UNCORRECTED TRANSCRIPT OF ORAL EVIDENCE To be published as HC 339House of COMMONSMINUTES OF EVIDENCETAKEN BEFOREWORK AND PENSIONS COMMITTEE
JOBCENTRE PLUS
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This is an uncorrected transcript of evidence taken in public and reported to the House. The transcript has been placed on the internet on the authority of the Committee, and copies have been made available by the Vote Office for the use of Members and others.
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Transcribed by the Official Shorthand Writers to the Houses of Parliament: W B Gurney & Sons LLP, Hope House, Telephone Number: 020 7233 1935
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Oral Evidence
Taken before the Work and Pensions Committee
on
Members present
Mr Terry Rooney, in the Chair
Miss Anne Begg
Michael Jabez Foster
Mr Oliver Heald
John Howell
Mrs Joan Humble
Greg Mulholland
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Memorandum submitted by Jobcentre Plus
Examination of Witnesses
Witnesses: Mr Mel Groves, Acting Chief Executive Jobcentre Plus, Ms Ruth Owen, Chief Operating Officer Jobcentre Plus and Mr Mark Fisher, Welfare to Work Director Department for Work and Pensions, gave evidence.
Q1 Chairman: Good morning and welcome to our evidence session with Jobcentre Plus and welcome to our witnesses; it is good to see you. I think we should congratulate you, Mel, on your acting position for as long as it lasts. I understand you want to make a quick statement.
Mr Groves: Mark Fisher is the Welfare to Work and Skills director in the department. I thought as it was March and the year we have had, particularly since April, I would like to say how proud I am to be doing this job but also proud of the people in the organisation, the way they responded to the downturn in the economy and then the recession and the way we have kept on top of the work and dealing with people who have been suffering during the recession. I am really proud of the way people in Jobcentre Plus have responded and also the way we have had to keep that going and also contribute with Mark and the departmental colleagues in thinking ahead about what we have to do next. I want to share that with the Committee that I am personally very proud of what people have done.
Q2 Chairman: We reciprocate your words about the staff. We do realise the pressure they are under and so far their response seems to be very good. On the changed economic circumstances, how have Jobcentre Plus's priorities changed because of what has happened particularly in recent months.
Mr Groves: I do not think the priorities of Jobcentre Plus have changed very much at all. We are absolutely focused on trying to help people as individuals and tailoring our support to each of them so that is about getting back to work and when people are not in work paying them as quickly as possible. The emphasis in the past few months has been getting the whole organisation, and that includes DWP as well as people in Jobcentre Plus, behind our customer focus. The new way of working and new model, the £2 billion invested over the past five years in creating the modern welfare to work organisation has been tested but, in my view, our new model of answering the phone and dealing with people in job centres and paying people through centralised benefit processing sites has stood up very well indeed. I think the purpose of what we do has remained the same but the focus has been on making sure we deal with customers as efficiently as possible.
Q3 Chairman: Can you tell us about Local Employment Partnerships and the Rapid Response Service? You are going to tell us it has been wonderful but how have employees engaged with that? It strikes me there are still not enough employers engaging with LEP and the Rapid Response Service. Do people always call on you when they have the required numbers?
Mr Groves: Employers generally, whether it is through Local Employment Partnerships or whether it is employers facing difficulties, what we recognise in Jobcentre Plus is we cannot do what government wants us to do without having employers at the heart of everything we do. On Rapid Response, the government doubled the amount of money we have to spend on Rapid Response. Through both colleagues in business enterprise and regulatory reform we want to make sure we have the intelligence on the firms that are facing difficulties. We tie that in with our local knowledge about the labour market and we want to try and get into employers to talk to them and to get to people who are facing redundancy. That is our first contact if you like. In the past few months since this new investment came in we have visited over 950 different employers across the country to offer help. On Local Employment Partnerships, that is a recognition that by working closely with employers we can get more and more people back to work. So far we have helped over 125,000 people through Local Employment Partnerships and through local employers to get back to work. The latest figure we have of the number of employers working with us is over 20,000. It is a recognition that you cannot help people back to work without employers either in the public or private sectors and the emphasis on trying to say to employers it is a deal: you give us an opportunity that we can put in front of an unemployed person and we will prepare them for that opportunity.
Q4 Chairman: If I can be cynical, which I am not normally, of those 120,000 how many of them would have been jobs anyway?
Mr Groves: I have no information on how many of the 120,000 but there is a recognition that in the number of people that we help to work some, or a few, would have got jobs anyway. I do not know if Ruth has information about the actual numbers but the issue is we are dealing with people who are facing unemployment often for the first time. We are dealing with people who need the extra help but the 120,000 are across the whole spectrum.
Ms Owen: Just to clarify on Local Employment Partnerships, up to date the customers that we have been putting forward to these opportunities have been what we call our priority customers, they are customers who have out of work for some time, people on income support, incapacity benefit or lone parents. They are not generally what you might call the churn in the labour market, people who would have got a job quite quickly anyway. We do not actually have what statisticians would call the additionality factor but what we can say is these are people who would not necessarily have been first choice for employers in the labour market.
Q5 Chairman: Essentially you present people to employers who you think are work ready and they guarantee them an interview.
Mr Groves: Correct.
Q6 Chairman: Is there evidence yet that employers are now encouraged and emboldened but what they have seen to trust you more than they might have done before?
Mr Groves: I think there is lots of encouragement. We are running around the country some award ceremonies to bring employers and individuals together who have got a job through Local Employment Partnerships. At a recent one I was there and saw a really good story about somebody who had not worked for ten years but by Jobcentre Plus and the local Learning and Skills Council working together we packaged a training programme to help that person. I think we even used a work trial where they can remain on benefit for three weeks. We packaged the deal and the employer gave the person the work trial and through that Local Employment Partnership somebody started work. Those are the things we have to do: working in partnership with other organisations but we have a job at the end of the process. It is really, really important that we can keep people close to the labour market and as close to local employers as possible and that is what we are trying to do.
Q7 Chairman: Have you any statistical evidence about whether people stay, how long they stay and how many come back?
Mr Groves: Not yet.
Q8 Chairman: When will we start to see that?
Mr Groves: Probably towards the middle to the end of this year we will be looking at the evaluation of how the first year of Local Employment Partnerships have gone. We do not have the evaluation or the emerging thoughts yet at all.
Q9 Chairman: ILO, which seems to be flavour of the month with the media, has been rising since December 2007. Could and should the moratorium on Jobcentre closures have happened earlier given that those fairly strong signals were there?
