leigh Lewis: I have some of those facts here, but I can happily write to you. Q29 Mr Bacon: I wanted to ask Nahid Majid a question. You are a British Bangladeshi, according to your CV, and, if I may say so, obviously very successful so you must, to some extent, be a role model for your community. It is quite clear from figures 4, 5 and 6 on pages 14 and 15, and the clearest one is perhaps the economically inactive by gender, figure 6, where the light grey line, that is economically inactive women, is highest by far for Pakistani and Bangladeshi. Is that mostly due to age? Is it older women from a traditional background who came to this country in adulthood, and that is why there is a skew there? Ms Majid: It is probably referring to first generations of people, yes, and some of the work we have been doing has been to look at that figure and looking at the perceptions and misconceptions in terms of why Bangladeshi or Pakistani women may not be entering into the labour market. We have done an interesting piece of work with MORI and the EOC working with local employers, which Caroline Flint, our previous MOS, hosted, which was looking at the misconceptions between employers and Pakistani and Bangladeshi women about why they did or did not want to work, and there are a lot of misconceptions. Q30 Mr Bacon: If you were to break down this chart by age into, say, whatever the standard age classifications are, 18-24, 24-30, whatever, would it reveal a very different picture? For British Bangladeshi women under 30 what would the rate be, for example? Ms Majid: I would think the rate would be much higher in terms of employment definitely. Q31 Mr Bacon: Do you have any figures you can send us across the piece, broken down by age? That would be interesting. The age data is something you have, is it? Sir Leigh Lewis: The honest truth is I do not know if we have it so we will look and, if we have, we will gladly send it to you. Q32 Mr Bacon: Sir Leigh, it says in your CV that you are an active member of the Jewish community, and I think I am right in saying there are only 270,000 Jewish people in the UK, it is a very small community, and in the chart on page 17 if there were a line there for a Jewish community it would be quite near the bottom, between Bangladeshi and Chinese, except it is not there because I do not think anyone thinks the Jewish community is discriminated against in a systematic way and that recruitment is phenomenally successful. What do you attribute that to? Because it is not simply the case that the Jewish community has been here a long time. As ethnic minority campaigners will tell you, there have been Black people in Liverpool for 400 years, Indian people from the south continent here for 200, and many Jewish people who have only been here for 50-70, in many cases people who fled continental Europe in the '30s. What is the secret of the Jewish communities' success? Sir Leigh Lewis: I am rather hard pressed to answer that because although I am Jewish, and proud to be, just as I am very proud to be British, I have never studied, if you will, my own community in the level of detail perhaps that would be required to answer your question. At the risk of generalising -- Q33 Mr Bacon: I do not mind generalising. I am after a generalisation. Sir Leigh Lewis: -- at the risk of generalising the Jewish community has always had a characteristic of placing a considerable value within the family on learning and on advancement. My own grandparents came into this country as refugees at the turn of the 20th century and even with communities which came in and were at that time impoverished and living a difficult existence, there was always a sense of seeking to promote the benefits, of learning and of skills and of advancement within a kind of a family structure which gave recognition to those elements, and that may be part of the reason. Q34 Mr Bacon: What data exists in the senior Civil Service about the ethnic minority composition of the senior Civil Service? Can you give us details about that? Sir Leigh Lewis: We do know quite a bit about that. Q35 Mr Bacon: Because one of the other noticeable things is that over the years since I have been on this Committee, since 2001, we have had many witnesses from an Asian background - and I mean countless witnesses, I would not be able to count them - but witnesses from an AfroCaribbean background I could probably count on the fingers of one, perhaps two, hands. Sir Leigh Lewis: If I just give you the figures I have in front of me, if you take Whitehall as a whole, last October just under 9% of all civil servants and 3.5% of the senior Civil Service were from ethnic minorities. Q36 Mr Bacon: It is the senior Civil Service I am interested in, the top 3,000. Sir Leigh Lewis: 3.4% of the senior Civil Service were from ethnic minorities. In our own Department it is a little higher than that, just over 4%, and that is slowly inching its way up. Q37 Mr Bacon: Do you have a breakdown in the same format as this Report of those 3.4%? Sir Leigh Lewis: Again, because these are Cabinet Office health statistics, I would need to check and see if I can provide them for you. Q38 Mr Bacon: That would be helpful. I am just wondering, and this may be a question for the NAO, whether it would be possible to get similar figures, for example, for the number of directors of FTSE 250 companies