Government Employment Strategy

That figure is correct, although it does not really matter who said it; we just need to look at the evidence, and I am afraid that the evidence is not good. Indeed, some of the indicators are going in the wrong direction. The key issue is what we should do going forward. David Freud talked in his report about some payments being made by result as a possible replacement, as well as other schemes that could run alongside the new deal. That is where the focus of policy debate needs to be at the moment. There are obvious concerns about how such schemes are structured. We should ensure that they help those furthest from the labour market, who are the most difficult to help, and that they lead to sustained employment. I completely agree with the Committee Chairman and others that 13 weeks is a wholly inadequate measure for sustained employment. Who plans anything in their life for three or four months? None of us operates in such a way in our own lives. One cannot pay a mortgage on three months’ employment, and one cannot plan to pay for a holiday, plan to buy a new car or do any such thing on the basis of 13 weeks’ employment, which is not ““sustained”” employment under any definition that our constituents would recognise. It is tremendously important that the payments by results models are structured so that the hardest to help are not left out. They will need a higher fee—more money will need to go to those who have been out of the labour market longest. That is probably the best proxy for the hardest to help. I am convinced that it is possible to put together a package to help all those with some of the payments by results schemes. To take one example, an independent provider, Tomorrow’s People, is achieving a 90 per cent. rate of people staying in work for at least 13 weeks, compared with a result of only 33 per cent. under the new deal for young people and new deal 25-plus measured during the same period. There are opportunities to get a lot more people back into work on a sustained basis. That is a tremendously exciting possibility that the Committee will consider seriously. My final point is about an issue mentioned by almost every Member who spoke this afternoon—the importance of giving the personal advisers more flexibility, treating claimants as individuals and trying to get the system to fit their circumstances rather than the other way round. We have heard a lot of figures this afternoon—we have had numbers of people, percentages and all the rest of it. I want to end my remarks by referring to two individuals, both of whom I spoke to earlier this afternoon and both of whom have given me permission to mention their cases. The first is a Mr. Michael Hughes of Ipswich. Happily, he has a job at the moment—I am sure that we all send him our congratulations and hope that he can keep it. He had been on jobseeker’s allowance for some time. Incidentally, he asked me to say that he rated his new deal adviser as extremely good—he was very impressed and wanted no criticism of any of the individuals who had helped him. He was concerned only about the system with which they were working. Mr. Hughes had one specific problem. He had the Institute of Certified Bookkeepers qualification and was all set and ready to get a job. There was lots of work around Ipswich that he could have got. The one thing that he needed to start work was for his indemnity to be paid. He thought that it would cost £250, which was too high a figure as it turned out to cost only £182. When he told his employment adviser about the problem, he was sent on a 13-week course to do a CV. The course was poorly run, I am afraid. There was very little access to computers, and he had to redo his CV time and again. He said that the course lowered the morale of the people on it. Even when his local MP tried for him, he was not able to find out the cost of sending him on that course, but I bet the Minister that it was rather more than £182. We have heard about the flexibility in New Zealand; why could Mr. Hughes not have been paid £182? He could have been in work straight away, much earlier than he was. The other story comes from a Mr. Ian Freke of Bristol, who wrote both to me and his local paper. His letter is in the public domain. He had been unemployed for more than a year. For the first nine months, he had not claimed JSA, but lived off his savings. He had not wanted to claim, but started to do so on 6 December 2006. He was absolutely thrilled to have been offered a job on 28 March this year. He had to start at 7 o’clock in the morning. He did not have a car, so he looked at the bus timetables. The earliest bus would not have got him to work until 7.35 am. It would have taken him an hour and 10 minutes to cycle, which the Minister would probably think unreasonable—the Minister is not responding, but I hope that he would think so. What Mr. Freke wanted was to get the job and get off JSA, so he wanted a scooter, which—on the road, taxed and ready to go—would have cost about £500. He was being paid £228 of JSA every month, so within two and a half months, the Department would have got its money back. Sadly, the job has gone. He was not able to get from the Department the means to get the work. This afternoon, I spoke to Mr. Freke, who is still out of work and claiming JSA. It will not be long before the Department will have paid out more in JSA than it would have cost to give Mr. Freke the means to get to work. We have to give personal advisers responsibility and discretion. If they get it wrong very occasionally, so be it. There are excellent people among them, and they will get it right more often than they get it wrong. They will get it right in eight or nine cases out of 10. Of course there must be overall responsibility, limits and accountability to managers, but please, New Zealand can do it! What is the point of a Select Committee that travels the world and finds out best practice from other countries if we do not learn from it? The travel budgets that the House pays will not be worth while if Ministers of any Government do not listen to those who can tell them about best practice and what works in other parts of the world. Please, can we give the personal advisers more discretion on how they spend their budgets, which have been reduced? I hope that my two examples will give the Minister pause for thought.