Mr Groves: The JSA count was rising along the same period as the ILO count as you know. We have been reviewing our service delivery plans and I think in the past we probably focused a few years ago on the office network but, as you know, the model has changed now. People access the welfare system through a telephone and our network of offices is only part of our service delivery model. For the past couple of years we have focused on could we do more through working in other people's premises and could we do more with our providers? Our office network is only part of our service delivery model. We are trying to make that more accessible by people using website, telephone and so on. In response to your question, over the summer period last year we were looking at what our service delivery options for each district, we have 48 districts, should look like. We probably could have suspended the closure programme slightly earlier but in discussion with ministers we did that, as you know, last autumn and there will be no more closures whilst we are in the recession and the downturn.
Q10 Chairman: With all due respect, that sounds like a non-answer but I will come back to that. There is a now a set criterion for closing job centres. Are you going to apply the same reverse criteria where you might need to reopen job centres?
Mr Groves: Ruth is carrying out a review at the moment as the chief operating officer. I am sorry it was a non-answer but I think what we are doing is making sure that how we deliver Jobcentre Plus services, in partnership with other organisations, takes into account the hours that we are open and where people can access our services. It is not just about the issue of whether we open another office, it is how we can reach the customers who most need our services. Our review should be completed by early April and we will look at what we need to do to make sure our services are accessible. That may or may not include opening new offices but I think it is probably unlikely at this stage because we have the capacity by making changes to the existing estate and also by moving people who are occupying job centres but not doing customer roles to put them into other services. The key issue is service delivery.
Q11 Chairman: On service delivery, there are a whole new series of processes that Jobcentre Plus actually carry out like skills audits, you are taking about a quarter of a million lone parents from income support to JSA and they have to have the work-focused interviews and all that, and there are various other things happening that are going to demand space in premises whether that is Jobcentre Plus or anywhere else. These are increasing demands that were not foreseen two or three years ago when you set up on the re-organisation of the estate, ignoring the increasing numbers of claimants, which is probably temporary, we all hope it is, but for some time it is still going to be climbing. How would you respond to that?
Mr Groves: I think we are being asked to do new things and I am sure we will be asked to do more things by ministers. The issue is where do we do our services? We can do them in partnership with children's centres. We regularly review. Every three months now we look at the estate and the service delivery options.
Ms Owen: Just to address what you said, in terms of the additional activity that we are doing, the criteria by which we design our service delivery plans is the number of activities that we need to perform so whether that is additional interviews, whether additional customers that we want to bring in because a new regime has come in, whether it is about skills enhancements or working with partners so we have some partners on our premises. We turn all those volumes through which gives us a sense of how many customers would we have coming to our business, how many staff we need and that will be what determines our service delivery plans. It does not necessarily mean we need job centres but at least we have a model of how many staff, how many customers and where we could deliver that service from, be that our own premises or elsewhere.
Q12 Mr Heald: The recession is going to shock many people as they lose their jobs. We all know that losing a job is a tremendously frightening and worrying experience for people. There will be people who are very much new to the whole world of Jobcentre Plus and will not be something that they have done before but they will be grade A or I think you said first choice candidates for jobs and hopefully will be able to be placed relatively quickly. What steps are you putting in place to reassure the newly unemployed that you will get them back to work relatively speedily?
Mr Groves: I agree that a lot of people we are seeing now have never faced unemployment. A lot of people have come from different sorts of industries and occupations to Jobcentre Plus. A lot of them have been pleasantly surprised by what we can offer. What we are doing is trying to make sure that we provide a service for all types of people from all backgrounds whoever they are and that the gateway to getting help whether it be directly through Jobcentre Plus or through other organisations that Jobcentre Plus can sign post people and help them. If they are from a type of work or a type of industry that we need to get help, we will do that locally. We have reviewed the provision and Mark has been directly involved in reviewing that provision. We recognise that people as soon as they become unemployed, particularly if they have never been unemployed before, we need to open up the access to them. From April we are giving our advisers discretion to spend money to help people. We are opening up programmes for doing CVs for newly unemployed people. We have talked about local employment partnerships and they will be available to people who are newly unemployed. We are recognising that we need to help these people in different ways than the traditional way of waiting and providing help later on.
Mr Fisher: What is important is the partnership that Jobcentre Plus has with Recruitment and Employment Confederation which is a network of private sector recruitment agencies many of whom are more used to dealing with this new set of people than Jobcentre Plus would be. Provision on the ground is really important: CV writing and other things as Mel has said. You cannot emphasise too strongly that the basic service delivery model that Jobcentre Plus operates is completely different to the one that existed in the last recession. People claim through ringing up through a contract centre. They use the internet to access services. The experience is very different than simply going into a job centre. I think that is a service which can be used by everybody even those who are unfamiliar to using the service as it used to be.
Mr Groves: There was no accessing the service through the internet in the last recession. The current figures show that we have over 70,000 people accessing our services to claim benefit through the internet. I think the experience is very different than it was previously. The range of help that we are putting on the ground either directly or through others is a different experience.
Q13 Mr Heald: With these easier to place candidates coming through, of course that does make life rather difficult for those who were still looking for a job before the recession hit, those who have been out of work for some time, barriers to employment and all the rest of it. Does this not mean that for that group the chances are they will be moving into long-term unemployment in larger numbers? What are the implications for those who are a bit further from the labour market?
Mr Groves: Mark just mentioned the previous recession. What we are doing through Jobcentre Plus now is recognising that the earlier we help people and the more provision we can get on the ground when people first become unemployed it is less likely they will drift towards longer term unemployment. What we are trying to do in Jobcentre Plus is recognise that the longer people are out of work we may need to spend more money on them and give them more intensive help. The range of provision to start with might be a day on a CV course or a referral to the private agency who will work with them, and so on, as we have just discussed. As you get through towards six months' unemployment then we need to intensify our help and that is when we will be moving from our existing set of programmes later this year to help through the Flexible New Deal. I think the answer is we tailor the provision to meet the needs of individuals. The longer people are out of work by close association with our personal advisers we can get to know them better and try and tailor that help. Then we will use our provider base to strengthen the support that people need and try and prevent them becoming longer term unemployed.
Q14 Mr Heald: You accept there will be an increase in longer term unemployment and you are gearing up for it.
Mr Groves: Mark may want to talk about the meeting he had with the people bidding to do the Flexible New Deal. We are recognising that however much we offer at the moment there are vacancies around that we can offer people. Actually the numbers coming on to our JSA registers at the moment will mean people will be flowing through it in increasing numbers in the second half of this year.
Q15 Mr Heald: My colleague will be asking about the Flexible New Deal in a moment
but perhaps I can ask you about the vacancies.
