Welfare Reform Bill

I was provoked by those two powerful contributions because one of my spies in the department gave me the staff survey appraisal that has just been published. It goes to the heart of whether the department is in a position to get this significant change of policy across. In the 2009 staff survey, which enjoyed the attention of 73,000 people in the department who responded, only a minority of the staff think that the department is well managed and that its executive team has a clear vision for the future. There are a lot of interesting statistics here, one or two of which I will offer the Committee for consideration because they feed into the capacity and morale of the department that will take forward the rollout of this programme. Only 28 per cent agreed with the statement: ""I believe the DWP Executive Team has a clear vision for the future of DWP"." The survey went on to talk about resources, with 43 per cent of respondents agreeing that there are usually sufficient people in their units, so there are some staff capacity issues there. Finally—and this is only one of a selection with which I could entertain the Committee with song and dance for some time—33 per cent of staff disagreed or strongly disagreed that their part of the DWP is committed to delivering a quality customer service and less than half agreed that it acted on feedback received from customers. That is a very comprehensive survey and I selected those statistics rather carefully, but I wanted to add to what has been said. Unless the department is really up to the mark, and professional training, resources, capacity and morale are clearly in place for 2010, we risk this policy failing. The Government have a lot of work to do in trying to make sure that this can be delivered properly and with confidence.