Work and Pensions Committee
Oral evidence: Plan for Jobs and employment support, HC 600
Wednesday 8 February 2023
Ordered by the House of Commons to be published on 8 February 2023.
Watch the meeting
Members present: Sir Stephen Timms (Chair); Debbie Abrahams; Shaun Bailey; Siobhan Baillie; David Linden; Nigel Mills; Selaine Saxby; Sir Desmond Swayne.
Questions 217 - 281
Witnesses
I: Rhodri Thomas, Managing Director, Reed in Partnership; Elizabeth Taylor, Chief Executive, Employment Related Services Association (ERSA); Richard Clifton, Managing Director of Employability, Shaw Trust; and Fiona Monahan, Chief Executive, Ingeus.
II: Rosie Ginday MBE, CEO and Founder, Miss Macaroon; Liz Sewell, Director, Get Ready for Work (GRoW); and Graham Parry, Director of Youth, Employment and Skills, Groundwork.
Written evidence from witnesses:
Employment Related Services Association (ERSA)
Witnesses: Rhodri Thomas, Elizabeth Taylor, Richard Clifton and Fiona Monahan.
Q217 Chair: A warm welcome, everybody, to this meeting of the Work and Pensions Select Committee in our inquiry on Plan for Jobs and employment support. We are very grateful to the four members of our first panel this morning. I am going to ask each of them very briefly to introduce themselves to us, starting with Fiona Monahan.
Fiona Monahan: Thank you for having me here. I am the Chief Executive of Ingeus UK. We are part of the APM Group, a global human services provider delivering largely specialist employment, disability and health services across 12 countries. We have been partnering with DWP providing employment services for the past 20 years in the UK.
Richard Clifton: I am Managing Director for Employability for Shaw Trust, a national charity delivering employability skills and health and wellbeing services across the UK, including services for DWP as a prime contractor.
Elizabeth Taylor: I am the Chief Executive at the Employment Related Services Association. We are the membership trade body for employment providers. We have 300 members, from the larger ones, some of whom are here today, right down to very small local specialist providers.
Rhodri Thomas: I am the Managing Director for Reed in Partnership. We have delivered services to DWP since 1998.
Q218 Chair: Thank you all. Can I put the first question to each of you? As you know, since the start of the pandemic we have seen quite a sharp rise in economic inactivity. Why do you think that is and what do you think the Department for Work and Pensions should be doing about it?
Fiona Monahan: I think we are all seeing that in the media and experiencing it in our programmes. We deliver Work and Health, Restart, and, more recently, JETS and Access to Work, so I will provide my answers based on our experience there.
Since the pandemic there are probably three or four key reasons that people are not returning to the workforce. There is health issues and a large rise in mental health issues. Caring responsibilities is something that we are seeing as a barrier, elder care and childcare. There is a skills gap, and since the pandemic people are also wanting a lot more flexibility in the work that they are doing. What we are seeing is that not all employers are able to provide that level of flexibility, so perhaps there is something there around being able to work more with employers to help them to be more flexible in the work that they provide.
Ingeus has recently done some research around employers employing people with disability. What we hear from employers is that they are still finding that they do not have the level of confidence to employ people with disabilities. Again, perhaps there is something there in relation to doing more around Disability Confident, incentivising employers to be more flexible in one area and supporting them to employ people with disabilities.
Richard Clifton: I would agree with all those comments. Post-pandemic, we did definitely see a change in some of the attitudes of people and that is linked to health. Some older workers got to a situation where they could see that they wanted a slightly different lifestyle. They took on caring responsibilities for their own family and now, coming back in, they are finding it difficult to pick up, where childcare is not as available or they are caring for older relatives and that sort of service. That becomes another barrier on top of potential health problems that they may have.
From a Government point of view, it is looking at all those barriers. I think that DWP can do a lot around the programmes. Allowing eligibility to be widened could be one of those, because a number of these people who are economically inactive may not be at this point claiming mainstream benefits that allow them to access the programmes. With that eligibility factor, I think the Department could then make more use of the programmes it has. We may talk about this later, but the success of the programmes is there to see. The support is available and we can move people, but we do not always access those.
From Shaw Trust’s point of view, we have run a lot of programmes, which are non-DWP, where we do go and engage with local communities. We are allowed to bring those on to programmes run with local authorities and ESF programmes that are now coming to an end but were there, which allowed us to engage with the economically inactive. There is sometimes a bit of a stigma about walking into a Jobcentre, which then prevents them getting referred on to the support they need. There are a number of barriers there that the Government could look to tackle.
Elizabeth Taylor: I think it is important to look at the distinction between involuntary inactivity, so people who are not economically active but it has been driven by a health condition, their mental health, some post-Covid nervousness about previously sheltering. Now they do not want to leave the house, maybe they have caring responsibilities they have picked up, childcare for other family members. Those are all things that can be addressed if work is dealt with alongside other things.
There is another group where it is voluntary inactivity. That falls with people who have chosen to retire early, young people who have remained in education, young people who maybe are doing very well in education but have chosen to stay on and do a master’s degree, do something beyond the first qualification. The employment support sector has solutions for all this, but we do need to recognise that it is not just one big cohort of people who are economically inactive.
Rhodri Thomas: Building on the previous comments, we can see on our current programmes that health and disability is the biggest driver. Our employment advisers are frequently talking about the additional barriers we are now dealing with in terms of mental health. As Elizabeth mentioned, we have a lot of participants who are reluctant to work in environments, like retail customer service, where they are in busy working environments. We also have a lot of participants who want greater flexibility, do not particularly want to work full-time and are looking for options to work from home as well. As Richard mentioned, that is one of the drivers that employers are not always able to be set up to offer those types of vacancies.
We have previously run a number of European social fund programmes, which worked with people who were economically inactive. We know that providers can deliver programmes to attract these people back into the labour market. We can do the work with employers to help shape the type of vacancies they are offering as well.
Q219 Chair: Rhodri, you made the point that health is a big driver. Are we talking here about long Covid directly caused by the pandemic, or are we talking about mental health problems that for some reason seem to have been triggered during the pandemic that were not there before? Tell us a bit more about health.
Rhodri Thomas: On our programmes, such as Restart, JETS and Work and Health, we have health and wellbeing advisers. We have seen a real shift over the last two years into delivering more provision that is focused on anxiety and, as Elizabeth mentioned, people concerned about leaving their homes and so on. We have to deal with people who are more concerned about going back into work, and some of the impact of the lockdowns has contributed to those worsening mental health conditions with some participants.
Q220 Nigel Mills: Can we come back to what I think you mentioned, Richard, the people who are not claiming benefits but could benefit from a programme? I think we have all seen programmes where the Jobcentre can refer people and we can understand how that process works, but how could the Department find people who are economically inactive who could benefit from a programme but are not in the system somewhere? How do you get to them in a reliable and predictable way?
Richard Clifton: I think it is reliant on the wider community assets we have working within communities. There is a bit of a stigma for those people about walking through the door of the Jobcentre. At the moment, for all programmes, even if we have a signposting organisation, they still have to signpost them to go via the Jobcentre to get the referral.
We have run a number of programmes for local authorities. If we look at the Live Well Kent provision, which is centred around wellbeing and predominantly mental health, we work with a range of community organisations. We have a network and are working in the community and engaging with those people all the time. From when that was originally conceived five or six years ago, annually we are now helping double the number of people the local authority thought that it would be supporting, and that continues. That is down to just being in the communities and not having some of that stigma of having to walk into a Jobcentre.
Starting conversations that are not directly about work, starting conversations about helping them to progress themselves and what they want, you end up taking them on a journey and work is a key element sometimes of their recovery.
With our IPS programmes, we work with the NHS where we build in employment as part of their actual recovery route. It is not all down to the Department or Jobcentres being able to solve it, it is allowing us to go out and find self-referrals or find the referrals themselves, like we have on ESF. We can evidence that somebody fits the set criteria for economic inactivity from a funding point of view, but it would allow us to engage with a wider number of people.
Q221 Nigel Mills: If I wanted to commission you to do this in Derbyshire, how long would it take to get that programme up? Say in a year’s time, how many people do you think you could have—
Richard Clifton: You have put me on the spot with Derbyshire as I have not done the research of what possibly could be there.
Nigel Mills: A new area then.
Richard Clifton: If we go into new areas, normally we can pick up quickly. As a national charity, we already have a number of networks that are already working in the organisation. We would not do it as just us doing it. It would definitely be that we would build a consortium of local organisations before we did that. We would build the framework.
That is exactly what we did in Kent. We went in there as a new provider and within a year we had established that and were getting the referrals at the levels that the local authority thought. By year 2 we were doubling what the local authority thought we would be bringing through. It works quickly by engaging the local community and having an offer that is targeted to the people you are trying to support.
Q222 Nigel Mills: Does anybody have anything different to add?
Elizabeth Taylor: I think it is worth saying that, at the moment, there will be organisations in Derby that are delivering European-funded provision that would be part of that supply chain. One of the things about the ESF 2014-2020 programme—which of course is still running—is that 55% of participants on those programmes are not in regular contact with Jobcentre Plus. The majority of that 55% are not the claimant of benefits; they may be the partner of a claimant. It is happening already, just in a smaller scale, of European, National Lottery or whatever funded provision.
It is the year that worries me. With speed you could pick up and build on that provision that is there, not with more of the same but with the organisations with the experience of reaching out and working in those communities.
Q223 Nigel Mills: Is it your experience that the only way to get any sizeable number of people in this situation back into work is not to offer some small tax incentive or something but that people are going to need some support and encouragement to do this? It is not just that we make it pay sufficiently and then it will be fine?
Richard Clifton: From my experience, it is more about the good work end of it. It is not necessarily about tax incentives; it is about working with employers to offer a good work offer. It is a good rate of pay, but people are also looking for progression and flexibility. That good job that they can go into is more of the incentive than any tax incentive and bits and pieces.
It may be that you need to look at incentives that we can give to business to allow them to do that. That could be one angle that you could look at. However, I don’t think that incentives around tax will, for the vast majority of the people we are talking about, have the impact that you are looking for. It is more about having the support that they need to overcome some of the barriers. Investing in the childcare end of it, the social care end of it, may allow them not to have to spend too much time on the care side so they can themselves go into work.
Unfortunately, I cannot think of the silver bullet of something like that that would work. I think it is a holistic approach that we need to take to overcome the problems.
Q224 Sir Desmond Swayne: From your point of view, how effective have the schemes—Work and Health, Restart, JETS, IPES—been in reaching those who most need them? What are the best features of those schemes that ought to be replicated in any future scheme? What improvements might be made to ensure that they get to those who most need them?