Typically 51 per cent of vacancies are hard to fill or skill shortage
areas. What are these vacancies you have
got at the moment? Is there any truth in
the report in the Daily Mail that Jobcentre Plus is advertising 200,000
posts in Europe and only 61,905 in the
Mr Groves: I do not recognise what Digby Jones was saying in terms of those figures and types of occupations. We are still getting between 9,000 and 10,000 vacancies notified to Jobcentre Plus every day. In the same way that people flow on to JSA and flow off JSA because they get jobs because the labour market is still a very dynamic place. We take vacancies for professional people, managerial people and people from all sectors. I have one figure in my head that in the last quarter we have taken over 56,000 vacancies for professional and managerial people. I do not think our vacancy base is confined to people at the elementary level; it is across the piece in terms of industries and it is across the piece in terms of occupations. I recognise that in the past we have focused on people at the elementary level but when you look at the vacancies we get it is across the whole spectrum.
Ms Owen: Let me just highlight the point about overseas vacancies. The data I have is of the roughly 270,000 vacancies we have just over 3,000 of those are overseas vacancies so I do not recognise the figure you have which is less than 1 per cent of vacancies that we hold. For me the benefit of Local Employment Partnerships we mentioned earlier is we do deals with employers that say all of the vacancies that we have in our business we will supply to Jobcentre Plus. For example with the NHS you get a broad range of managerial, professional and skill jobs.
Q16 Mr Heald: The National Skills Survey shows 51 per cent are hard to fill or skill shortage areas of total vacancies. There are about half a million vacancies over all and you have just over half of them. How many of yours are skill shortage and hard to fill?
Mr Groves: I am not sure I have the figure in my head so I cannot answer that but I do not think our vacancies that we hold I am sure that half those vacancies are not hard to fill. The issue that Ruth pointed out is that if we work closely with employers we may be able to package help both for the individual and through the employer to ensure that they are not hard to fill. I am not sure that I recognise the 51 per cent figure as vacancies being hard to fill. I think they can be filled. The number of vacancies that are flowing on and off our registers all the time means they are not a standard 500,000 every month. They are different people and different vacancies every day and every week.
Mr Fisher: The other thing is we are trying to make the hard to fill vacancies easier to fill. Things like Adviser Discretionary Fund means that an adviser can give a lump sum of money to somebody to get a security certificate so they can get a job in the security industry. The growing link we have with skills provision with the Learning and Skills Council means that we are trying to put packages of support that gets a person into a job and gets them the relevant training that can fill a hard to fill vacancy. That will be a growing theme over the next few years.
Q17 Mr Heald: I do not know if you ever feel frustrated. There you are trying to get people to learn to read and write so they can get their health and safety certificate but every year 40,000 young people are leaving school functionally illiterate. You are working against a background that is not as helpful as it could be, do you agree?
Mr Fisher: We have to deal with the labour market as we find it. Our job is to help people get jobs and work with our skill partners to help give people the skills they need to get the jobs that are available in the economy.
Mr Heald: I share the tributes to the staff of Jobcentre Plus. I think they do a very difficult job very well.
Q18 Michael Jabez Foster: Following up the last question, presumably it was more difficult in
1997 when there were twice as many people leaving school without basic literacy
but perhaps you were not involved at the time.
Be that as it may, what I wanted to ask about was you mentioned in
passing the fact of the flexible way you are able to help people as they came
into the front office. I want to put to
you an example and ask if this will change from April. A builder went to the
Mr Groves: Yes. I have written out today to all the people in
Jobcentre Plus to say that it really is good news. It is something we have wanted for some
time. In a way that is what we are
about: trying to make sure that person in
Q19 Greg Mulholland: We had the statement on Monday from the Secretary of State which was quite revealing in answering some of the questions we would otherwise have put here today. Can you be absolutely clear the role of the private recruitment agencies? That was rather shrouded in a bit of mystery before the statement. We need more clarity on exactly what Jobcentre Plus is asking them to do, what the government is asking them to do and how that fits in and how that is different from what the Jobcentre is doing. I think that needs to be absolutely clear and is not yet. The question is a more general one. You will be aware of this charge in the media that because Jobcentre Plus was set up in a completely different economic time and it had a different role, it was rightly then focused particularly on those would are furthest from the employment market, focused on a different set of jobs and now the situation is completely different. You will be aware the charge in the media is that because of the way it was set up Jobcentre Plus is not actually suitably structured to deal with the recession. I am giving to you the opportunity to answer that charge.
Mr Groves: I will take
the REC first. We have been working
closely with agencies for a number of years and that is across the
country. We recognise that some of the
recruitment and employment agencies are better placed to help than we are and
we have always referred people to agencies.
The way the labour market has gone is it has changed over the past few
years, as you have recognised, and therefore it is important to get the help to
people as quick as we can. We have
worked regularly over the years with agencies, all different sorts. What we have done in the past 12 months is
formalised working with the Recruitment and Employment Confederation. That has been really helpful because we have
been able to recognise that by referring people direct to them for particular
help particularly where we know that the person has got a particular specialist
skill and they might be an agency that can help. What we did through our Minister of State was
meet the officials from the Recruitment and Employment Confederation and agree
that across the country now we will have a formal arrangement for referring
people to a particular agency and that starts from the beginning of April. I am pleased to say that is now in
place. It is formalising what was
already there. It is enabling us to
signpost more people to different sorts of help. I think it helps us get people back to work
particularly those people who are professional and managerial who are using us
for the first time. On the model, I am bound
to say that it is an entirely different type of recession. I have dealt with two in my time in the
public service and this one is very different.
All the figures over the past few months indicate that the numbers of
people are coming from across the country, different times of occupations, and
different sectors. It is not confined to
manufacturing or starting in the north-east and coming down to
Q20 Miss Begg: Can I ask something based on the last exchange of questions? I accept that the newly unemployed's experience of Jobcentre Plus will be very different from previously. The organisation is much more efficient in paying benefits but what will not have changed is the shock that people who have never been unemployed before will find when they discover what the benefit levels are. They believe the Daily Mail stories about people leading the life of Riley on benefits and they suddenly find that our benefit levels are incredibly small. How much training are you giving to your staff to deal with that inevitable anger? We know as MPs, as we are getting that in our own surgeries, where the accusation is "How on earth am I supposed to live on this?" How are you and your staff copying with that?
Mr Groves: Ruth and I were talking yesterday about this very problem. I was in an office last week talking to a group of advisers and it was clear to me that some of our advisers who have been doing the job for a while have not recognised that we have to deal with people in an entirely different way if they have never used our services previously. I was heartened by what they were saying to me because the help we are now giving them, the training we are giving them, is to try and make sure that when people are faced with unemployment we give them hope. The first thing they need is an adviser to talk to. I would like them to see Jobcentre Plus offices as a place where they will get help to get back to work. They will get paid as well but also in getting paid we need to demonstrate that through the tax credit system and other help they can get when they are not working to the recently announced mortgage help that the government have given them, our job is to get on to a level with the people using our services where they can work together, the adviser and the unemployed person, and give that person some hope that they will get a job.
