Welfare Reform Bill

My Lords, I am grateful to the noble Baroness for tabling these amendments and to all noble Lords who have spoken to them. I was interested to hear that the noble Lord, Lord Freud, has plans, should he ever be given the opportunity to implement them, to spend large sums on national programmes. Perhaps this is not the occasion to pick over issues around the fiscal stimulus, who refused to support it and what that means, because you must not only will the ends but will the means as well, and that has been somewhat lacking in the noble Lord’s party. Everyone would agree that you do not want to have bureaucratic systems in place that are there for the sake of it, but there are real issues about monitoring. If you do not monitor things, how can you measure them and know what progress you are making? That is particularly important in relation to people with learning disabilities, disabled people and people with mental health conditions. I do not know how many years you would have to think back to a time before we started to monitor issues around ethnicity. Until we started to do that, you could not properly determine what was happening, where to target resources and where help and support were most needed. I take the point that being overly bureaucratic in requiring top-down rigid structures of training to fit everyone is not necessarily the right thing to do, but there is a balance to be struck here. Amendments 18, 38 and 61, which seek to ensure that advisers, discharging functions of the Secretary of State in relation to key aspects of the administration of income support, JSA and ESA regimes, including work-focused interviews and work-related activity, are adequately trained and meet required competencies, which it is proposed would be outlined in secondary legislation. I hope to persuade noble Lords that these amendments are unnecessary. As has been said, we discussed this subject at some length in Committee. I hope to reassure noble Lords that we take the training of personal advisers extremely seriously and believe that it is critical to the success of our back-to-work programmes. In previous debates I have set out some of the steps that the department already takes in this area; today I can also provide noble Lords with some further developments, which I hope will further reassure. As we have previously discussed, Jobcentre Plus advisers working with IB and ESA claimants already have considerable training in dealing with customers with a range of health conditions. All the organisations that deliver provider-led pathways have equally given specific training to their staff, to assist them in dealing with customers with learning disabilities and mental health conditions. They also have links to specialist subcontractors, to which clients with specific medical conditions can be referred for additional assistance. Jobcentre Plus keeps its learning and development of advisers constantly under review. We are undertaking a review of the training for all its IB advisers and ESA advisers, which will be completed by the autumn. Since April 2009, all Jobcentre Plus staff have also been supported by a new performance management system, which aims to ensure that they have the right skills to carry out their roles. This includes a new national competency framework for all operational staff. In addition, Jobcentre Plus is reviewing its options for adviser accreditation. We are exploring how we can link the acquisition of a professional qualification to the successful completion of the learning and development that advisers currently undertake. This will ensure that the skills that personal advisers acquire are externally benchmarked and will enable us to measure our adviser capability through a recognised framework. Within the procurement process of our back-to-work programmes, we ensure that we contract only with providers that have trained staff. For instance, in the provider-led pathways invitation to tender, we asked bidders to describe the relevant skills or experience of their employees or subcontractors to enable them to deliver the provision effectively and address the specific needs and barriers of their customers. We also asked for specific information on the roles, qualifications and experience required for each post needed to deliver the provision. In addition, the procurement processes have requirements within the terms and conditions of contracts for contractors to satisfy themselves that their employees are suitable in all respects to deliver the programme. The DWP does not require contracted providers to deliver specific training to their personal advisers, as we believe that this allows our providers the flexibility to deliver the training that they feel most suits the needs of their customers. However, I reassure noble Lords that all providers are subject to external inspection by Ofsted in England and Estyn in Wales to ensure that they provide a quality service to our customers. We are working with HM Inspectorate of Education to align Scotland with the current arrangements in England and Wales and will introduce an inspection regime for DWP-contracted employment provision in Scotland from January 2010. To specify to providers the exact competencies and training courses that the advisers must undertake could result in a significant increase in the contract price that the department has to pay. In some cases, the provider may not wish to agree a contract variation on this basis, which would make it difficult to progress until the contracts are ready for renewal. The noble Baroness, Lady Thomas, asked what the expansion of Jobcentre Plus means for staff and whether they are being properly trained. All staff joining JCP receive appropriate training. We have implemented shortened training packages for the key job roles in all delivery arms for new staff and kept the tried and tested model that we use for delivering ESA training, which uses increased class sizes and has facilitated e-learning. This enables us to ensure that we can train the number of new recruits coming through our doors. We also routinely monitor performance down to site level. Even in these challenging times, we do not shy away from tackling individual sites whose performance is relatively poorer than others. Such sites are given priority status and singled out for specific attention and ongoing focus to drive performance back to an acceptable level. We plan to have sufficient internal capacity to provide training for 2,500 recruits per month, with in excess of 600 trainers and coaches to support the peaks of our delivery. The noble Lord, Lord Rix, spoke with his great expertise on learning disabilities about the importance of people understanding them and being able to differentiate them from other conditions, so that people are encouraged to make the right decisions about action plans or jobseeker’s agreements. That is absolutely right. The suggestion that Jobcentre Plus might have a network of learning disability co-ordinators is interesting. I shall take that issue back. I know that Jobcentre Plus engages extensively with stakeholders and experts such as the noble Lord to do our best to make sure that we have full coverage of the whole range of clients whom we should serve. I hope that I have provided some reassurance on all the issues around training. I am conscious, as ever when we have these debates, of assertions that there is not enough training or that it is not as universal or effective as it might be. We assert from the Dispatch Box on the Government’s behalf that lots of investment and lots of training are taking place. No one would claim that it is perfect in every respect on every day, but there is huge effort and investment going in. Engagement with our stakeholders and the range of people whom we should serve will help to drive continuing improvements. I ask the noble Baroness to withdraw her amendment.