Rhodri Thomas: It is fair to say that across the DWP provision we are seeing good performance on programmes, including on the specialist programmes such as IPES, which works with people with the greatest health and disability barriers back into work. As the National Audit Office reported, Restart was a brand new programme that got off the ground very quickly and we are achieving the performance targets on those contracts.
One of the things that has shifted in the DWP approach is a focus on smaller caseloads. If you go back to some of the previous programmes, such as the Work programme, the adviser and participant caseloads were too high. We now have a market where the caseloads for participants are managed in accordance with the support we need and the barriers that those participants are facing.
One of the other key drivers is the DWP move towards HMRC notifications as evidence. It seems like quite a technical element, but, if you look back at how much money providers would have spent five or 10 years ago, evidencing outcomes, we have been able to reinvest that money now back into frontline services.
One of the other aspects of the provision is that, while there is a trade-off with larger contracts, the larger contracts that we are delivering do allow us to provide now greater focus on employer engagement. The way that we work, both internally and collaboratively, with providers across provision to share employer vacancies and to drive through consistency with large national employers is very productive, along with the big support teams that we now have within the employment contracts; as I mentioned, health and wellbeing advisers, trainers, executive coaches for people with higher skill levels to help those people get back into work at a corporate level. I do think we are now providing a much more rich and varied provision, which is tailored to the specific needs of the people on the quite different programmes and the barriers that they face.
Elizabeth Taylor: I don’t deliver these. However, maybe I have a bit of a unique perspective because I get to see what these guys are doing and I have a background of delivering provision. One of the things that strikes me about the provisions that you have just mentioned is that they were designed and commissioned and the world changed: the Work and Health programme when we got Covid; Restart was the Covid response, but we did not have the economic shock we were going to have and the challenges are different. Now we are looking at labour market shortages.
The thing that I observe from the outside is how well providers delivering those contracts have flexed and adapted them, learned to work slightly differently, drawn on experience of other provisions they have done before, and introduced new things, as Rhodri has just outlined. The level of collaboration between providers, through some of the partnerships and the employer engagement they do together, has been a big step forward and very innovative. I think that the contracts that are being delivered now are much better placed than things in the past, which was a more competitive environment in many ways. The sector is much healthier in the delivery of these.
Richard Clifton: I would agree with all that. What we have seen is that we also have a provider network that can respond very quickly to changes within the environment. That is not just down to the prime contracts, it is down to supply chains we work with. We are also developing our supply chain. We have smaller local organisations that can deliver more and not have to take some of the burden by the way that it is contracted. It allows prime contractors to take that overall burden and make sure that, as Rhodri was saying, we take off some of the admin burden and everything else. In actual fact, the smaller organisations do what they do best, which is deliver the support in the local communities to the participants who need the support.
The other thing is that we can move quickly and these programmes have adapted over time. JETS is one of the prime examples of that. In a six-week period the prime contractors within the Work and Health programme rolled out JETS. From our point of view, we remotely recruited 500 to 700 advisers and had them fully working remotely within six weeks, which is not something that is easy for Departments to move quickly to do. Having that provider network, you can move very quickly to put the support in place that is needed in a changing environment.
Fiona Monahan: It is very hard to go last after these three. I would agree with everything there. I was going to speak to JETS but I think that Richard is right. That was a good example of how the sector worked well with DWP to establish JETS as a programme. The results in JETS have been very good.
The other thing to call out there was the flexibility in the hybrid. It was largely remote, but one of the lessons we could learn from that moving forward is to have a little bit more flexibility in how we deliver services. Face to face is not always the best way to deliver services for all the participants we deal with. I think there is a bit of a learn from that for future provision, but I would agree with everything that the rest of the panel has said.
Q225 Chair: Can I pick up on a couple of points there? Rhodri, you made the point that there is a new focus on adviser caseload and maybe advisers had too many people in the Work programme to support. Are there requirements in the contract now about that?
Rhodri Thomas: Yes. For the most recent procurements there have been very detailed questions about caseload assumptions. We have had to provide caseload modelling to the DWP commercial team. Then the DWP performance managers focus very closely on caseload levels across the provision as a whole, but also within individual sites as well. It is reflected in the commissioning but also in the performance management regime. Obviously, we want to deliver that commitment because our performance model is based upon us having the right time for participants to get the support they need.
Q226 Chair: We no longer have the black box approach that was a feature of the Work programme? I think that you were given the money and it was just a question of you working out how best to use it.
Rhodri Thomas: Yes, we have moved away from the black box approach. We have a very specific set of customer service requirements. That is not about dictating what we do with participants, but it is about ensuring a common service so that everyone will be seen within so many days, everyone will have an action plan and have contact within a fortnight and then monthly contact on some of the programmes. There is now a clearer set of expectations about how we deliver. That is monitored and driven through the performance management regime in terms of caseload assumptions as well.
Q227 Chair: You made the point that programmes are delivering better as a result of this different approach. With the Work programme, there were quarterly data and we could all see what was happening. Presumably, you have your own data, but do you have data about how other providers are doing or are there data that the rest of us can see about how these programmes are performing?
Rhodri Thomas: Yes, usually a couple of weeks after the end of each month we will get the performance report from DWP. That will give us comparative data on our contracts and also with competitors, in terms of how we are all doing against customer service standards and against the performance targets that sit within that. I know that the Work and Health programme has a regular publication date of external stats on performance, but I do not think we have seen that on JETS so far.
Q228 Chair: How frequently is Restart produced?
Rhodri Thomas: I think that the Work and Health programme is every quarter, every six months.
Chair: Restart?
Rhodri Thomas: I think the last set of data was published probably in October or November time. I think that it coincided with the National Audit Office report.
Chair: You see it more frequently, do you?
Rhodri Thomas: Yes. As I said, we see monthly performance reports in quite significant detail in terms of cohort performance as well.
Q229 Chair: Is it clear from the data you see that the programmes are performing better now than the Work programme did all those years ago?
Rhodri Thomas: From our experience, I would say that we believe we are delivering a better quality of service and we are achieving better outcomes as a result of that provision.
Chair: Does anyone else have any comments on those topics? No, okay, fine.
Q230 Selaine Saxby: As we know, among the over-50s economic inactivity is a particular challenge right now. If DWP was to develop a targeted support programme to help this group go back into the labour market, what do you think this should look like, how could it be delivered and how would we identify and engage with those people?
Richard Clifton: I am going to repeat some of what I have said already. If we want to engage with this customer group, we do need to look at the eligibility criteria and not have it linked to benefits. That is one of the main things we need to look at, and the engagement, if it is going to be a commissioned service, allowing providers to go out and find and engage with these people. I think that the engagement side is going to be important.
Linked to that, there is the employer element. We have to build programmes that have clear routes, designed and working with employers, so that we can move people into good work and it is attractive for that cohort. It is going to have to be holistic, though, because within that you are going to have people who have health problems, who potentially have acquired disabilities. The number of people with acquired disabilities grows as the population demographic ages, so it is something that is more prevalent within the over-50s and we need to work to that.
Have a programme that has that approach, but it is more about engaging them in the community and, if I am honest, not forcing them to walk through the doors of a Jobcentre to be able to access the programme.
Elizabeth Taylor: I have delivered 50-plus provision in the past and it was interesting. I looked at a programme that I had managed and co-designed in 2015 and, apart from some of the things about people taking early retirement, the actual offer was not that different. It is not just about age, it is about health, it is about their place in the family and the fact that they may have childcare responsibilities for grandchildren or, indeed, their own children. It is having a very tailored package that looks at every aspect of what prevents them from being in work at the moment.
I would also like to reinforce what Richard said about employer engagement. We do need to do a big marketing campaign almost on the value of older workers because I think that there has been a drift away from that with some employers.
At ERSA we have been running an older workers forum, where people who have been delivering mainly the building better opportunities, age of opportunity type provisions—still ongoing—have been sharing good practice. There is a lot of knowledge that could be harnessed in the sector. If it is going to be commissioned, you could listen to people who are delivering it now, not just the 2015 model but the things that will be running until March that are targeting people over 50.
Q231 Selaine Saxby: Fiona or Rhodri, is there anything you would like to add?
Fiona Monahan: I think there is opportunity there. When you look at the research from the Institute for Employment Studies at the end of last year, the research showed that 72% of over-50s who were surveyed who were out of the workforce would consider going back, so there is certainly an opportunity there. When you look at what the barriers were, it is care and flexibility and location but also the skills gap. It is important that any provision considers how we can link the skills and the retraining, particularly around technology, which was something that came out there. That is the other thing that needs to be considered in any provision that goes ahead for over-50s.
Rhodri Thomas: We have previously delivered programmes specifically targeting people over 50 and one of the things we know from that is that it does require slightly higher-level advisers in terms of their skills and qualifications.
Going back to the earlier question, the other key thing is we knew that one of the effective ways of getting referrals and interest from this group was using social media. It was an effective tool to capture people over 50 who were economically inactive. We recruited about 3,500 people through that route on to quite small geographically based programmes.
One of the things that we are aware of, which we have spoken to the Department about, is that there is capacity within the Restart scheme. As we know, Restart was expected to be larger in terms of the economic shock that Elizabeth mentioned. There is a quick way that the Department could tackle some of these problems, by utilising the capacity within Restart and the Work and Health programme as well.
We know that that model is successful because it is what we used to deliver the JETS programme during Covid. That may be an effective way of dealing with the problem quickly while a longer-term plan is put in place. It does take time to set up new provision in new areas and to build the links and the relationships, and there is obviously then a performance lag in how quickly you can get going on that.
Q232 Selaine Saxby: Thank you. More generally, how effective do you think the support delivered by Jobcentre Plus and work coaches is? What more could be done to ensure that that provision and support is consistent across different centres?
Elizabeth Taylor: There is a real tension where Jobcentre Plus controls and processes benefits and mandates people and this conditionality around benefits. When you look at attracting people back into the labour market, they are not necessarily going to go to a Jobcentre. Often when people have got into work the relationship with the Jobcentre ends because they think that is job done. When we are looking at in-work progression and the next stage of getting people off Universal Credit, I don’t think it is best done in a Jobcentre. I think it is best done outsourced in the community with providers.