which would be roughly a similar size of cohort as the senior Civil Service. Is that possible? Mr Burr: I do not know whether those figures exist, but we could check. Mr Bacon: That would be very helpful. Q39 Mr Touhig: Sir Leigh, the pilot schemes begun by your Department in 2002 appear to have met with some success. We see in figure 15 on page 24 the figure for Ethnic Minority Outreach, over 13,000 job entries, and for the Ethnic Minority Flexible Fund the "Planning assumption" was 500 jobs and two and a half thousand job entries were achieved. You described these to the Chairman as small scale, as pilot schemes, and you said you spent £40 million on them, but you also told the Chairman you never intended to roll them out, so what was the point? Sir Leigh Lewis: What I was seeking to say was that we did not start off with an absolute commitment that they were going to roll out, and in small scale everything is relative. The Working Neighbourhoods Fund is going to spend £1.5 billion ever three years targeted on 60 or so local authorities at most disadvantage. What we were trying to do in that era, because we were recognising that the employment gap for people from ethnic minorities remained persistently large, even though we were having some success, was to see whether, by targeting specifically ethnic minority people, we could do something in a sense which would make a step-change improvement in their position. It is fair to say that nothing we did persuaded us that we could through that route alone, and that is why increasingly, from early 2006 onwards, we have moved towards focusing a strategic way on those areas of the country, particularly our cities but not absolutely exclusively our cities, where there is the highest concentration of both workless people overall and workless people from ethnic minority communities? Q40 Mr Touhig: Yes, but I can understand you saying: "There is a pilot scheme, it has not worked, we will not roll it out", yet you had some success and then told us you never intended to use it as a national scheme in the first place. What it is point in spending £40 million on it? Sir Leigh Lewis: The point was to learn some real lessons, which we did, and which we have incorporated in our City Strategy and in our Deprived Areas Fund and now in the Working Neighbourhoods Fund. Chris Hayes used the word "evolution", so it was not a question of us starting something and then saying, "Oh, gosh, this was a complete waste of time; let's just abandon it". Q41 Mr Touhig: It was not a waste of time; it actually made some progress. Sir Leigh Lewis: Indeed. They varied in their success rate and cost per job and so on but each one taught us some lessons, and we took those lessons, as we have set out in various Green and White Papers that the Department has produced, and very much incorporated them in the mood of focusing very much on disadvantaged areas. Q42 Mr Touhig: But there is still a 40% gap between employment rates and the rest of the population, and it seems to me that, having spent £40 million on some small-scale schemes, as you describe them, which worked to some degree, you have now abandoned them in favour of a one-size-fits-all approach? Sir Leigh Lewis: Absolutely not a one-size-fits-all approach. That would be us sitting in our office in London or wherever and simply saying "This is how we will do it". That is the very opposite of where we have been going. A good example of where we have been going is City Strategy Pathfinders, which is increasingly saying that the problems of Manchester are not necessarily the problems of, say, Heads of the Valleys, which are two of the Pathfinder areas. Interestingly, City Strategy Pathfinders have only 7% of total wards and 10% of the working age population, yet they include over 40% of the total ethnic minority working population. Q43 Mr Touhig: I assume you agree with the Report which does tell us that since 2006 the Department has shifted away from specific help to boost ethnic minority employment rates towards more general methods to help disadvantaged groups, so you are not now specific, you are more general. A one-size-fits-all approach is how you are tackling this. Sir Leigh Lewis: I do not think so. Of course I agree with the Report but that is not, I think, what the Report is saying. Q44 Mr Touhig: Well, it does say that. It clearly says that you have shifted away from specific help to boost ethnic minority employment rates towards general measures. It cannot be clearer than that. Sir Leigh Lewis: No, but my point is general measures do not equate to one-size-fits-all measures. Q45 Mr Touhig: What do they equate to, then? Sir Leigh Lewis: What they equate to is focusing on those areas where worklessness is concentrated and where worklessness amongst a number of disadvantaged groups is concentrated. If you take the City Strategy Pathfinders, the Deprived Areas Fund and the Working Neighbourhoods Fund, they are slightly different but all are targeted on areas of particularly high concentrations of worklessness and other areas of disadvantage. Q46 Mr Touhig: So if you are not living in one of those large areas of concentration then you do not get the focal support? Sir Leigh Lewis: There is still a lot of mainstream support in the system -- Q47 Mr Touhig: You are shaking your head one way and Mr Hayes is shaking his head the other. I am