Ms Owen: We have advisers who can help customers understand their financial position. Your question about how can people live on benefits, part of the first advice that we give to customers is what range of help they are eligible to receive. We do sit down with people. We are now rolling out a programme where we can help people in one interview to make sure they are claiming not only benefits from Jobcentre Plus but tax credits and we put them straight through to HMRC and make sure they are claiming all the relevant benefits from the local authority in terms of housing benefit and council tax benefits. It is not just the £60 a week from job seekers.
Q21 Miss Begg: Are you employing more debt counsellors simply because if somebody has been in work for a sustained period of time they probably have credit card bills and things which they are not going to be able to meet under their new circumstances?
Mr Groves: Across the country now there is a network of debt counsellors and we are making sure our advisers know about how to refer. When people apply for a social fund loan or a crisis loan, we want to make sure that those people know they can get help and advise if they are taking on debt. Particular will people will need that advice but I would not say they will be giving that advice to everybody. What we try to do is make sure that we target the help and advice to suit the individual circumstances so we will make sure that people are referred to debt counsellors where appropriate.
Q22 Miss Begg: It still comes as an awful shock to them when they discover how low the benefits levels are. I have some questions on resources around the budget and the estate. In the Pre-Budget Report £1.3 billion was described as being set aside additionally for the DWP over the next two years to deliver effective support for the unemployed. How much of that £1.3 billion is actually coming to Jobcentre Plus and what are you going to spend it on?
Mr Groves: Just under £700 million will come into Jobcentre Plus and all of that is being spent on our customer-facing services. We are not putting anything behind answering the phone, advisory services and processing benefits. All that we got out of the PBR is going to customer-facing services. Increasingly we are moving people from the back office to the front office to make sure we have enough people doing that.
Q23 Miss Begg: How are you going to make sure that you are getting the most for that money and it has been spent effectively?
Mr Groves: The way that we organise our front services all customer-facing services come under Ruth. We will regularly review, on a weekly or monthly basis, how we are doing in terms of performance against the targets and objectives we have. We are looking at our service delivery plans to make sure that we are employing enough people in the right place and doing the right things. I think it is the regular monitoring of everything we do. We are accountable to ministers, and I can assure you that our set of ministers, at the moment, look closely at what we do and are regularly visiting our offices. The monitoring is through the performance and ensuring that the resources we are putting out there, that we answer the phones quickly, and we are answering over 90 per cent of our calls, that we process benefit on time and we are hitting the targets that have been set for us so I think it is through the regular monitoring of the performance objectives we have been set for this year.
Ms Owen: That is right. All this money is essentially coming and translating into staff in my directorate as part of Jobcentre Plus. They are people going directly to the front line. I have a very clear recruitment profile so I can see week on week, month on month, how my staffing is increasing, where I am putting staff in terms of do we need people in the job centres, do we need more people doing processing and benefits. We are tracking that very closely. We are also inviting internal audit in to make sure that we are using that additional money very effectively.
Q24 Miss Begg: What was Jobcentre Plus's budget this year 2008/09 and what will it be next year 2009/10 and the year after 2010/11? Is it going up?
Mr Groves: I can give you the figures for what we expected to have in the current year, which was £2.6 billion, and we are going to spend nearly £2.8 billion in the year so it has gone up by about £2 billion. It needs to relate to the number of people and the challenges to translate that increased money into head count and recruit those people.
Q25 Miss Begg: If we come out of the recession quicker than anticipated, you would expect your budget to be cut in the following years?
Mr Groves: It is a fact that Jobcentre Plus is a counter-cyclical organisation. As an example for the Committee, when we went into this operational year we expected to end the year on 65,500 people roughly relating the budget to the people and that is why we were resourced to do 48,000 JSA claims a week. The recession started and we had to re-assess what we were doing. In terms of moving from the spending review 2004 into 2007, we suddenly find ourselves during the year as an organisation, as it was announced in the PBR, recruiting 6,000 people. The first thing we did was keep the 2,000 people we had to help land the Employment and Support Allowance in October so ministers agreed that. Then we decided that we had to keep recruiting, which we have, so we have now recruited over 4,000 people from either outside the organisation or elsewhere inside the Civil Service. We expect to end March, in two or three weeks' time, with close to 70,000 people. We have had to resource very quickly the activities that we carry out, and that is no small task. It is a huge task on the organisation's capacity and we have come through it but we are going to keep going because of the announcement about the increased funding. Our planning assumption is to carry on recruiting somewhere between 1,500 and 2,000 every month into customer-facing jobs.
Q26 Miss Begg: In reply to the Chairman's question talking about the moratorium on the closures of the estate, you had already closed quite a lot of offices up to that point and you just talked about the numbers you are recruiting and extra throughput. How close are you to full capacity of your estate or are you already finding that you are short of places because of the decision previously taken and what is happening now?
Mr Groves: I will ask Ruth to give you the details because we are looking at the service delivery plans. When we rolled out our network over the past five years, we completed the network in 2007, we knew that our model included an expansion factor between 15 and 20 per cent so we knew that we could expand. What we have now done is make sure that we have plans for each of those customer-facing Jobcentre Plus offices being reviewed to make sure that we use them regularly. I can tell you in most of parts of the country we have been open on Saturdays to make sure that we can deal with new claims. We opened in the evening when we had to deal with Woolworths so we are responsive. Each office has to review the space it has got. Those plans will be coming in and Ruth will look at those to make sure we can cope and house the people we have to house.
Q27 Miss Begg: Are these job centres that are left in the right place now? A few years ago you were talking about the strategic closure to make sure you had an even spread. Has that worked or are you now finding you should not have closed that one and one of the ones you are now having to keep open, because it happened to be at the end of the closure programme, is in the wrong place and it would have been better had you kept the one you closed?
Mr Groves: It is really important that we keep reviewing every three months what our service plans are. Increasingly we may not need a new office in a location that we moved out off. It is important to remember that we had 1,500 offices originally when we put two estates, the old Benefits Agency and Employment Service, together so we have ended up with 750. We do increasing amounts of work in other people's premises by our people going to other people's premise. It is not necessarily a decision to open a new office. It may be we can move in with the local authority department or one of our providers or a children's centre.
Ms Owen: Flexibility is the key really, recognising we need to deliver our services to an increasing number of people. I do not think we have any offices saying they are full. I have just over 100 offices where I approved an estates work, which is generally within the premises, increasing the customer-facing space and moving more customer-facing desks into the space we previously had back of house. I also have about half of my job centres saying they have sufficient space for the recruitment and customer profile for the year ahead. It really is different according to different places. For those places that are in busy areas it is not they are in the wrong place but we are looking across different parts of the service delivery network to make sure we can offer services across the community. We will go to where the customers are as well expecting the customer to come to us.
Q28 Miss Begg: I do not have any problem with you going out into the community. I think that is a sensible thing particularly in rural areas and areas that have a big rural hinterland. However, how do you make sure that the confidentiality is assured when you are actually going out into the community? Particularly in a children's centre people are not going to talk about their benefits and everything else in front of everyone else.