I was talking to somebody in Liverpool last week and they were telling me that the Toxteth Jobcentre was going to close, so there is not always the estate to actually deliver. I thought that if there is not a Jobcentre in Toxteth—which I know about and don’t know about—to me, that is a community that should have a Jobcentre in it. It should have a Jobcentre that is serving that community. It would need a big overhaul if it was going to meet the challenge of economic inactivity. The provider community or the employment support sector, whatever we want to call it, are in those communities and working with people now and are better placed to do it.
Richard Clifton: For me, there is a place for both the provider network and work coaches. The work coaches are that gateway to the additional support. They are very much there to support people to initially get their financial side and their benefit sorted, as far as they find themselves in a situation, so that they are not in crisis. That is important and that is a massive role that they do. That early stage of signposting them to employment opportunities and everything else is good.
We then have to remember that, as we have been saying, as people who do not move quickly into work need additional support, to expect work coaches to have that broader experience, understanding and skillset in every Jobcentre across the country is difficult. That is why in some respects, in the contracted services that DWP has, we develop that skillset within our team because we are not having to deal with all the benefits and everything else. We can focus on having that staff team there. We have to be careful that we do not ask the work coaches to do too much, that we get them to do that first bit really well so that people get to the right support at the right time.
Fiona Monahan: I think that is a good point, Richard. We only see a very small part of what the work coach does. They have a very broad remit and it is important that we work collaboratively and in partnership. When we see that happening, I think the results demonstrate that. I do think that partnership is important, but I agree with Richard, I think there is a place for both in the sector at the moment.
Rhodri Thomas: I think everything has been covered.
Q233 Selaine Saxby: Excellent. The final question I have is: should employment services include support for those who are already in work to help them to retain their job or find something more suitable? Do you have a view?
Richard Clifton: From my point of view, we do that as providers anyway. With all our programmes, because the vast majority of them are DWP PBR contracts, from the start we built in the in-work support. We are not about just moving somebody into a job. We want to make sure that they do sustain them and that is the best outcome.
From a Shaw Trust point of view, we will always strive to have that child to career framework that we work to. We want people not just to enter employment but to progress in it and move on. It is important that we do that. The providers are set up to do it, because we have built the relationship with them by spending a lot more time with the individuals. It is more likely that they would continue to engage with us as we go. It is more difficult for work coaches to engage when they have only had short interventions with them and they have moved into work.
We have other programmes that are out there. We might need to look at how we bring things together. You have things like the National Careers Service, which could be more targeted to work at the in-work progression part of it, to support anybody and have open access to it. It is there already but I do not know if we utilise it best to do that. We quite often use it at the front end to get the CVs done, to look at how they can move into work quickly rather than looking at whether this is a progression route. I think that is where it could be used more.
Q234 Selaine Saxby: You are talking there about people you have already seen, to help into work and to progress, whereas there is a whole cohort who have never been in. At a time when we are seeing an evolution of a lot of very different, highly skilled jobs, there is almost a real need. Do you think there is more that could be done?
Richard Clifton: That was my point about the National Careers Service. I think that is the one, a model similar to that. We can learn a lot from JETS about the digital remote delivery, because most of the people who are in work are not going to have the ability to come into our offices because they are in work already. There are lots of ways we can use to engage them and a lot we can learn from a number of programmes. It is important. In-work progression needs to be part of the model moving forward. Because that also helps open up entry-level jobs for those who want to move through. You end up with a big ecosystem of moving everybody on.
Q235 Selaine Saxby: Thank you. Does anyone else have anything to add?
Elizabeth Taylor: There is one thing about the employer engagement relationship. When providers place somebody with an employer, they know the employer as well as the individual. Often, if they can progress people in work, they can backfill the vacancy. They can access skilled support for that, not only for the individual but for the employer. It can lead to growth, expansion, better business, and sustainability. Because of the portfolio that the sector has, whether it is the employment support, the National Careers Service, or skills offers, it is well placed to work with people in work.
Rhodri Thomas: There is an element about better integration between employment and skills provision. That is one of the challenges that we have as providers in terms of how funding matches and follows participants. I know that this week a number of the employer bodies wrote to the Government about the apprenticeship levy. I think that is an area of policy focus where you could unlock employer investment to support people, particularly 50-plus, through skills provision.
We employ a lot of people over 50 on a different, non-DWP contract. However, in order to meet the flexibility, we have discussed earlier those staff typically do not work 30 hours, which is what you require to utilise the apprenticeship levy on those staff, whereas we could use that funding for other progression opportunities within our workforce. That is the same across a large number of employers as well. For me, that is one area where this agenda could move forward. It could also work between DWP and the Department for Education.
Q236 Sir Desmond Swayne: Given the closure last year of the New Enterprise Allowance, should DWP be looking to increase the support available to those who want to start their own business? For whom would that opportunity be a significant benefit that is not met by any of the existing availability?
Fiona Monahan: It is probably not best to start with me on this one because, as a business, we did not deliver the last programme. I think that Elizabeth probably has more to say on this one than me at this stage.
Elizabeth Taylor: Through ERSA we ran an enterprise works programme, so we did quite a lot of consultation with organisations that were delivering the New Enterprise Allowance. There was a great expectation in the sector that there was another programme coming and it was going to be called “future self-employment support”. It even had a name.
What we were seeing was this large number of people who had gone through the New Enterprise Allowance. I think the last figure I saw was on 1 December 2021. At the end of referrals, there were 299,000 people who had gone on to the New Enterprise Allowance. We see that 18% of people in work in the UK are self-employed, so it is a big cohort of people.
What we have seen is that the New Enterprise Allowance ended; some of the European-funded employment support provisions are coming to an end. While some of the national provisions, particularly Restart, have done well in picking up self-employment support, it has got lost. It is becoming a bit of a postcode lottery, depending on where you live, whether you can access tailored employment support.
We would advocate that there is a need for a national provision. I would argue that there is a need for it to be sat alongside employment advice. Often people will enter into exploring a business idea and, if it is not viable, if within that same centre, within that same setting, they can then see an employment adviser, they have already started the journey of getting into earning money again.
The other thing that has happened in this gap is that people are giving business advice who are not necessarily experienced and qualified to do so. I do not mean any disrespect to the people who are doing it, but I think they have been put in a difficult position. It is a unique skillset and we need qualified business advisers delivering business advice, particularly in business start-up situations.
The other thing I would say is that when the New Enterprise Allowance started, 63,000 people had a disability. That was a big shift of people from being dependent on health-related benefits to getting into business. My personal opinion is that it should sit with the DWP because it is about job creation and growth, and other Departments are dealing with bigger existing businesses.
Rhodri Thomas: We deliver self-employment support across all our programmes and we have some dedicated resource to do that. However, it represents quite a small percentage of our total job starts, typically about 5%; more in some areas of the country. There is a challenge about people coming through those services because, as Elizabeth mentioned, you do need specialist resource to be able to help people in a professional way. The mainstream programmes can do that. However, I do think that we lack a specialist programme such as NEA, where people who turn up on our programmes, who have a very distinct wish to become self-employed, would have received more bespoke services than some of the mainstream programmes.
Richard Clifton: We are just running down our last two contracts on NEA. We had delivered it for a number of years and it was a very successful programme. We saw a success rate of over 70% of people sustaining in self-employment, bearing in mind that the normal run rate is 50% of new businesses fail. Working on that basis, with the support we were giving, it was allowing people to move in.
To reiterate, a lot of those people had the need to work flexibly due to health problems or disability and it did give them a good chance to be able to work. If you have a fluctuating health condition, if you are self-employed it gives you the flexibility to be able to do that. It is a good option for people to be able to do that. For others, it allowed them to start a business, to use an entrepreneurial spirit and go on to employ other people. There are so many benefits with having the programme. I agree that it needs to run alongside, as being a credible employment opportunity that we can offer within the framework of DWP provision.
Likewise, we have the benefit that we are moving our experienced self-employment advisers across into our mainstream provision, but we are not going to be able to move them all. We are going to lose that expertise from the sector, which is very sad in some respects.
Q237 Shaun Bailey: Can you give me your perspective on how effective you think DWP’s contracting processes are at the moment in this space? I am conscious that a few of you have quite specific views on this, but I am just curious to understand whether you think the contracting process could be improved and whether you think also from an effectiveness perspective, particularly for the end user, it is working properly at the moment. Richard, do you want to start with that one?
Richard Clifton: From my point of view, it is effective. I do go back to pre-New Deal and see how the sector has developed and the commissioning pre that. I can go back to job clubs and things like that and how DWP or Jobcentre at the time commissioned that. In the journey that both the providers and the Department have been on, I think we have learned a lot about the effective ways of commissioning. Having longer contracts that allow providers to be able to develop service over time is good. I think we now have a good, open dialogue with the Department, both on performance management but also the commercial teams that are looking at the future. I think they really do want to get the input from across.
From that perspective, I do not think anything is ever perfect. We could always find ways to continually improve that. If I compare it to other commercial contracts that I have done, in actual fact the Department, DWP particularly, does well at having a fair, clear and transparent way of doing it. It is then driven by policy, so in some respects it can sometimes be that it is having to make sure that it is delivering a policy that does not always change as quickly as we need it to. We have had a very fast-changing environment, but I think the Department coped with that. As we have said, for JETS we sorted out how we could get the support out there quickly. There are a lot of positives within DWP as far as commissioning is concerned, from our perspective anyway.
Fiona Monahan: I would agree. We go through a fairly robust process each month, certainly on our key contracts. It feels collaborative and I think we work well with the Department. I have not been working with the Department for as many years as some of the people on the table, but from what I hear it feels like a better relationship. I think the experience through covid demonstrates how the sector worked well with the Department. When I compare that to other contracts that we run I think it is positive.
Rhodri Thomas: One of the positives about DWP is the fact that the commercial team work closely with the performance team, so there is a high level of knowledge within DWP about how programmes operate on the ground. That is not always the case with different government commissioners. That helps then to build in good programme design. As Fiona said, DWP is tough as a commissioner when it needs to be, but we are collaborative with it in resolving problems and ultimately working to achieve good value for money for the taxpayer by getting the highest number of people we can back into work.
Elizabeth Taylor: I face it in a different place. I would not disagree with anything that has been said, but I would say that as we look at the next commissioning round there is opportunity. I think the DWP can look at the experience of the big provisions it has commissioned that are being delivered well and successfully at the moment. However, it can also look at the things that are being lost in many ways with the end of European funding.
If we do want to get more older workers, if we do want to get young people who are NEET into mainstream, if we want to work with people with caring responsibilities, women, the DWP commissioning team could do some wider consultation and look beyond its existing provision. It is not a criticism of the current state of play, it is just that opportunity looking forward.