not clear. Sir Leigh Lewis: I will let Mr Hayes speak for himself in a moment, but there is still mainstream support. In a sense, an 80:20 principle has to apply in government as elsewhere, and if you target absolutely everything equally then you get an equal response everywhere. We are deliberately, as a conscious act of policy, focusing on those areas which have the highest concentrations of both deprivation and worklessness, because that is where we believe that we can get the best return for each pound of the taxpayers' money. Q48 Mr Touhig: You are looking for quick hits, though, are you not? Sir Leigh Lewis: No. Q49 Mr Touhig: "Large concentrations, large numbers of people, let's get a few ticks in the box, and if you do not live in a large conurbation ...". We do not have large numbers of people from ethnic communities in the Welsh valleys so they would not get much support and help then. Sir Leigh Lewis: But it is quite interesting, is it not, that two of our City Strategy Pathfinders are Heads of the Valleys and Rhyl -- Q50 Mr Touhig: I was involved in those when I was a Welsh minister, yes. Sir Leigh Lewis: Absolutely, and both of those, as you will know, have only around 1% of ethnic minority people, but they have other significant concentrations. Q51 Mr Touhig: But they do not have the concentrations of places like Cardiff and Newport. Sir Leigh Lewis: And that is why we still have, just to be clear, very successful mainstream services available everywhere to everyone which have consistently been complimented by OECD and others. Q52 Mr Touhig: It is just that this Report does not say that this is exactly what is happening, and I do come back to this one-size-fits-all approach because this is surely one group in society where there are linguistic differences, cultural differences, questions about women in employment and reluctance in some communities for women to be in employment, basic skills challenges and so on, so surely this is one area where if we are to succeed in reducing the numbers of unemployed we have to be much more focused? Sir Leigh Lewis: Majid might want to say something about this, because this is absolutely her bread and butter, in her job every day. Ms Majid: What you have highlighted is exactly right: the complexity and magnitude of the problems. It is certainly not about one size fitting all, but actually having a strategic overview of the issues around concentrated deprivation. One of the big factors around the city strategy is not just to look at the small-scale programmes but to align funds so that you can have maximum impact. For example, we are very pleased to say that the Manchester pathfinders are co-ordinating very well with the Regional Development Agency, where they have got an extra £4 million towards their city strategy. Q53 Don Touhig: You talk about city strategies, but the report states in paragraph 2.24: "There is a risk that city strategies will not adequately address the needs of ethnic minorities." I recall very often you launched action areas in Jobcentre Plus in the past; you focused them; you empowered the people and gave them budgets to control, and they actually took individuals into work; it was very focused and it worked. It seems to me now, with this particular case, that you are moving away to a general approach. You will not accept my comment, but that is how it appears to me. Ms Majid: We have been very successful in negotiating local targets with the city strategy pathfinders, and we can say quite proudly that out of the 15 pathfinders, 13 have all agreed to signing up to ethnic minority targets, and we are now securing figures around that. Obviously, the real and the heads of family which - we are not requiring them to have a local ethnic minority target. I think the city strategy offers a huge opportunity, and, quite rightly, the Audit Office has noted that there are some difficulties associated with that. Q54 Don Touhig: I appreciate the point you are making. I just want to come back to the point I made a moment ago: the report tells us you are shifting away from specific help to general help. Sir Leigh, I am astonished to see in paragraph 1.7 that the Department will no longer have specific PSA targets. Have they gone out of fashion; are they too tough to meet, or what? Sir Leigh Lewis: I just think that this is much more appearance than real. Can I say exactly what the position is? Q55 Don Touhig: It was all candyfloss in the first place, was it? Sir Leigh Lewis: No, it was most certainly not candyfloss in the first place. We are proud of the fact that we hit both our SRO2 target and we look like hitting our SRO4 target for reducing the gap as it affects people from ethnic minorities. In relation to SRO7, we lead on two PSAs right across Government, and only two in DWP. One of those is to maximise employment opportunity for all. It has four indicators that sit behind it under which progress against that target will be judged, and the second of those four is a narrowing of the gap between the employment rate for ethnic minorities people and the overall rate. Actually, it is a wider, different PSA structure within Government. The practical effect is that we have exactly the same concentration on this issue as before. Q56 Don Touhig: The report tells us you will not have specific PSA targets for employment rates among ethnic minorities. Sir