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Jobcentre Plus

What a pleasure it is to present my first report of this nature with you in the Chair, Mr. Taylor—no doubt that will be the cause of further discussion later. I also welcome my hon. Friend the Minister to what I shall call his first confrontation with the Select Committee on Work and Pensions. We shall see how we get on today. No doubt there will be many future occasions on which we can cross swords. The background to the report started in November, when the then Minister of State in the Department for Work and Pensions, who is now my right hon. Friend the Minister for Industry and the Regions, and the chief executive of Jobcentre Plus, appeared before the Committee for discussion of the annual report. All members of the Committee, through their own constituency work, press reports and submissions made to our incapacity benefit inquiry, were well aware that there were escalating problems in the operation of Jobcentre Plus. As a result, we decided to conduct a short inquiry. Had we known what we were going to find, we would probably have decided to have a longer inquiry, but we had set ourselves a timetable and we had to adhere to it. The focus of the inquiry was the impact of the efficiency savings on training programmes, personal advisers, the customer management system and contact centres. It is important to say at this stage that what was originally the Department of Employment finished up being merged into the Department for Work and Pensions in 2002. That was the third major change of machinery in Government in seven years, and no doubt it has left some legacies. We need to recognise, as we did in the report, the achievements of Jobcentre Plus offices. Every working day, details of 13,000 vacancies are received; they conduct 36,000 work-focused interviews; they place 4,000 people in work; and they take 16,000 new claims. By any standard, that is reasonably impressive, but we have to recognise the nature of the clientele with which Jobcentre Plus is dealing. Any failure in that is a failure for those in society who are least able to help themselves. We found that the Department or Jobcentre Plus was trying to carry out four major projects at the same time: rationalisation of the estate; the creation of Jobcentre Plus offices; the integration of a new information technology system; and the very significant head-count reductions. Any one of those would have been a major project on its own; having all four running at the same time stretched management capability to the limit and perhaps even to breaking point. That was not just nationally; in districts and local offices, there was real pressure on management. As a consequence, many of the services provided through the Department suffered. We should remember that Jobcentre Plus is key to two major departmental objectives: the welfare-to-work programme and the elimination or reduction of child and pensioner poverty. If the system is not working, those laudable social objectives are not being met and vulnerable people suffer as a result. One consequence of the head-count reduction has been that, frankly, inappropriate staff have been placed in contact centres. Anyone who has had experience of contact centres, whether in the public or private sector, knows that a special talent is required to work in them. We visited one contact centre—I do not want to name it, because I do not want to embarrass anyone—and it was quite obvious from the submissions and the evidence that we received that that process was happening. It was being done almost in a humane way, from management’s point of view: rather than putting someone out of a job, they would be transferred to fill a new vacancy. However, the skills required to work in a contact centre are specific. They do not relate to someone who has spent 20 years being a decision maker, benefit processor or claims assessor. Last summer, because of the process that I have described, there was virtually a total breakdown in the contact centre operation.