Q238 Shaun Bailey: Perhaps to segue a little bit into DWP’s broader collaboration and partnership working, again from your perspectives, how do you think the Department can make that better? Do you think it is effective at the moment and where are the areas specifically for improvement? I feel like I might have opened a bit of a Pandora’s box on this one.
Richard Clifton: Coming back to something that Rhodri said before, one of our biggest challenges generally is around skills and employability. The Department for Education and ESFA do work together. We know the commercial teams are talking together and we know the Departments are talking together, but we are not getting that link-up when they are commissioning programmes to make sure that they align. It allows us to get the best out of both funding streams so that, if we are running an employability programme, what is being done on the skills side complements what is going on. It is not easy and I can see it from the commissioning point of view. Getting that to dovetail is not going to be simple.
There is then that broader bit: let’s think about what we are doing about commissioning from a health point of view and what we are doing with the additional support. If we know that disability and health is a problem within employability, how do we make sure that commissioned services do align within local areas and make that happen? That then brings in the local authority and we are probably going to come on to devolution, but there is a big part to play in how we get that locally commissioned support to align with nationally commissioned support so that it all works together ultimately to give the people in the communities all the support they need to move forward and be successful.
Q239 Shaun Bailey: Does anybody else have anything to add?
Fiona Monahan: I think Richard has said it all.
Shaun Bailey: Brilliant. That is great. Thank you.
Q240 Debbie Abrahams: I want to pick up on a couple of things that you have mentioned in your previous responses, but could you keep your responses brief so that Sir Stephen does not get cross with me?
First of all, Fiona, you said that there needs to be a reality check—that is my language, not yours—for employers about the changing labour market and what they need to do. Is anybody addressing this and, if so, who? If they are not, who should be?
Fiona Monahan: I think that DWP with the Disability Confident scheme is addressing it to a point. I also think that providers generally, individually, are working with employers. For example, we are doing a lot of work with The Body Shop, which has launched its open hiring scheme. It asks anyone who is applying for a job three basic questions. It does not put them through a normal process, so it is doing something very different. I think there is the opportunity for the sector to share some of those and collaborate a little bit more, but I do think the Disability Confident scheme could do a little bit more to support that.
Q241 Debbie Abrahams: If I am correct, if you are Disability Confident you do not have to employ anybody with a disability. Does it also cover small businesses, given that half of the workforce is employed in small businesses?
Fiona Monahan: We do work with some small businesses, but that is certainly a barrier and we could do more with that, there is no doubt.
Q242 Debbie Abrahams: Thank you very much. I think that it was Richard who said, in response to the Kickstart schemes and so on, the transition and changes in the delivery of the programmes, that there is a smaller delivery supply chain. What did you mean by that?
Richard Clifton: It probably was not with Kickstart. It was more broadly on programmes. Most prime contractors will have supply chains that are operating to be able to deliver the contracts, but what we do is we then target those smaller organisations. From the Shaw Trust point of view, we have always wanted to almost be an incubator for those smaller organisations so they can develop their skills within the local community and deliver more for us. It is important that primes take that responsibility to manage that supply chain so they can develop and grow and deliver more within their communities.
Q243 Debbie Abrahams: Thank you. This is my substantive question now. You have all been incredibly supportive of the importance of locally provided programmes, so different from the Work programme where charities and others were used as “bid candy” and then were not engaged. That has changed significantly, but what would you see as the benefits of a devolved programme, both in provision and potentially in commissioning, given that local communities tend to know their labour market needs and aspirations a bit better than central Government?
Richard Clifton: I think we can already take lessons we have learned from some of the devolution that has gone on. If I look at the Work and Health programme, we deliver within west London through the West London Alliance, which is working with the seven boroughs there. Although it is the Work programme in framework, it has allowed us to work with those boroughs to look at targeting particular groups within the community, adapting the programme to suit what is needed locally, and working with and connecting up to services that local authorities have.
I give the example of the care leavers programme that we do there, working with their care-leaving teams, having meetings to take those care leavers through the programme and support them, and work with the employers that the local authority always work with. That is some of the benefit that we need to grab hold of and say, “This is probably the template to go forward”.
Q244 Debbie Abrahams: Okay, so general support, then, about provision and potentially commissioning. Does anybody want to add to what Richard has said?
Chair: Debbie, can I just butt in for a minute? You made the point about potentially commissioning. In west London it is actual commissioning, isn’t it?
Richard Clifton: It is actual commissioning. It is actually commissioned that way.
Debbie Abrahams: I understand, yes.
Rhodri Thomas: Yes, we all deliver through the national programmes with DWP and devolved contracts, and our perspective would be that devolution works well when it is at a level and a scale. Going for large programmes down to an individual local authority level would be very challenging in terms of being able to provide the breadth of employer engagement. On our devolved Work and Health programme contract in south London, we work across the five south London boroughs and that does have an efficiency and an economy of scale that we would not be able to capture if we were just working in Croydon, for instance.
Elizabeth Taylor: Briefly, if we are looking at local labour market shortages, if we are looking at people who are economically inactive, there is a strong case for having devolved programmes because you can then include people who have that local knowledge.
The thing that would worry me is how small a level you go down to. I think there needs to be a real challenge set to local authorities that they should work together in a local area. It is very easy for the combined authorities to commission, but what will happen in Lancashire and Cumbria and Cornwall or whatever? We should not forget that it has been possible before. We have had things like single regeneration budget, city strategy, pathfinder, working neighbourhoods, the TECs. Even when New Deal started, even though it was a national provision—I think we have to have national because something has to be delivered everywhere—it was commissioned more locally with local input. I think that is the key factor.
Debbie Abrahams: It is about national standards but local commissioning and delivery, then?
Elizabeth Taylor: Yes.
Debbie Abrahams: Could you get back to us—I do not know if you have this—on what you are saying about the scale and what would be practical?
Elizabeth Taylor: Yes.
Q245 Debbie Abrahams: Are there any other issues that would have implications for you as providers?
Richard Clifton: For me it is that you want a mixed economy. I have seen it both ways. I suppose this is just history telling me that having a mixed economy, having a national programme that is DWP led to make sure we do not end up with postcode lotteries for a core support, is important but it should be alongside. One of the things that we put forward was to have national programmes for both disability and the core employability and health but to have locally commissioned skills and employment programmes that are possibly combined. It is coming back to the other point, as we are saying, DWP, the Department for Education and the local authority co-commissioning it for the needs within a large enough area to make it economically viable to deliver.
Elizabeth Taylor: I have one last thing. There are lots of good local provisions that are very vulnerable with the end of the European social fund, particularly in England with the gap before People and Skills comes in. It would be remiss of me not to point that out. There are things that will be lost that we will need if things are going to be commissioned at a local level.
Chair: We will come back to that specific point.
Q246 Nigel Mills: I was with you until the end and then I got confused. If I am DWP and I decide that I want a get back into work programme for the economically inactive over-50s, just as an example, I could commission a national programme and presumably award it in regional blocs like we have done for previous things. Or I could say, “Here you go, Greater Manchester, here is your share of the money. You go away and do it for me”.
I could probably do that for greater Birmingham or whatever they call that combined authority, West Midlands I think. I could probably do the same for London, but I am going to have patches in the country where I have to do it myself because there is no combined authority. You appear to be saying that devolved works better and then saying we should do a national programme. It is hard to do both, isn’t it?
Richard Clifton: No, I think you can do both. That is what I am saying. What you described first was a national programme that you may be able to devolve to where you have a combined authority and a commissioning mechanism. Some of this is down to a commissioning mechanism to be able to do it. You can give to the likes of Manchester, West Midlands and other combined authorities. They could commission it within a framework. You get a national standard but it may be commissioned slightly differently in London or Birmingham.
Alongside that, you can then run complementary skills and employment programmes that are picking up and utilising things like the AEB that goes to local authorities, utilising combined funding streams that are very targeted to local needs. You can run both. We have been running both side by side with ESF for years. It does work. Our biggest problem is that we are losing it because of ESF.
Q247 Nigel Mills: What I am trying to ask you, though, is: I am sat in the Department and I want this scheme quickly and I want it to work, and I either say, “Okay, here are contracts for the nine regional blocs” or whatever they are. You all bid for them and the rules are I will pay you half the money fixed and half is conditional on outcomes or whatever I want to do. You go away and do it. Or I ring up Andy Burnham and say, “Right, here is the money for Manchester. You go away and do it how you think, but here are the outcomes that we want for the money”. Presumably, he would offer a different contract to different people and more local providers than I would, because I do not have the time to go and find 27 providers in Manchester and 25 in Birmingham and God knows what I am going to do differently. It is a very different contract, isn’t it?
Richard Clifton: Not really because the way the DWP commissions now is by using prime contractors over geographical areas. Where it is not a devolved region, it will say to the prime contractor, “Go out there, and part of your bid is you have that supply chain that has all those local bits in”. We have to demonstrate that we are using the local providers to do it. That is part of the bid criteria. It does that already.
At a national level, it can do that and that is why we were advocating having two programmes, a core employability programme and a core disability programme. You can put that in place straight away and that can be quick using the mechanisms that the Department is used to. Of the areas where you have combined authorities, you can devolve out for those core programmes if you wish, but to develop the skillset and to make sure that you meet that local need—as we have been talking about, not everybody is engaging through Jobcentre Plus—you need to have those skills programmes that are broader, that engage with the economically inactive at a very local level. That can be commissioned locally but it will take you longer to do that bit. You do not lose momentum and you can do it through the national programmes, but you can then start to build up the capacity at a local level.
Q248 Nigel Mills: I have one final thing. How do we handle where geography does not quite work? There are bits of Derbyshire up around Glossop that are in Derbyshire but would commute to Manchester for work and health. If I give the money to Manchester, it does not want to support people from Derbyshire because they are not in its catchment area. It is not allowed to spend money on them, basically. It makes far more sense for me to send those people to Manchester than Derby because there is a nice direct train or bus rather than a two-hour-change-three-times situation. Can you find ways of doing the commissioning that flexes things to make it work on the ground rather than just have bizarre dividing lines?
Rhodri Thomas: I think there is some good collaboration taking place with providers. For instance, with the Work and Health programme and for Restart, we have employer forums that all the prime providers contribute to in terms of resources and we share national employers. We develop clear pathways that we all follow with specific employers, and that includes sharing vacancies.