Leigh Lewis: That is because the Government has reduced from having more than a hundred PSAs to thirty - that is across Government. It is the intention to have fewer but broader PSA targets, but within one of the only two PSA targets on which the Department leads, we have a very specific indicator, which is precisely the same as we had in 02 and 04. Don Touhig: All down to fashion, I think, Sir Leigh! Q57 Chairman: I just wonder, Sir Leigh, whether we are being honest with ourselves! Following on the question put to you by my colleague, I have always been a huge admirer of the Jewish community in this country, and you mentioned the desire for education, but also, be honest, it is a desire for assimilation, is it not, on behalf of the Jewish community here, an absolute determination to assimilate here. We see in this report a huge difference between success in the Indian and Bangladeshi community. It may be that the Bangladeshi communities come more from rural areas and the Indian community is more middle-class, but surely there is a question of a desire for assimilation here; and what are you doing to promote it; or do you disagree with what I have just said to you? Sir Leigh Lewis: It is a line of questioning that I did not quite expect to focus on the Jewish community; but in one sense ----- Q58 Chairman: Pass it to your colleague if it embarrasses you. Sir Leigh Lewis: It does not embarrass me at all, Chairman. I will just speak for myself, and then Nahid. I do not think one should see assimilation or retaining a cultural identity as opposites. You can have a very proud identity with your community and be part of the wider community. Q59 Chairman: We all accept that, but we do not want people to be stuck in ghettos, do we? Sir Leigh Lewis: No, I agree with that - absolutely. Ms Majid: If I can refer it back to what the city strategy is about, the whole nature of communities has changed quite substantially. For example, when we had the pleasure to see the children's centre in Stockwell the other day, it was quite clear to us that the nature of the communities has changed so much that by focusing just on ethnic minorities we would emulate those communities; so it was quite good that we were focusing on a range of disadvantaged communities. One of the big things that came out of that discussion was that it enabled them to assimilate with other communities that were in the same position. Q60 Phil Wilson: The first paragraph on page 30 is about employer satisfaction. It says it has improved over the years, but it is still only 45%, on the way to 50%, that are most satisfied with the quality of candidates provided, although this was an improvement on the previous year. What are we doing to get that figure down? Why is it at that level? Sir Leigh Lewis: I will say a word or two just on some of the numbers, and then perhaps ask Chris Hayes, who is closer to Jobcentre Plus's employer customers day by day. It is worth saying that the last survey we did of employers that used Jobcentre Plus services in 2006/2007 found that three-quarters were satisfied with the overall levels of service. I have a lot of detail here that I will not bore you with. On almost every specific indicator within the survey the level of employer satisfaction with Jobcentre Plus had increased compared with the previous survey, which was done in 2004. We certainly seem to be seeing Jobcentre Plus's standing with employers improving. Mr Hayes: We do have a specific target within Jobcentre Plus to measure employer satisfaction with particularly the candidates we send to them, and that is done by independent survey. We get the results on a monthly basis. We are very aware and very responsive to the results that we get from those surveys. Those show on average that we are achieving about 73.5% of satisfaction from employers that we survey on that basis in terms of very specifically the candidates we provide for them. We are now trying to move to a different relationship with employers through the local employment partnership initiative, and that is where we are asking employers to work with us, particularly with our priority groups, to have a much more longer-term strategic understanding with us. The simple deal there is that we will try and understand their training needs over a longer term; and we will then get from them a commitment to look seriously at people from our priority groups in considering recruitment into the vacancies they have. In that way, we are getting a much better relationship with employers; and they understand that in some cases some of our priority group customers are a bit further away from the labour market, and we might both need to do a little bit more to help them into employment, and into sustainable employment. Q61 Phil Wilson: There is another survey that I want to ask a couple of questions on, which is on pages 34-35, the survey that you have done on satisfaction amongst people from ethnic minorities. There are some issues that have been raised which I found interesting. One of the main concerns amongst ethnic minorities claiming incapacity benefit and income support relates to staff attitudes, which is the most common cause of potential complaint across the ethnic groups. Can you extrapolate from that or do anything to change it? Sir Leigh Lewis: Let me say something! If the Committee would find it helpful, we