Welfare Reform Bill

My Lords, I shall speak also to Amendments 38 and 61. We have tabled these amendments to acknowledge the widespread concern expressed in Committee about the competence of those in positions of authority in the offices of Jobcentre Plus and the outsourced companies. The amendment requires the Secretary of State in regulations to set down what the required competences are for staff in JCP offices and those of the outsourced providers. The last thing we want is to seek to build a huge bureaucracy around training for staff in this field, but there is a great deal of disquiet about whether the rapid expansion of JCP staff has meant that their training has been compromised. Those of us who raised this issue in Grand Committee were particularly concerned that staff should be adequately trained to recognise and meet the needs of people with mental and/or physical health conditions. Amendment 38 would ensure that any staff dealing with those customers with drug problems should have the competence to deal with them. Amendment 61 would extend the requirement to outsourced providers. In July, I wrote to the Minister about the training of personal advisers, decision-makers and disability employment advisers. His reply, a copy of which was placed in the Library, was that personal advisers complete 60 hour of induction and foundation learning. This is followed by 160 hours of learning specific to the personal adviser job. The letter goes on to talk about adviser skills workshops and something called, ""periods of supported workplace consolidation to enable advisers to effectively interview customers"." I wondered how and when all this learning can take place when JCP offices are under such pressure. However, the Minister’s letter goes on to say that the programme of "learning products" has been prioritised to enable PAs to take up their roles quickly. Cutting out the jargon, the thrust of the letter seems to be that a lot of JCP staff have been thrown on to the front line pretty quickly, with a minimum of training, and that more extensive training is being deferred until the offices are less busy. While this is understandable in the present economic climate, in the context of the Bill we hope that the wider training programme will be undertaken as soon as conditions are right. This is particularly important when there will be claimants with more barriers to work than ever before who will be in the employment group of ESA and who will be expected to be in the progression-to-work group. While some will be seen by a disability employment adviser who we hope will have training in helping those with specific health problems, such as all the myriad fluctuating conditions and those with a degree of autism or dyslexia, there will be many such claimants who see a personal adviser. Our grouped Amendment 61 also requires the outsourced companies to ensure that their staff have adequate training to deal with their clients, who often have the most complex barriers to work. I will not mention "creaming" and "parking" again, as we have raised this problem again and again with the Minister in the context of the Flexible New Deal, and he assures us that the contracts with the outsourced companies will guard against that. We need to know that, as they will receive taxpayers’ money to help clients with complex problems, and we hope they will have sufficient training for this. The importance of sufficiently trained staff was highlighted by the Joint Committee on Human Rights in its 14th report on the Bill. It says: ""The Bill expressly provides that any direction must be reasonable ‘having regard to the person’s circumstances’. It is unclear whether advisers will have the tools necessary to assess an individual’s circumstances effectively enough to know when a particular activity is appropriate or not"." The DWP’s own research suggests that even within Pathways regimes personal advisers admit lacking knowledge and understanding of mental health issues, with some saying that their initial training had not prepared them for working with people with mental health problems. We hope that individuals with disabilities will be involved in designing and delivering this training, as this has been found to be highly effective in improving understanding. The Minister knows that we have both worked on a plan that will come up very soon in a statutory instrument about a better deal for people who are doing this work. I conclude with some information that I heard the other day from someone who was thrown off incapacity benefit but who was helped enormously by a disability benefits adviser to get on to a government programme specifically targeted at her previous profession. This changed the woman’s life dramatically and she said that was eternally grateful to the adviser who was, interestingly, herself disabled. I beg to move.