One of the benefits of the DWP model is that we are in competition during bidding but during delivery we are in collaboration mode. We all have an incentive to make sure that the programme overall is as successful as possible. A key part of that is about meeting employer demands. If we have vacancies in our part on some of our contracts, we want to be able to share them with people who have travel routes into those roles. That is one thing that I don’t think was prevalent in the employment services market 10 years ago. We were a bit better five years ago, but certainly in the last two to three years we have focused on that element of collaboration.
Q249 David Linden: I want to touch briefly on the UK Shared Prosperity Fund and the European social fund. Most of you in your written evidence have been pretty stark about the outlook as a result of that gap. Can I ask specifically about the support landscape for folk who are unemployed and economically inactive and what the implications are for that transition from ESF to the UK Shared Prosperity Fund? I will start with Mr Thomas because I think he has said that the drop in provision for the economically inactive could not have come at a worse time. Can you develop that a little bit more?
Rhodri Thomas: We previously delivered a number of European social fund projects and a big part of that was the economically inactive. All those programmes finished at different times but roughly over the last 12 months in terms of active referrals. For the people who we were engaging, there is now no provision for them to access at a time when economic inactivity has obviously risen and is also contributing to some of the inflationary pressures that we see within the labour market. The gap between ESF and the Shared Prosperity Fund is a real problem, as Elizabeth said, particularly for some of the smaller providers who are part of our supply chain and relied on those programmes as part of their viability.
Q250 David Linden: Ms Taylor, in your written evidence you cite some statistics from the Northern Powerhouse Partnership that shows that it represents a 34% cut. Is that correct?
Elizabeth Taylor: I think it is more severe than that now. ERSA currently has a survey out of members. It is not closed yet, but we did some analysis yesterday. We have had 95 responses from 95 local organisations that are delivering ESF of various sizes. They are working with the groups that we need to get into the labour market now, younger people, people from minority communities with care responsibilities, childcare and so on. One insight was that 55%—I think I have said this already—of the people they are working with are not actually on benefit. They will be partners of claimants. They will be people who are health related outside the main UC strands who will not find their way on to Restart or whatever.
We asked if the provisions would be replaced. This is mainly an English problem because the four nations are slightly different. Because there is a one-year gap between ESF finishing and People and Skills starting, not every local authority in its investment plan has put People and Skills in, so there are places that will not be commissioning it. We asked, “Will the provision you are currently delivering to”—I could go through all the different cohorts, but only 4.21% have said yes; 29% have said partially, but most of these provisions are just going to end, and end in March. We have a cliff edge and if there is any way that that budget for People and Skills can be brought forward that is the No. 1 thing you could do, alongside some expansion of eligibility.
Q251 David Linden: Mr Clifton, in your own evidence you have outlined that for the Shaw Trust that would be an end to the Aim4Work employment and mental health programme. Can you develop that a little bit more and explain to the Committee what that means in real terms as a result of this poor planning by Government?
Richard Clifton: The Aim4Work programme is part of the broader BBO offer that was co-financed by the Big Lottery. It was a programme that supported those who were not being supported through mainstream programmes, who were not being referred to Jobcentre’s mainstream programmes, who had mental health support needs but wanted employment. It was an employment-based programme and we have supported hundreds of people within the London area to move into employment.
That is currently being wound down and that will come to an end as of March. That support just will not be there. There are other programmes that are similar, because we run IPS with national health primary care services, but that was already there. In essence, you are losing a chunk of support that was there that was helping people. That support just goes. It will have to be picked up or the people will not get any support, and I am afraid it is likely to be the latter for a period.
Q252 David Linden: That is hugely concerning. Ms Monahan, do you have anything to add?
Fiona Monahan: I have nothing further to what the team have said.
Q253 David Linden: This is the last question I have, and whoever feels that they are best qualified to answer it please feel free. Can you elaborate a little bit more on the implications of restrictions on the spending for the People and Skills investment strand?
Richard Clifton: The restrictions were that they were not allowed to do it in the first couple of years of the UKSPF. What made it a little bit more confusing was the way that it was devolved down to district and borough levels. Instead of having a few commissioners to work with, you could end up in an area where you—well, overall, we have over 300 commissioners of this, in essence, so even if I look in my home patch of Leicestershire and Rutland, we ended up going from possibly one commissioner to nine.
Any organisation working in there then had to work with multiple districts to see if that was possible. Where they work together there are bits being able to be done, but it is not true across the board. That is where the complexities come in, and the bit that probably has been forgotten is that most of this was match funding in the past so it is only worth half the value that it was originally.
Q254 David Linden: To wrap that up, would it be fair to say that in the transition from the European social fund to the UK Shared Prosperity Fund the latter has been pretty much done on the back of a fag packet and the chickens have come home to roost now?
David Linden: Yes. I have no further questions.
Q255 Chair: Can I put a final point to you? You have all made the case to us that the sector is doing a better job now than was the case 10 years ago in the heyday of the Work programme. Is there evidence somewhere, which you can point to, to demonstrate that that is the case? Are there numbers somewhere that we can look at?
Rhodri Thomas: There will be numbers that we see daily in terms of how we manage our businesses and we can see the performance tables. One of the aspects is about more data being visible and published. For instance, JETS has been a successful scheme, way beyond what we might have even envisaged ourselves at the beginning of that, but the figures have not yet been made public.
Q256 Chair: There are not data somewhere in the public domain that we can look at to verify what you have told us? Are you allowed to show us your data?
Rhodri Thomas: I think we are only allowed to publish or divulge data that have already been published by the Department and the ONS.
Fiona Monahan: The most recent Work and Health programme data showed improvement and that is public, but in relation to Restart and JETS I don’t believe we are in a position to share that.
Chair: Okay. Thank you all very much for giving us very interesting answers to our questions. We are very grateful to you all. We will ask you now to step aside from the table and we will welcome our second panel. Thank you all very much indeed.
Witnesses: Rosie Ginday MBE, Liz Sewell and Graham Parry.
Q257 Chair: Thank you for coming to answer our questions this morning. What I would like to do is ask, as I did for the first panel, each of you to very briefly tell us who you are, starting with Liz Sewell.
Liz Sewell: Good morning. I am Director of the GRoW programme. We support women, mothers mainly, furthest from the labour market to get back to work. We work on programmes that are voluntary, and we work with programmes where you can be both economically inactive but also unemployed. The real thing we have to add today, as well as talking about the benefits of local provision, is talking about engagement because, if we want to get economically inactive people into work, we have to think about how we engage them. I think that is the kind of area that we can probably give the most support on.
Rosie Ginday: I am the founder and CEO of a social enterprise called Miss Macaroon. We make and sell cream and gluten-free French macaroons. We then reinvest 100% of the profits in our Macaroons that Make a Difference training course, where we support 18 to 35 year-olds with multiple and complex needs to build their skills and confidence and get them into work. We also provide those jobs ourselves alongside our employer partners.
Chair: When did Miss Macaroon start?
Rosie Ginday: In 2011, 12 years ago.
Graham Parry: I am the Director of Youth, Employment and Skills for Groundwork London. I am here today on behalf of the Groundwork Federation, not just London. We are a federation of local trusts and have been working for 40 years in community trusts in England, Wales and Northern Ireland. One of the main strands of our work is youth and adult engagement and progression into the job market.
Chair: Thank you all very much. The first question is from Nigel Mills.
Q258 Nigel Mills: I want to ask about how we can target support at people who are not currently claiming benefit, so economically inactive people who would be willing to get back into the workforce but have various issues. What is the best way of creating a programme that can identify and engage and help those people? Liz, could you start?
Liz Sewell: I think it is crucial that you understand that, when people are economically inactive, they often lack confidence in two areas—their own ability to work but also the ability of the employment out there to provide a job that suits them. The organisations here are talking with people who are further away from the labour market. We might be working with somebody who has English as a second language or an autistic child or somebody who has never worked. The issues that they are talking about are not just employability. It is not about saying, “Here is a CV, apply for more jobs”. They need to have a network of support to move them into work.
To engage them you go out to where they are. For the people we support, we are really lucky. There are great places where mothers are, children’s centres and schools. You go there and work with the people that they trust, like the family support workers in schools, who can say that we are running this programme. We run a universal programme, we offer it to everybody in a school or children’s centre, so anybody can come, but then at that point we can identify those who have additional needs. You have to be thinking about them, what their need is, what they are interested in. We ask people what they like about their life now. What people like about their life when they are not working is time and people. Those are the things that are good for them, but if you ask what they want to change, almost all of them can be benefited by going back to work. It is about changing people’s perceptions and moving them in that way.
You asked earlier how do you reach people. If you want a job and you are the kind of person who is an activist—an activist, pragmatist we call them in the learning trade—you will go out and get a job. Most of the people on long-term unemployment programmes and most of the people we work with are theorist, reflectors. They have questions such as, “What if there is a train strike? What if my child minder is ill? What if my boss asks me to stay late?” They have to have time to work through those issues.
You need trusted places in the community where you can go, trusted people who can advise you to work with them and programmes that focus on their needs. As I think Richard said earlier, you need to have time. When people are further away from the labour market, you cannot do that on a six-month programme or maybe even a year; it might be an 18-month programme. Those are the kinds of things you need to be thinking about and local specialist organisations are often well placed to deliver that kind of support.
Q259 Nigel Mills: Rosie, do you want to add anything?
Rosie Ginday: I agree with everything that Liz said. We work with a whole host of referral organisations—youth centres, women’s refuges, housing associations, safe spaces—and it is about having strong networks that we can draw people from. It has really helped us to upskill and empower graduates of our programme to go out and represent us and promote the programme and be advocates. They have created their own programme called MacsMAD Leaders.
When people come in, which is a huge barrier in itself, for them to be able to see people, who have completed the programme within the last year or the last few years, being employed in the business and sharing stories of their first day and almost calling in sick because they were really depressed and they had not got out of bed for a week but they pushed themselves. That real human connection provides inspiration. They can see that they are in work and they are working full time or they have been for a year or 18 months. That point of inspiration really helps.
It is having the wider connections, the ambassadors within the organisations, but also our team with lived experience who can go out there, share their experiences, pull them in and provide real work environment in an accessible way so they can share their experiences.
Graham Parry: I agree with everything that has been said by Liz and Rosie. I will add a couple of things. I think that the art of finding people and encouraging people to engage in the process needs to have a value put back on it. These organisations do that because they exist to do it. A food bank is not just going to be distributing food. They will be having conversations with people, helping them find solutions to their problems, and we don’t value that any more. It is just something that is done on top of everything else. If DWP wants to encourage more people to come forward and accept the wealth of opportunities it might be able to offer them, everything else gets incentivised through those sorts of things.