Ms Owen:
Customers love the service they get from
the children's centre. I was in one in
Mr Groves: By establishing the relationship with the person who wants our help, trust is important and getting people to realise they can phone that adviser or they can access the information sometimes through the web site or through direct.gov is so important. We establish the relationship and describe how you can get help from Jobcentre Plus and other organisations in different ways. As Ruth said, we want the relationship to be one of trust and about getting people back to work and making sure they get all the help they can.
Q29 Mrs Humble: I want to take the discussion further into your staffing levels. You have actually answered some of the questions that I wanted to ask but I think it would be helpful to the Committee if you could drop us a note about what your current head count is, how many of those staff are members of staff who have been transferred in from other parts of the DWP and how many are newly recruited. I listened carefully to what you were saying earlier about the flexibility of the organisation and perhaps in another year or two years you might not need the same levels of staff because hopefully the recession will have receded and we will be back to business as usual. If that is the case, how many of the new staff that you are taking on are on short-term contracts to give you some flexibility for the future? Could you could drop us a note on that and what you foresee as your staffing levels in another two years time? An area that you have touched on is the changing role of Jobcentre Plus and the pressures on your staff: on the one hand delivering a more personalised service and, on the other hand, dealing with much higher volumes of people. We all hear your praise of your staff and we share that but are you convinced that they are actually coping with those additional pressures?
Mr Groves: I think the board of Jobcentre Plus try to make sure we are out in offices, contact centres and benefit centres every week visiting somewhere. We see for ourselves what people have to put up with. We are under pressure, I accept that, but there is a tremendous spirit amongst the organisation because most of the people in Jobcentre Plus, whether they work in a contact centre or a job centre, work and live in that local community. They know what that community is suffering. Most people who work in our organisation probably know somebody who has suffered from the recession. Jobcentre Plus is responding in a way that says we want to help. We do have to work more overtime in some places but not appreciably more overtime. We are trying to be flexible and responsive as we have said. I actually think as I go around the organisation and talk to people that we are responding really well and our job is to make sure that we lead the organisation through these difficult times.
Ms Owen: I second that. I go out to job centres regularly and the spirit is extremely strong. Everybody has recognised we need to do our best for the customers and people really have been extremely positive and extremely flexible and everybody has mucked in to get the job done. We had an extremely busy January which is always our busiest period anyway and for this year it has broken all records in terms of the volumes we have dealt with. People are under pressure but they also understand that they are being supported because we can say we have been given more money, we have more people coming through and that was visible to them. We have had people loaned to us from other parts of the Civil Service and where they might be busy they can at least see there are people in the training room who we have recruited and will be supporting and taking the pressure off them fairly quickly. I do not think people are feeling there is no end to the pressure because very soon they will have more colleagues to share the work.
Q30 Mrs Humble: Can I explore further the issue of staff morale? You say the spirit is strong but have you recently undertaken a survey of your staff morale and, if so, what does it show?
Mr Groves: I am pleased to say the survey starts this week or last week. There is the DWP survey which includes Jobcentre Plus for 2009 so that survey is about to start. It will be interesting to see what the results are like this time compared to last year. We did do what I would call a local survey across our contact centre directorate which comes under Ruth and it was really encouraging. The informal survey across the contact centre said that people compared to last year were really behind what we were trying to do and were up for doing what we were doing and that was heartening. The other thing I would like to add in terms of taking the temperature is that we are ensuring that all our senior leaders are communicating with people regularly. We have a telephone conversation where anybody can ring the board every month. I was writing out today putting the emphasis on communicating what people are saying about Jobcentre Plus. I remember there was a bad press recently about Jobcentre Plus. Increasingly I am seeing stories in the media about what Jobcentre Plus is doing and how it is helping local employers and how individuals are getting back to work. That is entirely helpful because people realise they are at the front line of getting people back to work.
Ms Owen: I completely agree. Our people are proud of the service they deliver in the communities they live in. A lot of our people have been affected by the recession themselves, their friends or families, so I think they are really keen to make sure that we are there for people and can offer that help.
Mr Groves: I am writing out this week. Having read the report on Flexible New Deal where the Committee said some kind things about Jobcentre Plus I will make sure, when people say things about Jobcentre Plus, our people know about that. I do that sort of thing.
Q31 Mrs Humble: In the past sometimes if staff morale was low it was reflected in high sickness absence levels. Have you been monitoring your sickness absence levels to look at the issue of staff morale in that context?
Mr Groves: Yes. We monitor sickness absence every month. We are part of the department and over the past few months we have some encouraging figures where our sickness absence is getting better both departmentally and within Jobcentre Plus. Ruth probably has the exact figures. We will not hit our target this year but we are getting very close to our target which is very good.
Ms Owen: We measure average working days lost so in the rolling total how many working days lost. There were 8.8 working days lost in a year which is a significant reduction from where DWP and Jobcentre Plus have been in the past. I think our target is 8.3 so we are not far off and we can see further improvements to come.
Mr Groves: The emphasis we are putting is not just on monitoring the number of days lost but trying to make sure that people use our Wellbeing Campaign. We have lots of things now that we are putting in front of people that will help people encourage them. It is not just about monitoring but giving help to people when they are not at work.
Q32 Mrs Humble: Going back to earlier comments about the fact that you have a substantial number of staff on loan from other parts of the DWP and you also mention from other parts of the Civil Service, I would be interested in those figures. How well are they trained to do the very demanding job that is required of them now? Working in the Pensions Agency is different to dealing with people at the coal face of unemployment. That is a peculiar expression but I know what I meant.
Mr Groves: The number of people we are taking on from inside DWP, we took over 500 in January from different parts of the department to come into our offices to help. We have taken a whole pension centre in. We are taking 600 people from CEMACH, formerly CSA, so the training we give depends on the background as you have just said. The people we have taken from other departments, like Land Registry and HMRC, will probably need more training but those people within the department will need less. What we have done is we have increased the number of people we have got on learning and development working for Ruth, another 100 people. We have now that increased from 300 to 400 people in Ruth's directorate. What we have done is make sure, in the same way we landed the Employment Support Allowance which was a huge effort in training last summer, we have adopted the same approach. We are tailoring the training that people need individually and recognising that whereas at one time we might have trained them in the whole range of a particular benefit we are making sure that we only train them on what they need to know for that first job and then reviewing it. We have made sure, particularly on benefit processing because of the issues with benefit, that everyone has a mentor and before they start on live cases they have to reach a standard of 95 per cent accuracy. The answer to the question is the number of training days that we are doing has hugely increased but we are doing it by tailoring the training to meet the needs of the particular job that the people are doing and their previous experience.