have a little bit of recent data that was not available when the report was put to bed, because we have had now the 2007 Jobcentre Plus customer satisfaction survey, which we published earlier this month. Overall, in that survey in 2005 ethnicity seems to play a relatively minor role in the extent to which people are or are not satisfied with Jobcentre Plus services; so it does not vary very much by ethnicity. There is some good news - a lot of good news actually! The report said that the overwhelming majority of Jobcentre Plus customers, 80%, said they were either satisfied or very satisfied with the service. One in five felt that the quality of service had improved over the previous 12 months; and only 5 per cent felt it had declined. This is worth saying, I think: customers from non-white groups were amongst those most likely to have perceived an improvement in the service. So 80% felt they were satisfied or very satisfied, which still leaves 20 per cent who were not. That is not sufficiently good; but these are quite encouraging results that we have been getting. Q62 Phil Wilson: This might also be an update, but paragraph 3.23, the last sentence, reads: "Although overall more ethnic minorities than whites felt service had improved over the past year, more Mixed and Black Caribbeans felt the service had got worse." Why would they have a different view to the other ethnic minorities? Sir Leigh Lewis: That is hard to say. One thing which goes into these technical difficulties - I have explored some of this in preparing for this hearing at great length and the more you explore in some senses the less you are clear that you really understand it. What we get down to here is some very small sample sizes, even with a big survey, when you are trying to get down to communities within communities, if you will; you end up with some quite small sample sizes. So while there are some differences between different parts of the ethnic minority group overall, I do not think we should put too much weight on relatively small differences amongst communities. Q63 Phil Wilson: The last sentence of paragraph 2.35 states: "Focus group participants were unaware of the range of Jobcentre Plus programmes available to help them into work and thought there should be more advertising and provision of services out in their communities." How are you getting round that, to advertise? Sir Leigh Lewis: Again, Chris might want to say something at a local level. At a national level, trying to promote very hard the programmes that are there. It goes back to our outreach question; it is not just through ourselves but through a whole range of our partners with whom we work, because quite often they can be better advocates for some of these programmes than can we. Mr Hayes: Each district manager who would manage a fair proportion of a geographical area has very specific partnership plans, and, in that, very specific guidance about how to ensure that communities are aware of services and how they are accessing services. A good example is the children's centre we went to in Stockwell where our advisers are on site, talking to parents as they come in; and also we have got various literature on site that parents who maybe do not see the advisers can pick up, with contact numbers. We are increasingly trying to get out into community centres and children's centres, and also we are trying to operate some of our services for lone parents in particular from employer premises so that we can bring lone parents into employer premises so that they can understand what the workplace is like. Those messages can go out to their peer group, and they can influence their peer group to access our mainstream services. Q64 Phil Wilson: Moving to the same kind of area about how people from ethnic minorities, when they go into Jobcentre Plus, are approached and how they interface with the staff that are there, paragraphs 3.19 and 3.20 are about how you disseminate good practice. Paragraph 3.19 mentions conferences et cetera, which you no longer do; but now you try and disseminate information on best practice through the Internet, which all seems great. Then we read in paragraph 3.20: "At local level we found that few staff in Jobcentre Plus offices accessed examples of good practice." So the information is there and in theory it sounds great, but in practice it does not seem to be happening. How do you square that circle? Mr Hayes: We considered that comment and in any event we were refreshing the material we had on the internal intranet site for our people to make sure that there is a range of information available to them; and that it contains all that they need to be aware of services, both that Jobcentre Plus provides but also as importantly other organisations provide in that area. We also have a training programme whereby each new advisor within the first three months will undertake at least three modules, which talk to them about diversity, discrimination and cultural awareness. Once the adviser has gone through that programme we then obviously regularly measure the quality of engagement that they have with customers through various mechanisms. One is that their manager will sit with them through interviews and pick up any training needs - not just training technically but also in terms of general awareness. The officers also have every Wednesday - the