I think that the workers in those organisations could be incentivised to not just have the great conversations they have but take it one stage further and help them engage in the system. There are lots of great organisations out there, who don’t operate in the fields that we do but are great at engaging their communities. We are here for the journey. We are here to support people from when we first encourage them to work with us through to them having retained a job for many months. However, I think we could put some value back into the community and voluntary sector who do that as a day job and add it on to the service. They could do it more effectively if they had some resources to go with it.
Q260 Nigel Mills: The Secretary of State has been tasked with waving a magic wand to find us some more workers. I think that your advice is that there is no quick fix, no tax change or incentive you can give individuals or employment acts. To really make a difference here it needs long, stable programmes done by the right people.
Liz Sewell: I can give you an example of a project that we are working on in Newham with four children’s centres. There is a lot of unemployed mums in Newham and also schools that are crying out for teaching assistants. We have been able to put together a programme that starts with the mums in the children’s centres and then they will go on maybe to Multiply, build their functional skills, go into the college. We have a very good link where the college will provide us with training courses but then links into the schools to provide us with placements. It will not provide you with somebody tomorrow but if you look at that down the line, that is a ‘grow your own’ programme.
We need to be looking at the engagement, the employability and the skills that go together to do that and then the employers as well. The further away you are, the broader the network you need to get you back into work. You are not responsible for childcare, you are not responsible for flexible working, but if you are looking at magic bullets, childcare and flexible working are magic bullets.
Graham Parry: You can add transport to that, which again is way outside the portfolio of the Secretary of State but that is the other limiting factor. It narrows people’s opportunity down to maybe a handful of jobs that they can get to. Whereas, if transportation was made more effective and easier it would open up far more opportunities. He needs to bang on some other people’s doors as well.
Rosie Ginday: I think the instance where tax breaks would be helpful is where there are key third sector and employer collaborations and partnerships. We are working with Midcounties Co-op to embed the Macaroons that Make a Difference training course within one of its struggling Walsall city centre stores. For the Midcounties Co-op to be given business rates amnesty would help it to do that because it has invested its own money as a private sector business in reworking its store to create a training space and a counselling room, like we have at Miss Macaroon.
It has funded us to set up a whole new team of a programme manager, a MacsMAD leader and a psychotherapist to sit within its business and provide opportunities for 18 young people per year, but the impacts within its organisation are huge in that one store, where it has 17 FTEs, with a much bigger team, the mental health conversations that are starting to move through that organisation—they are just huge. People are bringing their experiences of people in their own families struggling with these kinds of issues and those conversations were not happening before. It is a much more supportive and collaborative workplace in preparation for having these young people on site.
That business has become a convenor for other third sector organisations in a town where that provision has worked in a silo. Hearing from the last panel, those organisations are approaching a cliff edge with the loss of ESF funding and some of these projects will close. They are worried about what will happen to the young people once the team disbands and they have no support. They are providing a little bit of a safety net there and they don’t have any tax breaks or anything like that or financial input from the local authority at the moment, but there are eight other sites across the country that are ready to go in a similar town or city with a similar area of deprivation.
In Walsall there are 15 businesses within a three-mile radius across all of the different group businesses that it can move people into, so it has similar kind of spaces across the country. It has other stores that maybe don’t have the same kind of density but should it get a tax break and support from Government, I am sure that it would continue along with its co-operative values to collaborate with the community and provide opportunities.
Q261 Siobhan Baillie: Graham, what do you mean by valuing and incentivising the conversations more? Are you suggesting that DWP should pay for signposting or successful signposting? What does that look like on the ground? What are you suggesting that the Government should do?
Graham Parry: Exactly consider that for service organisations and look at the value you will get back in return; whether or not you have to deploy new officers to every open space around or can you encourage the organisations that are already there and are trusted by local people? They might be having great conversations—and undoubtedly they are and undoubtedly they are giving free advice and support—but then go to the next step and say, “I am not just going to give you the free advice and support, I am going to do a warm handover”. It might be DWP Jobcentre Plus or it could be one of the other providers, but they will say, “I am going to do a warm handover”. That takes time and effort outside of their day-to-day job.
It could be well worth looking at. We do provision where DWP is referring to us and then we get a lot more contact with the participants. We do a whole host of other provision where we are putting in the hours and the hard yards to engage with people and get them on board. If we had more time to spend with the client and less time on the road out finding them—we do it because it is necessary. If somebody is incentivised to send more people to provision, you might get more value for money out of it. It might look upfront that you are spending money in new places but you could be getting more value out of it. The people who have the expertise and the progression support could be doing more of that than finding it.
Q262 Siobhan Baillie: I have just started a new cross-party group, APPG for employability, so I am interested in this and getting people ready for work and the skills that underpin all of that. How well did the Kickstart scheme help participants to overcome barriers for employment? What is the main learning from that scheme?
Rosie Ginday: It worked incredibly well for us. We supported the Kickstart employees that we had at the time to do a piece of research in collaboration with York University. It found that 93% of young people went on to further work. I don’t think that was baked into the programme. We used our existing frameworks and psychotherapy support to provide mentoring, career coaching, actual technical skills from agencies that were working for us. We got them to give us some time and we paid for some. There was real technical training there as well.
We were very clear with them that we were pushing them out as quickly as possible. We did not want the young people who were not in our normal category to stay for the six months. We specialise in working with people with three to five barriers to work. Through Kickstart we took people with two to three barriers to work but, because of the increased mental health needs during the pandemic, we decided to do that because it pushed them over into the people we would normally work with. We saw that it was incredibly effective.
The Macaroons that Make a Difference training programme that we run is seven to 10 weeks. It is very intensive and people go from never having had a job before to being able to move into a job, but the real learning happens within the workplace. That is where they can turn all of the theory into practice and build those muscles, so they need to have a supportive and flexible employer in the first period. We were a gateway as well. We supported organisations that would never really consider this kind of thing, very commercial organisations, one-man bands, to provide that support within the workplace and then we put all of the extra support around them.
Since the programme has finished, and we continue to recruit for the Macaroons that Make a Difference training a course, we have come into contact with people who did the Kickstart programme with other organisations and there was widespread exploitation with certain projects—people were not paid wages, it was shown on their payslip that they should get the full amount but they were getting a fraction of that, or no support provided. As a scheme it worked really for us, but it was not designed in that that was needed. It did not pay for us to do that, the costs were not covered, but because of our social impacts that is what we put into it.
Siobhan Baillie: I love the name of your organisation, by the way. I think to be fair to Government, it was created very fast and to try to solve a particular problem that we then found was not as bad as we expected.
Graham Parry: I put Kickstart under the banner of what we call supported employment and Groundwork has been delivering these sorts of programmes for about 25 years. I have been lucky enough to be involved in every single one of them. The bottom line of any programme like this helps. You are right, it was designed to mobilise very quickly and I am not going to put any criticism into that because it was needed at the time.
However, I have some reflections about how it compared to previous programmes. To echo Rosie’s point, it was never designed to help people on to the labour market. Organisations like Rosie’s and ours and many others did that. However, it was set out in the guidance—everything you read—that it was for people who were job ready, so it was never set up and designed for it.
I agree with Rosie that the level of support costs offered reflected that. Also, the design could have been improved that it was implicit for us to progress people on from the end of it. Again, we did it because that is what we have always done, but I am sure that many organisations supported and looked after the person for the six months and then it was over. We have always seen it as part of a journey because we have focused on the people who need it most.
A lot of people needed it then, that is quite true, but it felt quite difficult for the people who really needed a supported employment programme to access because of the route through Jobcentre and the conditionality of benefits that were set against it. It could have helped a lot more people.
To put it in perspective, Groundwork was involved with the Future Jobs Fund in a similar jobs market climate to what we experienced during and post Covid. Groundwork in London is an organisation now three times the size that it was then with more reach and more capacity. We delivered nearly 1,000 Future Jobs Fund places and just over 200 Kickstart because the process slowed it down a lot. Right response, right time, a little bit more detail into it. It is still needed today for people who are vulnerable.
Q263 Siobhan Baillie: Back to DWP about Kickstart, has there been a response loop to give your experiences about that?
Graham Parry: Yes, there were several ongoing ones during it, to be fair, and flexible changes were made throughout it. There have been some post-programme reviews.
Q264 Siobhan Baillie: Liz, in your written evidence submission you put forward the argument that disadvantaged mothers should be included as a group who do less well in the labour market—I think they are often forgotten as a particular group—and that back to work services should be offered to address their needs. What specific barriers to employment are faced by disadvantaged mothers?
Liz Sewell: When you are looking at almost all women, I am intrigued by the fact that there is not more emphasis on how we can get this group of the workforce back into work. You are five times more likely to work term time if you are a woman than a man. That says that women are taking childcare responsibility. There is no formal childcare that kicks in until two as support, and then only if you are in a particular group. For your three or four year-old you get 15 hours and that is great to help you to try to get back to work. You get 30 hours if you are in work. Still, that is term time only and so we are looking at 13 weeks of the year when you are not able to work.
We are also looking at the Universal Credit system, which provides more help, up to 85%, but only for two children, so if you have a larger family you will not get childcare help. Let’s say you have three children, you may well have one who has just started secondary school, one in primary school and a four year-old. Those are the kinds of things that make it difficult to take up formal childcare.
Any financial help—you talked about tax breaks—towards childcare should be supply side not demand side, because I think demand side eventually puts the prices up. We need to look at what is on offer. Childcare is expensive and as a society we have to decide whether we want to provide it or not and then we have to look at the other options. We did a lot of home working during Covid. However, flexible working after Covid is not just about home working. A lot of the jobs that disadvantaged mothers do are where you have to be there, so we need more flexible care jobs. Also, a lot of the jobs that women do are disappearing. Everybody has a smart phone, people don’t have admin, so now the kinds of jobs that are available are different.
We need to think as a society that either we will need to provide more childcare or we will need to provide more flexible working, because that is what will draw a talented group into the labour market. The difference between women going back to work after looking after children is that they are more skilled. A 25 year-old who has a baby and then as a 30 year-old has a five year-old is in a better position to work even if they have been out of work for five years. It is about how we put those things together.
Q265 David Linden: How effective is the support that Jobcentre Plus and work coaches offer you?
Liz Sewell: I am desperate to talk about this. Jobcentre Plus has a hard job to do because it has to play good cop and bad cop. We did a survey of the mothers we work with and of those who use Jobcentre Plus, nearly 40% are anxious when they go there because they have a lot to lose. We are always saying to them, “Your Jobcentre Plus work coach is there to help you”, but if you think that you might lose your benefits if you say something wrong it is difficult to engage.
