Welfare Reform Bill

I congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Skelmersdale, on this amendment, which gives us the chance to discuss whether all Jobcentre Plus offices around the country will have enough high-quality trained staff properly to manage "work for your benefit" schemes. As the noble Lord said, the Minister has kindly provided us with interesting case studies—which I would call positively Panglossian—in which personal advisers were crucial in providing the right help and advice, and in understanding different situations and being flexible in a number of challenging circumstances. However, I should like to know who will monitor each Jobcentre Plus to ensure that these personal advisers and decision-makers, who are to do such crucial work in the future and who will have such an enhanced role in their clients’ cases, are up to the mark. I do not know whether any noble Lord listened to "You and Yours" before lunch today, in which there was a section all about people’s experiences in Jobcentre Plus offices. It was not a very happy programme to which to listen. When it had just finished, the programme-makers were inundated with phone calls and e-mails, with people saying that their experiences were not very happy at all. I have also had the benefit of some very interesting input from a large CAB in the north of England. It said: ""DWP policy, as stated in the Jobcentre Plus Service Standards, is to offer assistance completing forms to people who, because of disability or a language barrier, would struggle to complete forms themselves. We had a case recently where a disabled client sought a face-to-face appointment at a Jobcentre for help completing a form. Our adviser went through ten people at JCP, citing the Service Standards each time, before he managed to obtain an appointment for the client"." Another problem is the use of telephones. A lot of people are told when they go to Jobcentre Plus offices to go away and use the telephone. DWP policy is that jobcentres should provide phones, but this does not seem to happen in practice. My informant said that it troubles him that people inquiring about crisis loans are routinely treated in this way in direct contravention of paragraph 23 of part 3 of the Social Fund guide, which states: ""customers who are already in the office must never be told to go home and telephone"." The role of Jobcentre Plus personal advisers and decision-makers is becoming more important as the Flexible New Deal is rolled out this autumn and the "work for your benefit" schemes are piloted. They are expected to deal with those who can hardly understand English, who may be unable to read and write, who have learning difficulties, or those who have multiple problems. Their clients may be violent, abusive, angry, clinically depressed, truculent or just desperate for a job. A lot is being asked of these people, the number of whom has had to be increased very quickly as Jobcentre Plus offices have become busier. How confident can we be that the training is now adequate to cope with this increased caseload? Who will judge when a JCP is ready to roll out of a "work for your benefit" scheme, provided, of course, that it passes all the evaluations after the pilot scheme?