office is open a little later and we feed in information there, and we offer advice to organisations from the community to keep their awareness up. We are very conscious of the fact that we need to constantly reinforce these messages and keep them up to date. In that particular area we are about to launch a new intranet site, which will hopefully help our people to have that up-to-date information. Q65 Phil Wilson: In paragraph 3.16, on personal advisers; it basically says they do not have the time anyway; they are too busy to sit down and access the information. In some areas it does not effectively cover the diverse cultures of the customers that they are dealing with on a regular basis. Again, it is the theory and the practice; we still have the same issue whereby once you have revamped the products suite it is getting the staff to sit down and do this in a practical sense, rather than listening to all the theory. Sir Leigh Lewis: Can I just say a word on this? As ever, and I have used this phrase before this Committee before, there is always a bottle half full and a bottle half empty. The half-full bottle is that we have 9,000 Jobcentre Plus advisers; and the report in a number of places said how impressed it was with what they do and what they succeed in doing. I have no doubt at all that there are thousands upon thousands upon thousands of people who are in work and employment today who would not have been there without the support of some incredibly dedicated personal advisers in my Department. Always there could be more. You could give them more time for everything. There is always a trade-off in the end between the resource that you can provide and the need that ultimately they could deal with. The fact that we have 9,000 advisers in Jobcentre Plus who, by common consent - and indeed the National Audit Office did a report only recently on advisers themselves - every report says that these are impressive people with real commitment, who change people's lives for the better every working day - I think this bottle is a long way more than half-full! Q66 Mr Williams: The Chairman referred earlier to the fact that you piloted a substantial number of initiatives which never really went anywhere. You completed pilots, but, as he said, they were not rolled out. The NAO suggests that they got off to a slow start, were too short, and failed to reach their full potential. Is that not a diagnosis of waste? Sir Leigh Lewis: I do think that in some cases, over a long time in Government, we have tended to run too many small initiatives. Any small initiative takes time to get off the ground and gather momentum, and it takes time to deliver results. That takes us back to the conversation that I was having with your colleague Mr Touhig; I think that actually we are on a more sustainable long-term strategic direction now, which is focusing on those areas where worklessness is at its highest. Q67 Mr Williams: C&AG, do you think that they were premature in killing some of these schemes off? Mr Burr: I think that there certainly might have been more mileage in some of them, yes. Q68 Mr Williams: But you choose to disagree. Have you had discussions between yourselves about the different value judgments? Sir Leigh Lewis: It is fair to say we have. There is only one judgment of any seriousness in this report which is disagreed, in a report that is otherwise wholly agreed, which would normally be the case, which is that we did not accept the view of the National Audit Office that there had been a lack of continuity in our programmes. We did accept that there were some transitional difficulties in one particular year. That was just one area of disagreement between us. Q69 Mr Williams: Again, with Mr Touhig you explained the absence of a public service agreement target, with some reference to general policy about reducing public service agreements or targets and so on, but you reduced the absence of them in relation to ethnic minority employment. Are you absolutely sure they would not be helpful, these targets? Sir Leigh Lewis: I can give this Committee an absolute assurance that there will be no diminution of the effort that my Department is applying to supporting people from ethnic minorities into work. Indeed, the report does say - and we were grateful to it - that there has been huge commitment from my Department over a very long period of time, and much impressive achievement. The target structure is different because, if you like, the over-arching way in which the Government has designed targets for the SRO7 spending round is different; but the fact of the matter is that within one of the only two PSA targets which we lead on in Government, there is an absolutely clear indicator, without which we cannot succeed in delivering that target, which is a narrowing of the gap between the employment rate for people of ethnic minorities and the overall rate. That is exactly where we have been in SRO4 and SRO2 and there will be no diminution of effort whatsoever. Q70 Mr Williams: Was it your decision or was it a decision imposed on you not to have a target? Sir Leigh Lewis: The decision to have a new structure for public service agreements was a collective Government decision taken across Government. Q71 Mr Williams: If it had not been for that, would you have continued ----- Sir Leigh Lewis: I am not sure if it is pleading the