Ms Owen: We did 90,000 training days over the last three months. It is worth emphasising the people we have had on loan to us to date the vast majority of them we have put into our benefit processing centres because during the January period that was where the pressure came. We wanted to keep on top and make sure everybody got their benefits as quickly as possible. If you are thinking how does somebody from the pensions service help somebody in a job centre, we have not had that many transfers in that case and therefore it is easier for somebody who has worked on pension credit to retrain them quite quickly to work on job seekers allowance, benefit processing. The shift now from here on in is to staff-up our job centres because we need increasing numbers of personal advisers, therefore our training plans have refocused now to make sure we have much more training capacity to help people with different sets of skills in terms of understanding the labour market and being able to give people face-to-face advise, the things we talked about this morning.
Q33 Mrs Humble: Training capacity was going to be my next question. Your training needs are not just people being loaned into you and new recruits but also your existing staff. Do you have the capacity? Over the years your training establishment has been reduced as you have had headcount reductions. Are you increasing it to meet all those many demands upon it? Secondly, you mentioned mentoring. What pressures does that put on your already pressured staff, and in turn their morale, if they, on the one hand, welcome in all this additional support to help them but if they are being taken away from their job to act as a mentor to those individuals you are putting more pressure on them. How are you managing all of that?
Mr Groves: I think because we are in the situation we find ourselves, which we have talked about, new people coming in are being welcome. The idea of mentoring and having a mentor, the mentors are in a particular office so if you are in a benefit processing site we will make sure that somebody who is experienced in dealing with JSA, for example, will mentor somebody so there is an immediate colleague who can help when you have a difficult case or get a bit of advice. All the evidence seems to point to our own people being pleased to mentor new people. Going one step back to the recruitment and learning and development, what we are developing across the 48 districts in Jobcentre Plus, including the contact centres and the benefit delivery centres, are workforce plans to take into account both the recruitment of the permanent people and some people on fixed term contracts to make sure those plans include the learning and development so we get the right people in the right place. Some of this may mean moving people across the organisation but the combination of getting the right type of training, the right type of access once you have been trained, to information through the internet, through the departmental intra-net and also through a mentor is seeing us through.
Ms Owen: It is a logistical challenge as you can imagine but I am absolutely confident we have the capacity there. I had an update from our learning and development people only yesterday to say they are clear they have the capacity not only for the increase in volumes but to make sure we have trained everybody for the new changes we are bringing in in April. You are absolutely right it is not just new people but our existing people where the regime that we are delivering is changing, as it will be from April and no doubt later in the year. We have built that into our training plans so we know exactly who has to be trained on what. We have grown that capacity again very quickly bringing in new trainers and borrowing from other parts of the DWP and other government departments, trainers and training capacity.
Q34 Chairman: When will you put the results of the latest YouGov survey?
Mr Groves: During the summer period but I do not know the exact date. I can let you know the exact date but it will be late summer.
Q35 John Howell: You recently probably made the mistake of saying you were meeting your targets. The mistake being that the next question that follows is are the targets appropriate and are they tough enough for you.
Mr Groves: I think we are meeting five out of six targets set for this year so I will correct that. We went into this year recognising at the start of the year we did not know the downturn and the recession was going to be as bad as it has been. Our targets were set on the basis that we had to bring in the Employment and Support Allowance. I thought that they were very fair given the challenge that we faced and because we have had the extra resource and because we have talked about the model being tested I think they were stretching, they were challenging, as they always are since we have been created over the past five years, but it would be unfair to say that what we have done is deliver targets that were not reasonable.
Q36 John Howell: Are they appropriate targets for this recessionary environment and, secondly, for what you see as the landscape after the recession?
Mr Groves: They are negotiated with departmental colleagues and they are kept under review and reviewed every year. The important targets are to measure how we get people back to work, the individuals we help, and how quickly we pay people. The targets are directly related to what we do and underneath that we have all the usual key performance indicators. They are the right targets. The one that is not the right target, and we recognised this with the department, is the job outcome target. What Jobcentre Plus needs is a target that can be directly related to the work inside a job centre or on the telephone. We recognise that the job outcome target is one for both the department, through the providers they recruit, and Jobcentre Plus so that is not a strategic target if you put it that way. The target for helping people back to work I think will change after the next year to one that is directly related to the work of job centres. We are piloting now a new way of measuring the effectiveness of our advisers and our back to work staff.
Q37 John Howell: With such an increase in claimants, targets about getting claimants dealt with within two weeks must be challenging.
Mr Groves: It is challenging but that is why I emphasise doing benefit processing on 80 centralised sites that could become centres of excellence rather than over 600 sites like we used to. The new way of helping people is giving us the opportunity to say that we can help individuals and we can pay benefits more quickly and we can make sure that we pay benefit accurately. I do not see any difference between having to help twice as many people. The targets are absolutely right. The challenge is keeping within the targets that we are been set given the increase of resources.
Q38 John Howell: Let me pick up on the errors strategy that you just touched on there: a lot of progress on fraud, not so much progress on sorting out errors. Could you say something about where they lie in relation to whether the errors originate, from your side or from the customer side?
Mr Groves: We have, as you say, improved on fraud and I will ask Mark to say something in a second. The error target is a departmental target. What we have done for the past year, and we have got a target for next year now, we have made sure that our contribution to the overall error reduction strategy of the department is for Jobcentre Plus to do the right things. We have a series of activities and we are measured by the type of activity that we do, the checking that is done when audit come along and check what we do. In the current year we have a mix of activities amounting to 2 million. If we carry out those and get all that right, get the percentages right, it adds up to the departmental target. The target for next year is 2.1 million activities. You measure the activities in Jobcentre Plus which adds up to an error target that the department has.
Mr Fisher: I am particularly pleased about the fraud performance because what that shows is that the model for Jobcentre Plus actually helps reduce fraud as well as help to get people into work. The fact that everyone is seen in an office really does bring down the fraud and that is shown in the figures over several years. As far as error is concerned, clearly that remains a high priority for Jobcentre Plus and for the department as a whole. The over-payment figures are continuing to come down which is excellent news. There is still error in the system which we need to eradicate and that will have to be done between joint work between Jobcentre Plus in terms of the delivery and people in my group who actually designed the benefits and designed the processes and designed the systems because unless you attack this at both ends you will never get to grips with it. It does remain a high priority. It is really important that Jobcentre Plus keeps its focus on this at the same time as dealing with pressures in the labour market. The evidence so far through clearance times and other things is that it will. One of the biggest reasons we get error is if we allow clearance times to slip you will get lots more calls from customers because they want to know what has happened to their benefit and that will grow and that will become a self-generating problem for the agency. It is really important that they keep a grip on clearance times and it is good to see it is holding up so far.