However, let’s face it, Jobcentre is not the best name for what that place is because we have another 40% of people who were slightly disappointed. They got there and they were not helped to get a job, because that is not what it does. It is in a difficult position.
We need specialist staff at the Jobcentres who understand the specialist provision that people need to be referred to. Some people are very work ready and they don’t need the support that we are offering but for an awful lot of people, especially if you have been out of work for a long time, things have changed. You need that specialist at the Jobcentre and you are looking at that for over-50s, people with disabilities and there are other groups. Otherwise, you end up with somebody going in and they say, “You want part-time work? We have cleaning work that starts at 4 o’clock”. It is that expertise and I think the Jobcentre staff can do. Lots of them are very able and lots of them have been there a very long time, but they need that specialism otherwise they are left floundering.
Q266 David Linden: To take this a little bit further, you spoke about the difficulty of good cop, bad cop. Let’s focus on the bad cop side of things, which is sanctions and conditionality. We have heard quite a lot of evidence from young people and disabled people that sanctions have had a negative impact on their perceptions of the Jobcentre and work coaches. What insight do you have on the impacts of the conditionality regime?
Liz Sewell: There is a hierarchy of needs. Until you think “My food is safe, my house is safe”, it is very difficult to move forward. We say to people, “You get quite a lot of support from the state, you are getting your housing paid. It does not feel like a lot in your pocket but actually the state is paying quite a lot of money.” Understandably the state says, “There are things that we would like you to do”.
We work with people on our programmes who have to look for work and those who don’t have to look for work. They need the same kind of support; they are interested in the same issues. You could separate those out and have specialist provision for that, so they feel that when they talk to that person they can trust them. You cannot do that on half an hour every other fortnight or once a month or whatever.
To develop that trust, you need an adviser who can talk to you when you want to talk to them. We are big advocates of group support because in group support you get the opportunity to talk with other people in a similar situation and you find out from each other and you have a guide there to help you through. When you are going back to work, it is something that you have not done a lot. It is a bit like if you have a baby you have a midwife who takes you through that process. You need somebody who really understands you and is standing beside you and supporting you to get into work. That is a different thing from the state saying, “We are giving you this funding and we need you to reciprocate”.
Q267 David Linden: I think we all agree that there are harms associated with sanctions. I am seeking a short answer from each of you. Do you think that sanctions sufficiently improve overall employment outcomes to justify those reported harms?
Graham Parry: I have no data to support or refute that statement, but we can use anecdotal evidence and it does both. You will get some people for whom it sharpens the mind and helps them get on but you get many more people who want to drop out of the system and be disenfranchised from it. They don’t trust it. Those people include all the things that Liz said about getting anxious and would much prefer to talk to somebody else. Work coaches doing the best job in the world still work under the same roof and the same banner, work for the same person who has decided to sanction their benefits, so it puts them in an impossible position sometimes as well.
Rosie Ginday: I agree. A provision that is tailored to people with autism, disabilities, from different backgrounds or with mental health issues does not happen. Where the sanctions come is where there are exponential impacts. People may not understand what is being asked of them and it pushes them into huge debt that will be almost impossible for them to get out of. The impacts with those groups are outsized compared to the situations where it can sharpen the mind.
Q268 David Linden: Do you think that work coaches and staff at Jobcentre Plus are aware enough of conditions like autism, for example, that they would not go ahead with a sanction, understanding that that will have even more of a detrimental impact on somebody?
Rosie Ginday: From my experience, it is not widespread but we have fantastic teams. Handsworth has a great disability team who are really switched on and support claimants in an absolutely fantastic way. It works really well where it is split out and there is tailored understanding and support that matches.
Graham Parry: Many are hidden disabilities that people have not shared. It takes a lot of training and skill to recognise the condition and then how to respond to it in a positive way and not exacerbate it. You have coaches who work with people who have a diagnosis of something and have been given specialist support, but they are working with a general population of people who react very differently and, completely by accident, they will present themselves in a way that discourages people with autism or other conditions to come forward. It is unintended but they do not build the personal relationship quickly enough and deep enough for the person to disclose their wider condition.
Liz Sewell: Especially in certain communities, there are so many undiagnosed learning difficulties, so it is sometimes an impossible situation.
Q269 David Linden: Are the brutality of sanctions worth the consequences?
Liz Sewell: You would want to look at the double impact that that has on children. It would be interesting to do a cost benefit analysis of whether imposing sanctions makes a difference to whether or not a person is likely to get back to work.
Q270 David Linden: The Government have just laid regulations fairly recently—in fact they have just come into effect—for the administrative earnings threshold. Should employment services include support for those already in work to retain employment and to find more suitable work or more hours? The evidence suggests that about 600,000 people are expected to progress further. What do you see the role of that?
Rosie Ginday: I agree. The Kickstart scheme showed where the support was not available for young people in care and supported accommodation, people at risk of homelessness moving into shelters. That was an option for them.
A similar kind of thing is that apprenticeship levies cannot be used, as we heard in the last panel, for people working fewer than 30 hours but they cannot work more than 16 hours without having to pay a huge amount of rent for supported accommodation. There are key demographics where the existing Apprenticeship Levy and those kind of things don’t work, where organisations want to invest in the young people, want to invest in people in these groups. A broader pot of money, or being able to use the levy in a way that works for people on shorter hours or a shorter course, would provide a huge amount of benefit for those people and the organisations.
Liz Sewell: On the point of people who are already in work, for a lot of mums the best thing they can do is go into a small job. That is the route into getting a better job. One of those is the SMSA or what I would call the dinner lady—much more qualified now—somebody who is there at lunchtime. Those are 10 or 12 hours a week jobs. That is a great job to do and you will not be able to find another three hours to add to that. It is like picking easy fruit. You have people who you are in contact with and that is not necessarily the people who need extra support, so I don’t think it is the best way of targeting.
Graham Parry: Obviously there are people who need to be helped into better jobs with more pay. There is also a group of people who took a lot of effort to get into that job and need supporting for a longer period in it to make sure they don’t lose it. That could be young people with very little previous work experience. It is a big leap to adapt to the world of work from not having had a job before and they need support, so that a trip does not mean a fall and they can learn from errors and build on them rather than losing the job and going back to square one. It is a similar effect for people with disabilities, long-term health conditions, in that it is a big step to move back into the world of work. However small the job is, there is a regularity about it that might be hard to attain and they need supporting through that. You can work with an employer to maybe adapt a job or change a job, change the working hours, and you can advocate for them if you walk the journey with them for the first months of the job.
David Linden: That is very helpful Thank you.
Q271 Debbie Abrahams: You have covered the question I was going to ask in your previous responses to some extent. Liz, you talked about a more person-centred approach in how we work with that, not just in the practical issues of transport and childcare but, also, their position in the fear of change cycle, put it that way. I want to look more at the holistic programmes that you think need to accompany that to ensure that the different needs are addressed. It has been raised in previous evidence that that is a particularly important approach. Shall we start with Liz if you want to build on what you were talking about before?
Liz Sewell: If you are a mum who wants to get back to work and you have not worked for a long time, you might benefit from having the ability to build your confidence and think about what motivates you to go back to work. We know that if you are going to work and you have children and it does not work, you can fall out and could stay out for a very long time. It is the understanding of building your confidence and your motivation, but then a lot of people will need to have some very basic skills to get into work.
We are very much in contact with the local college, the local adult learning, whether it is functional skills or ESOL or how to work in retail, those kinds of courses. It is only when you have built that that you can get on to the employability. Once you have done the employability, we do a weekly bulletin that is all part-time jobs in the areas that we work in. That means that they are being offered appropriate jobs.
Another thing that we have innovated is we have an app. It is only available to people who are on the programme, so it is very safe. That means that they have a community and they can access things, because we provide support every day. It is not just like once a fortnight; it is every single day you could come on to a confidence course or preparing to work in schools or how to look for jobs in retail. We are offering lots and lots of different things. I think people will pick what they need and then you have a personal adviser.
It is about building all those things around people. When people have specialist needs, you need specialist support.
Q272 Debbie Abrahams: Fantastic, thank you. Rosie, do you want to add to that?
Rosie Ginday: Yes. I definitely agree with everything Liz has said. With the rise in mental health issues—and through the pandemic and lockdown we all experienced a little bit of anxiety—it is important to put specialist support in place to understand mental health and overcome any barriers that have arisen due to those issues or due to the past few years.
Large organisations have that kind of support for mental well-being in the workplace. However, generally the people we are supporting to get into work, people furthest from the labour market, are not going to go into those large organisations. They will go into smaller organisations, so making sure that they feel empowered, that they are able to have conversations with employers about reasonable adjustments and their needs, and them taking responsibility for that as well and putting in place what they need to enable themselves to succeed, is key.
Graham Parry: This is a slightly different angle to it, but I think you can get more holistic provision without spending more money. By that I mean I will circle back to a point that was raised I think in the first session and in earlier hearings, about the referral route into provision. I will give you one example. In Hounslow borough we deliver part of the Restart programme for DWP. We also deliver a social prescribing service for the BCT. Our staff of those two provisions spend a lot of time sitting next to each other in the same office. They have lots of helpful conversations with each other to help the projects along but neither of those teams can make a referral to each other.
That is one example of many that exist across the system. If we had different routes in rather than the standardised ones of a job coach referring somebody on to Restart and then a randomised process to see which provider they come through, if there was more flexibility in that, we could deliver a more holistic service.
Liz Sewell: Can I add to that point, because I think it is crucial, that funded services are funded to meet the need of that Department. The individual is not funded. It is, “Do you meet this target, do you meet that target, are you in this group, are you in that group?” It often means you have a mismatch of what is available, as Richard said earlier. But I also agree that there are lots of services out there that we can link people into. That is an asset but the other side of it is a real problem.
Q273 Selaine Saxby: How do you think DWP could work more effectively with other Departments and external organisations to deliver employment support?
Rosie Ginday: In our region we have a great team who pull together external partners. There is a lot of communication within the network but there could be a greater role for convening and a greater acknowledgement of those who sit outside of the network; the public sector organisations who have an ESG agenda and CSR agenda and want to do something in a meaningful way but don’t necessarily have the infrastructure in place. It is that holistic view, looking at what is in the system and providing those routes.