Fifth Amendment, Chairman, at this point, but I do not think I am going to set out hypothetically my own views. I think the Government took a decision to have a smaller number of public service agreements precisely because of a view that actually having a very large number of PSA targets was probably not helping in the real intention of joining up Government. That, I think, is actually - for what it is worth, and I think it was the right decision - is having benefits in causing departments, including my own, to work together more closely. I just want to come back again - because it is an important issue - there will be no diminution of effort from my Department in this respect. Q72 Mr Williams: I noticed the dubiety at the start of your comments there. Without targets your practice of devolving funding surely makes it much more difficult for you to judge effectiveness! Sir Leigh Lewis: I probably need to say, so that it is there on the record, that we are not without targets. The target is the same target; it simply sits under a different structure, so I think it is just important to say that. As Nahid Majid explained earlier, if you take our city strategy areas almost without exception they have targets that they have arrived at locally, which are for reducing the gap between ethnic minority employment and other employment or increasing the employment rate for people from ethnic minorities. There can actually be a very good reason - will you bear with me for a half a minute - for not imposing targets from the top. Remember, I said that I have been at both ends of this. If you set a target from the top down, you simply say: "Here is a target. I have decided it is a good thing. Now you go and deliver it." You may get buy-in or you may not. The great thing, I think, in terms of our city strategies is that by giving that authority, giving that ability to create targets for people locally within the framework of what they believe to be important, we have much more chance that we will have targets that people genuinely own and will be striving to deliver. Q73 Mr Williams: How do they devise their targets and how do you know they are right? Sir Leigh Lewis: Because each of the city strategy pathfinders has a board, one of whose tasks is, as part of the overall strategy, to decide in the overall framework what they believe to be the targets that are right for their area. Ms Majid: Can I give you some examples? The Birmingham pathfinder, which has an ethnic minority population of 37%, has agreed a target reduction of 1.3% per year, a reduction in terms of the unemployment rate. In another case, for example, South Yorkshire has developed six local targets and they aim to achieve a 60% employment rate of their ethnic minorities by 2010 by narrowing the ethnic minority gap by 7.2%. If we did impose a target, it would not be specific to individual localities and the issues around those localities. Q74 Mr Williams: On page 32 in banner headline it states, "Personal advisers play a key role in getting ethnic minority customers into employment". Yet those very same advisers who spoke to the NAO said that they did not consider they were given adequate training. Are they right or are they wrong? Sir Leigh Lewis: I am not going to say that any member of my staff who says something to the NAO is simply wrong. What I would stress is that we invest very, very substantial amounts in training for our Jobcentre Plus advisers. Chris Hayes has already set out specifically, but we have two days for a new adviser and equal opportunities awareness training, two days tackling race discrimination and valuing cultural diversity training. I think we have a very good record in the DWP in investing in the training of our staff. I dare say if every employer in the country invested in training of their staff to the degree we do, we would see some benefits in the wider economy. You can always do more. You never get to the point where it is perfect or it is absolutely enough. I am sure that at the level of individual advisers there is still a feeling they would benefit from more, but there is a very heavy investment in the training of advisers, as in having advisers at all. Q75 Mr Williams: The Department argues that there is plenty of training material available for them, but they come back and say they just do not have time to access it. What are you going to do about that? Sir Leigh Lewis: Chris Hayes has already in a way tried to respond to that issue. Again, there is no perfect issue here. We cannot rely solely in a large organisation - and I was Chief Executive of Jobcentre Plus and the Employment Service before it - on people accessing Internet guidance. As Chris was describing, we do lots of other things, bringing community organisations into our offices and giving the time for people to have away from their desks to discuss, learn and concentrate on those issues. In any large organisation today there is a slight sort of romantic-looking back to an age where all training was chalk and talk, all training was done away from the workplace, in effect the classroom, et cetera. That world has moved on, and I do not think there is a major organisation, public or private, today which does not use the Internet or in our case the intranet for part - by no means all - of the training of its people. Q76 Mr Williams: It says that the Jobcentre Plus