Ms Owen: In terms of answering your question, it is roughly half and half between customer error and internal error. It comes back to the training point in terms of official error about how we train our people to make sure they have the skills to get things correct, that we do not let new people onto live cases until we are absolutely sure they have got the full skills and capability. Mark is also right in terms of designing out opportunities for errors. We have a task group jointly between ourselves and the department to look at what are the key sources of error, whether that is internal error or customer error, and how we can design them out, whether that is changes to the IT system, changes to guidance or changes to communications to customers so they know when to report changes in their circumstances. For me that probably is the key to how we drive that figure down.
Q39 John Howell: On the customer issue, when was your last customer satisfaction survey?
Mr Groves: We did the last national Jobcentre Plus survey in 2007. Our next one will be later this year but one of the targets we have are to measure customer satisfaction on a monthly basis and we are just hitting that target now, so a national survey every two years and a regular target that we are measured against.
Q40 John Howell: There was a certain amount of criticism from the Public Accounts Committee about the customer service in terms of the consistency of it mixed with a need to respond flexibly to how people wanted to engage with you. Do you have a response to that at all?
Mr Groves: We strive to make sure we give a consistent service across the country, whether it be answering the phone or dealing with people quickly when they come into job centres or paying them money. The targets are set to try and drive up consistency. Our ministers regularly ask if we are hitting that particular target, are there people in some part of the organisation that are not doing very well or are there particular benefits that are not paid promptly. I can assure you we are in a much better position now than we were 12 months ago in relation to consistency of service and we have priority areas that Ruth will look at. By establishing floor targets for a particular benefit or floor targets for a particular type of help, we can ensure that regularly we see how different parts of the organisation are doing.
Ms Owen: A critical part of my job is to make sure there is not that variation in performance and the customer experience should be good wherever a customer lives. We have league tables of every district and every benefit centre and across the contact centres. I know if there is any outlying performance I can take action with it, whether that is about giving that centre or that district specific support or whether it is addressing underlying causes or performance. We have made a significant difference since that last report on reducing variation. I have the ability to do a lot more moving work around the country so if performance is poor in one area I can make sure the customer does not suffer by making sure we can move the work around to other areas so the customer experience is consistent.
Mr Groves: It is
particularly helped by the investment in contact centres because in
Q41 John Howell: In terms of people turning up at job centre offices and the new open plan office environment, how has that affected customer satisfaction?
Mr Groves: In terms of the individual job centre, what we have got is by district customer satisfaction. We measure customer satisfaction by telephone benefit delivery centre and job centre and we are hitting the targets for job centre customer satisfaction. I am sure it is better than it was last year.
Ms Owen: Going back to the 2007 survey, predominately at the end of the roll-out of the new job centre layout 21 per cent of all the customers asked said that they had seen an improvement in the service delivery from Jobcentre Plus which is not insignificant numbers in terms of public service delivery. That is the facts. In terms of anecdotal response, I was in a job centre last week talking to people, both in terms of regular customers and people who have never been there before, and they really felt it was a professional environment, it was a supportive environment, people were moved around smoothly in terms of knowing where to go and where to get that help. I am absolutely sure customers find it a better experience.
Q42 John Howell: Can I pick that up in relation to a question that was asked earlier? During the summer I spent a day at my local Jobcentre Plus which was very useful and again I would pay tribute to the staff and the experience I saw there. One of the things that I chose to deal with, because as MPs we are used to this type of person coming to our surgery more often than not, was the very angry person who would not really take a rational argument. My experience of that, and I think the experience of the staff there, was the open plan office structure at the beginning when people came in made it worse because it made it very public and much more intimidating for others who were wanting to come in and seek advice. Is that an experience you have seen elsewhere?
Mr Groves: No, on the contrary. I think the environment we have created helps people to come in and be informal because they are greeted by somebody. As soon they walk in the building they are greeted, we identify what they want and move them through. We can direct them to a job point. We can direct them to their appointment with an adviser and the issue really is making sure that we have the customer service processes designed in such a way that it de-risks that environment. It helps individuals to believe they are being helped from the moment they come in. We do get instances where people are unhappy by the very nature of what we do. In some respects what you saw is an every-day operation when somebody sometimes is frustrated but in the design of the job centre we design out as much as we can. My experience of being in offices is that by having people welcoming people to the office and directing them to where they need to be helped it helps them.
Ms Owen: I used to work in a social security office and our new environment is much less intimidating than working in that environment.
Q43 Greg Mulholland: If I could ask you about the implications of the Leitch Review. Is this now something that you and we should be concerned about? As we heard at the beginning, the questions about the recession, inevitably there is a considerably increased workload for Jobcentre Plus and yet at the same time we are now talking about additional responsibilities in terms of the skills which are needed. It is something which we would all support in principle but because of the timing and the situation we are in is this now a concern?
Mr Groves: Can I say
something about where Jobcentre Plus comes from on skills? Mark was in one of our job centres in the
Mr Fisher: I am, as
skills director, accountable jointing with the DIUS for rolling out this
priority throughout the whole country by 2010. We are still committed to do that. What we are doing is taking stock of the
experience so far, the pilot site predominantly in the West Midlands but in
other places too, and also trying to look at what effect the recession has had
on the relative importance of doing this and how the process is designed. What we are now trying to do is look at how
we can roll it out further in a way that maintains the fundamental principles
but reduces the amount that an adviser has to do in a job centre whilst making
sure we continue to refer people to the skills system for skills training and
that the volumes increase. I was out in
the
Q44 Greg Mulholland: Could you briefly give us an indication of how you feel the pilots have gone and what the challenges are? Are you able to tell us what elements from those pilots you think might be able to be rolled out at an early stage?
Mr Fisher: The experience of the pilots is good. People are being systematically referred through the skills health checks into the skills system and getting training. Referrals are not quite where we expected them to be but getting better. In terms of the learning, we have had some surveys done of this and there are some big issues we need to crack about the way management information flows between us and the skill system. We can exchange data because exchanging data between us and the skills system is really important to make this work. There is lots of wiring stuff that we need to get right and we are trying to learn from. The basic principles are ones we need to roll out. The six months' offer which we are going to launch in April has a big skills component to it. There are things we are doing in real time to make this work.
Q45 Greg Mulholland: Do you think that the Jobcentre targets currently reflect the importance of job sustainability? This is something the Committee has been very focused on. It is enormously important getting people into work, and back into work now a particular focus, but is there enough emphasis on job sustainability and the length of time people will stay in jobs?
Mr Groves: The target suite that we have got is the right target for what we are doing now. I welcome closer attention to sustainability in the targets that providers are going to be set in delivering Flexible New deal or other provision because the outcome-related target depends on how long somebody has stayed in work having gone through Jobcentre Plus and through the providers. I am very comfortable with our suite of targets at Jobcentre Plus because of the numbers of people we are dealing with and what we are being asked to do. It is increasingly important to judge the welfare to work response in such a way that the longer people stay in work the better it is for everybody including themselves.
Q46 Greg Mulholland: Do you think that is going to stay the same in light of the economic situation? There is going to be an increased pressure to get people back into work who have lost their jobs.