In Walsall the local college is setting up a hub where there will be some job coaches, Citizens Advice and education provision all in the same building, so it is one-stop shop. We will work with Midcounties Co-op and our organisation to bring in people to get all that additional support, and we will support them to provide extra sessions as well. I think it is working in a slightly different mindset that it is an ecosystem. That creates some complexity in funding but I think that is where the live change happens.
Graham Parry: My point is similar to the last point I made. I don’t understand the inner workings of the Jobcentre but my staff have conversations with work coaches who say, “I am sorry, they can’t come and join your ESF or locally funded provision because they will have to move on to the work and health programme or they will have to move on to Restart”.
We heard earlier about the successes of those programmes. However, I think we all agree they are not a one-size-fits-all programme and many people need something a bit more specialist. Even when we think we have that, job coaches will not be referring to us because they are referring to the provision that DWP has already procured. That might work for some but it does not work for all. I think that it is about Jobcentres being encouraged to value external provision as much as they value the provision that has been procured through DWP.
Liz Sewell: I think that is a really good point because, credit where it is due, during Covid DWP really stepped up and supported the sector to continue to work. A lot of the organisations did a lot more than employability support during that. There are times when it really steps up, but somebody has dropped the ball for small organisations and that needs to be recognised. Stewardship of the small providers, so many organisations—these are the people you are talking about you want to reach. ESF funding reached those people. DWP halved the funding for Restart. I think the BBO programme is about £70 million. If it had just invested £70 million to keep all those things going until UKSPF came in, that would have been some sort of start.
I think that it has lost the ability to think about the small sector who do not have CAEHRS 2 or CAEHRS 3 frameworks put in place, the small organisations, so DWP is not looking to us. You can look at what the big organisations do, and supply chain models are good because it means that the big organisation takes responsibility for the bidding and the organising and the supply chains deliver. We have benefited from being on supply chains but Restart did not deliver for small organisations. If you go into who is providing, it is the big organisations and a lot of them are subbing to each other. That is because the financial envelope that was provided to those people made it very difficult for small organisations to participate because you had to be a certain level to do that.
We are not in Restart and the BBO and ESF programmes are finishing. I feel that somebody needs to take responsibility for that and think about how we can save so many great organisations. When you asked, “Are people doing better now?” the employment service sector overall does a lot better, the big organisations and the small organisations. That is because they have had that support through ESF.
The last years of the programme made such a difference and it has been extended to allow people to continue. There are people who are at the top of their game doing good work. The sadness is that that will be lost at the point where you most want to take advantage of it.
Mr Mills asked earlier about if I had a magic wand, and I think the problems is that there are too many programmes that want to have a magic wand, and it is not a magic wand. It is long-term understanding of what people need and putting in place programmes to deliver. You need national contracts to deliver long-term support for everybody but you also need local provision.
Q274 Selaine Saxby: Thank you. You make an interesting point about small companies and their involvement. I represent an incredibly rural part in North Devon and, listening to the evidence this morning and recognising you are all from very urban areas, I wondered how some of these programmes roll out.
Chair, I don’t know if we have plans to look at if we are struggling to access things like this when they are not in a city centre. In my entire constituency, which is enormous, I have one Jobcentre, which is fantastic but I have just the one. I wonder about the accessibility issues of some of these programme and how they translate. I don’t know if you have any thoughts.
Graham Parry: Not about translation but I want to emphasise the point about scale. We are not talking about just closing out organisations with very small turnovers. Groundwork London turns over £25 million a year. I could see lots of programmes and say, “We could do that”. I have not seen a single programme come out of the DWP that even an organisation the size and scale of Groundwork London could bid for.
Q275 Selaine Saxby: Thank you. I think you have already started to answer part of my next question, but from your perspective is there anything else you would like to add about how effective DWP contracting processes are at ensuring that the best providers are selected to deliver a support programme?
Liz Sewell: I understand that you have to have competition, but there are some really good bid writers out there and often they can win contracts for you. It is not just about that. I think that devolving stuff will help organisations like ours to be able to apply for them. If you had smaller contracts, larger organisations will not want to bid for them. As Richard said earlier, you need to have a mixed economy of things that are happening.
I also think that we need to look at what technology can do. In your area you could deliver Zoom sessions to everybody every day. You could have an app, e-mail support, one-to-one advisers online. There is so much that we can do with technology now that you can access as long as you have a smart phone. There are two sides of it. It is about the funding and how we reach them.
Q276 Selaine Saxby: Don’t get me going on broadband. Are there any other points on the contracting process?
Graham Parry: Ditto, absolutely. There is guidance about how you want the big primes to involve their semis or social enterprises but I don’t think there are targets. Those targets could be significant and enforced. Don’t ask me to pick a percentage but a certain percentage—and it cannot be 1% or 2%—is delivered by specialist local organisations. They all have fantastic processes and systems and capacity in place to manage supply chains. If they were encouraged to do it more that would be an easy partial fix for the next round of commissioning, with some targets set around diversification. From where I am sitting, you are contracting with fewer and fewer organisations now than you probably used to.
The performance is there, people have said it, but what is it hiding? It is hiding the variety of provision and the people on the margins of that provision getting the support they need. The big numbers can be hit, but what is happening on the edges, who is not getting supported and would a more diverse supply chain help with the people who are not getting supported?
Rosie Ginday: My comments are building on both of those. For Miss Macaroon, Kickstart is the only programme we have been involved in, not because that is the only one we have wanted to but it is the only one that has felt accessible because the systems feel too big and we don’t have the capability in our organisation to manage that.
Having tried to access systems as a subcontractor, we had similar kinds of experiences. I feel that the only reason we were successful with Kickstart was because the scheme was being built as they were going, so they had to provide that level of accessibility and support and it was open to private sector organisations as well. I think that some of the lessons learnt there could be applied. There could be a greater diversity of organisations that can apply for these kinds of contracts.
Liz Sewell: Could I add one point very briefly? If you look back at something like the New Deal for Lone Parents, and how that worked and looked at things like incentives and outreach, it was a good model of how DWP could go into a particular area and add value.
Q277 Nigel Mills: Would you rather be commissioned by DWP as part of a national framework or would you prefer more local commissioning?
Liz Sewell: We have never been commissioned by DWP. We are too small and I get that. That is why supply chains work but I think the point that was made around not incentivising by saying, “This is what you need to do” is important. I agree that for local commissioning you need to have sufficient capacity. In London, you might live in Hillingdon but you work in Ealing. You don’t necessarily want contracts this tight so that the eligibility is so small, but I think that good local contracting would make a difference. We would like to be part of both.
Rosie Ginday: I agree, definitely. There is huge value in local commissioning because there is the eyes and boots on the ground that understands the needs of local areas, but there is the need for national provision with the standards and safeguards that provides as well.
Graham Parry: The same, and hopefully something constructive to add to it as well is that you asked the last panel: how can you manage both national and regional/local provision? You already have something of a model for that. You do it through the ESFA. The ESFA procurement for ESF-funded programmes over the last few years has had some strong national frameworks to it, but they have consulted at each of the LEPs or the region or whatever is the appropriate regional panel and flavoured and shaped the programme to that sort of need.
They have looked at different sectors, for example. When MOPAC, the GLA police joint unit on crime prevention, wanted to commission a programme about gang prevention and getting more people who were on the path to involvement in gangs into work, they designed it first and then sought the ESFA to procure it, because the ESFA is brilliant at procuring provision and at managing the money on behalf of the Government. They are the best people to pick, so you do have strong models that can be used, locally flavoured, regionally flavoured but without having to replicate endless procurement systems.
Q278 Chair: I was going to ask you a question about the end of ESF but Liz and Graham have spoken about that. The idea is that the UK Shared Prosperity Fund will fill the gap. Do you think that will deliver, Liz and Graham?
Liz Sewell: The ESF was based on need. I worry that with any political Government, whether it is the First Minister in Scotland or the Prime Minister here, you might end up with political needs being the way that things are distributed. For national delivery, ESF focused on need not politics. I urge that there is a real understanding that one area might win a bid but there may be people next door who have exactly the same need. That is not a party political point. I think that it would happen under any party. They would be seeking to reward the people that they feel need most, but there are people everywhere.
Q279 Chair: You would argue for a clear needs’ basis for the UK Shared Prosperity Fund?
Liz Sewell: I would, yes.
Graham Parry: The last time I was giving evidence to a Select Committee was almost to the day five years ago and it was to a committee set up to look at the ESF and the impact it would have on the UK. We were asked this question five years ago and we all agreed: let’s not focus on some of the difficulties, let’s not focus on the detail, let’s focus on the transition. The worst thing that can happen is we can drop the ball with a gap in provision and, sadly, it is looking like that ball has been dropped.
People are taking a very broad-brush approach to it, saying, “Well, there is ESF money being spent in 2023”, forgetting the point that Liz made earlier that a lot of that ESF provision has already finished and more will finish in the course of this year. Even the provision that is contracted to the end of 2023 will not be recruiting new participants for a good six months at the end of that programme.
Unless those organisations and programmes—the ones that are working obviously—already have a seamless progression into a locally or regionally procured UKSPF provision, participants will be dropped off the end of it. To build on Liz’s point, a huge amount of talent will be lost from the sector that has been through the hardest times possible to help people back into work and everything they have learnt from that. We will lose those people.
Sadly, five years later, we are still making the same point but there are still practical solutions. A lot of the ESF is being used nationally through DWP and locally. There has been a reluctance or a barrier to DWP bringing in its own resources to match to local provision. An advantage of not having that mix going forward in having ESF in DWP and ESF in local provision, if it wants to the DWP can now step in and match and build upon local programmes. If region A has decided what it really needs is this, surely there is no barrier to the DWP saying, “Okay, we are going to put a bit of money behind that and grow it”, and also, most importantly, learn if it worked or not and then it will better inform future programmes.
Q280 Chair: You would argue for the DWP filling the gap with its own budget, if it had it of course?
Graham Parry: Yes. Rather than thinking it has to be funded locally or it has to be funded nationally, co-production, co-funding of projects can be a good way forward.
Q281 Chair: This is the first time this Committee has taken evidence related to macaroons. Could you tell us how this all started, what you were doing, Rosie?
Rosie Ginday: One of my close family members was in care when he was a young kid and it had a massive impact on him. I wanted to provide opportunities for young people who had been in similar situations. I brought all of my skills together and decide to create an organisation where young people who had never worked before could walk straight into a kitchen and pick up some skills in a safe and supportive way.
Chair: That was your intention right at the start, and that is what you have been doing ever since. Very interesting. Thank you all very much indeed for a very interesting and helpful evidence session. We are very grateful to all of you. That concludes our questions and our meeting.