disseminates good practice, but what is the point of disseminating if people do not have time to absorb it and apply it? Sir Leigh Lewis: This is a fair question. I do not want to pretend I have got an absolutely perfect answer for you. One part of the task is to put good material, to make it available; but the other is to encourage people to use that material and to make it available. I would say, however, that I spend a lot of my time out in my Department and a lot of that time in Jobcentre Plus - I was in one of our offices in Glasgow on Friday. What I see there is some brilliant advisers and brilliant staff, who have an enormous amount of skill and knowledge about the local communities in which they are operating. Q77 Don Touhig: You gave us targets for Birmingham and South Yorkshire. Can you give me the target for Newport in Gwent? Ms Majid: Newport Gwent is not a strategy pathfinder. Q78 Don Touhig: Am I right in thinking, then, that you have thresholds, and if communities do not have a population of 20% ethnic minority, say, they are not going to get any targeted support? Sir Leigh Lewis: The position is that the city strategy pathfinders operate in 15 areas of the country, and outside of those areas we do not have the same structure of a separate pathfinder with a separate board, et cetera. But in those areas, Jobcentre Plus will still have its targets, which are national ----- Q79 Don Touhig: Is there a threshold, Sir Leigh? Does a region or a community or a city have to have an ethnic minority population threshold before you put in those kinds of resources? I am arguing all the time that you are not being specific, and you say you are. Do you have a threshold? Sir Leigh Lewis: There is no one specific threshold that says that you become a city strategy pathfinder with ----- Q80 Don Touhig: Is ethnic population a factor? Sir Leigh Lewis: Ethnic minority population is a factor; levels of deprivation are a factor; levels of worklessness are a factor; but - and it is something that I just want to emphasise - there is no part of this country where we do not provide considerable support and assistance. Every Jobcentre Plus district in the whole of Gt Britain has a set of targets for getting people into employment. Q81 Chairman: As you know, I am a great enthusiast for international benchmarking, and we passed over that quite quickly. A lot is going on in the United States where unemployment rates in the black community is 8.4%. It has always been a much more dynamic economy under any government than here. Looking at Denmark, case study 3; there is an interesting little project going on there: "... an independent institution under the Ministry of Culture. Begun in 2003 the aim is to bring immigrant women together with native-born women who have experience in the labour market. Mentors and mentees are matched after interview according to the mentee's needs and wishes." It is obviously going quite well. What work are you doing to try to learn what is happening elsewhere in the world? Sir Leigh Lewis: We do try quite hard actually to do that, and we are both members of some sort of international organisations. We also very much encourage - and there are some bounds in terms of cost and practicality - a culture of learning from others. A delegation from my Department - or a group of staff in my Department went fairly recently to Canada to look at what they call their Service Canada Organisation and the way they provide service right across Canada to the citizen. We came back from that thinking that we can learn. I am absolutely sure we can learn from others. Having said that, it is gratifying, Chairman, how many visitors from abroad Jobcentre Plus can entertain. I think Chris Hayes at times thinks that he might just value just one or two fewer people coming from abroad to learn from us, but this is a two-way interchange! Q82 Chairman: Thank you, Sir Leigh. That concludes our hearing. Obviously, it is very disappointing there is this stark inequality in employment rates. The employment rate in ethnic minorities is only 60% compared with 74% in the general population, as we know. It is not just some sort of employment statistic. For instance, 19% of white people live in low-income households against 56% of Pakistani and Bangladeshi people - so I know you agree that this is a very worrying problem. Whilst you are a highly competent witness, Sir Leigh, we want to see some actions and you wielding this unwieldy department together and I hope we will re-visit this in two or three years to see what success Sir Leigh has had in ending this, frankly, flip-flopping between different schemes, and inconsistency, which has not crowned your efforts so far with any great success. Do you wish to have the last word? Sir Leigh Lewis: I certainly do not want for us to have the last word for saying it, Chairman, but I do not accept the flip-flopping point. What I do absolutely accept and share with you is that there is a real determination. Can we just end on a positive note, if only from me? We have seen - that gap is still far too large and it is a blight on our society. You believe that and I believe that. It is smaller than it was by a significant margin; it is reducing and the employment rate of people from ethnic minorities is increasing, not least due to the hard work and determination of the staff in my Department. |