Mr Groves: It is going to stay the same for 2009/10 for the next year that starts beginning of April. As we get into the different relationship that we will have with providers to help longer term unemployed people back to work, it is really important that we focus on how long we can keep people away from our doors because they are in work. For next year it will be same suite of targets as we have for this year.
Q47 Michael Jabez Foster: The Secretary of State is still optimistic about Flexible New Deal going live in October. Do you share his enthusiasm?
Mr Groves: From a Jobcentre Plus perspective, and Mark will come in about the providers, we are ready in Jobcentre Plus, even with the increased numbers, that we can deliver our part of Flexible New Deal from October in the phase 1 districts we have agreed to start.
Mr Fisher: From a provider's point of view, providers tell us they are broadly ready to start in October too. We are pretty much ready to go. Clearly there is work still to be done but we remain absolutely committed to launching phase 1 in October and phase 2 in October the following year as planned.
Q48 Michael Jabez Foster: Suppose that you and he are wrong, that in fact because of all these disputes going on, because of the litigation that may follow if the contracts are changed too significantly, it cannot happen, what are your contingency plans?
Mr Groves: We are ready to go with the existing model. We know there are discussions taking place about what might change in the contract and whether we need to change the funding arrangements and change the way we are measured. In terms of getting Jobcentre Plus ready, we will be able to refer the people when they get through to the right time. It will make it somewhat easier because we have the six-month programme. We are ready for the six-month programme from April. We are ready to roll out in October in phase 1. I do not think it is an issue so much for Jobcentre Plus, it is more to do with the providers but the meetings I have had with providers and that Ruth has had with providers and Mark has had with providers, when the decisions are taken as to which providers are doing what and where then we will work as closely as we can with them to make sure it is all on the ground in October.
Mr Fisher: We will have contingency plans in place district by district if there are any problems in particular districts. Those contingency plans will have a range of factors including using Jobcentre Plus or using existing provision. There is provision out there at the moment. At the moment we are anticipating that the FND phase models one will start in October.
Q49 Michael Jabez Foster: It is cautious optimism.
Mr Fisher: Yes. Under the surface there is a lot of detailed planning going on with providers. We are also looking at the performance matrix we want to use with providers to make sure they are tuned properly for the downturn.
Mr Groves: The phrase we have been using is the longer people are out of work the more we work to help them back to work. It is really important that the cautious optimism over the summer period is turned into specific providers and places that we can refer people to if we have not got them back to work over the first few months of their period of unemployment.
Q50 Michael Jabez Foster: The commissioning role of Jobcentre Plus particularly in the early parts before Flexible New Deal takes over, the first 12 months, will you be fast tracking as a priority over providing them? The options will be that you actually look for services to assist you in that first 12 month period or you fast track them onto the Flexible New Deal providers. Where are you there? What is going to be your preference?
Mr Groves: We will have a clear list of people who need to be fast tracked, and through the initial interviews in Jobcentre Plus if somebody needs that help that is provided downstream we will fast track those to a provider, either a provider prior to Flexible New Deal coming in or when Flexible New Deal comes in. Our role at the start of all this is to identify those most in need and fast track them.
Q51 Michael Jabez Foster: I will tell you why we are concerned. A lot of the current providers, the people you are dealing with now, are still uncertain where they fit into the Flexible New Deal big contracts. Are they going to be asked to do something or are they going to be asked to do nothing? They may not be there unless you are able to give them some reassurances that you are still going to use them in some way or other. I appreciate that is very difficult for you but what is your solution to that dilemma?
Mr Groves: My solution in Jobcentre Plus is to work as closely as possible with Mark and departmental colleagues, particularly those who on the procurement side, to recognise that in the short term we have lots of people who need help, and while we have this uncertain situation for some providers it may be that we have to extend some of those contracts to give us the provision we need. I recognise the uncertainty but I am pleased, as the acting chief executive of Jobcentre Plus, that we are all working together. We have just organised in the 48 districts that Ruth looks after to make sure we do an audit of what is there so we can establish the provision that is there now and what we expect to have in October and if there gaps we shall know by the end of this month.
Ms Owen: We will be having discussions with the providers to say where is their capacity, where can we move that current capacity around to make sure while we wait for Flexible New Deal we have got help on the ground. That is the most important thing for us. One thing I would add is help for customers is not just the Flexible New Deal. While we have customers with us over the first 12 months of unemployment we can refer them to external providers for short focused help and support, what we call programme centres at the moment, so short, sharp help to people with their job search, with their CV writing, skills or whatever. Some of the providers that you are talking about are already working with us over the next year to make sure we have that help in boosting up that programme-centred support so that we have places we can refer our customers to for additional help.
Q52 Michael Jabez Foster: I appreciate that whilst the concern comes to us mostly at the moment from the providers and their jobs, your priority must be the customer. The empirical evidence is that many of these providers are now thinking of shutting up shop and jumping ship. They simply are not able to wait and see. What is your wider experience of that? Is that something that is coming through to you or do you think there is still going to be enough provision out there should there be a problem with the New Deal or indeed offering new options for the first 12 months?
Mr Groves: The challenge is, as we said earlier, to make sure that we have the right sort of provision now on the ground to help both the newly unemployed people, particularly those who have not experienced our services previously, but also to recognise we are going to need the right sort of provision when people have been out of work for six months and maybe 12 months. I recognise the uncertainty. What I am pleased about is the dialogues that are taking place, the conversations that are taking place, to try and sort out what the provision should be and who should be providing it to work with us. The district managers who have key roles in all of this I am sure are talking to providers at the moment. It is an uncertain situation for all of us collectively until we have sorted it out.
Q53 Michael Jabez Foster: You said you may extend contracts that already exist. Are you entering into new contracts with providers for those services that you will need up to the 12 month point as opposed to fast tracking? Is that an area you are looking at or are you trying to shy away from that?
Mr Groves: What we are trying to do is to make sure that the audit tells us where we have gaps. We know what is coming in terms of Flexible New Deal. We know what is going to come towards the end of the year in what is going to be called the Jobcentre Plus Support Contract so there will be two sets of contracts at the end of the year: Flexible New Deal and a new contract for providers to help us. What we are trying to do is say until we get that exercise out of the way we need some types of provisions, CV writing or the programme centre extending, and so on, so as we roll through the year towards the new arrangement if there is something we need then we get it, either by having a new contract on a short-term basis or by an existing contract but only to give us what we are liking to get under the new arrangements when we get there.
Q54 Chairman: We have this pause in the FND process. In that pause, has anybody dropped out?
Mr Fisher: No. We are not aware of anyone having dropped out and all people are still in the process.
Q55 Chairman: Thank you very much and f you have not got the message, congratulations to your staff.
Mr Groves: May I say thank you for your support as well.