Work and Pensions Committee
Oral evidence: Plan for Jobs and employment support, HC 600
Wednesday 3 May 2023
Ordered by the House of Commons to be published on 3 May 2023.
Members present: Rt Hon Sir Stephen Timms (Chair); David Linden; Steve McCabe; Nigel Mills; Selaine Saxby; Rt Hon Sir Desmond Swayne.
Questions 386-474
Witnesses
I: Guy Opperman MP, Minister for Employment; Tom Pursglove MP, Minister for Disabled People, Health and Work; Sophie Dean, Director General for Labour Market Policy and Implementation, Department for Work and Pensions; and Katie Farrington, Director General for Disability, Health and Pensions, Department for Work and Pensions.
Witnesses: Guy Opperman MP, Tom Pursglove MP, Sophie Dean and Katie Farrington.
Q386 Chair: Welcome, everybody, to this meeting of the Work and Pensions Committee. This is our last evidence hearing in our inquiry on the Government’s plan for jobs and employment support. A very warm welcome to the three witnesses in front of us here in the Committee Room and also to Minister Guy Opperman, who is joining us virtually. Thank you all for being with us. Could you each tell us briefly who you are?
Tom Pursglove: I am Tom Pursglove MP, and I am the Minister of State for Disabled People, Health and Work in the Department for Work and Pensions.
Katie Farrington: Good morning. I am Katie Farrington, and I am director general for disability, health and pensions in DWP.
Sophie Dean: Good morning. I am Sophie Dean, and I am director general for labour market policy and implementation.
Guy Opperman: Good morning. My name is Guy Opperman. I am the MP for Hexham. I am sat in my kitchen because I have some horrendous lurgy, in a throwback to covid times. I am the Minister for Employment, and I was formerly the Minister for Pensions at DWP.
Q387 Chair: A warm welcome to everybody. My first question is largely to you, Guy. The Secretary of State told us in November 2022 that transparency “informs public debate and allows a feedback loop for the Department.” We very much welcome the recent publication of research that the Department has been unwilling to publish in the past. Is it not time to publish regular performance data on all the Department’s employment programmes?
Guy Opperman: I will attempt to answer that, but I would always make the point that the Secretary of State—as you know, having served in the Department for Work and Pensions on several occasions—always sets the way in which disclosure of all information is done. I am on my eighth Secretary of State. The present one is very good and has taken a different approach to his predecessor bar one in particular. We disclose way more, and are way more transparent than we have been. I think Tom and I dealt with quite a lot of detail in our letter of 21 March. To be fair, that was drafted largely by officials, as you will understand. The approach of the Department—under the new Secretary of State, to his credit—is to try to create a safe space for the Department to develop policy, to discuss and debate issues, and to analyse things on an ongoing basis, but then, when such work is completed, by and large to disclose it, if at all possible.
Select Committees always want utter certainty about exactly what is going to happen. As those of you who have served in Government know, nothing is ever certain, because you are subject to FOIs and other things, and you cannot be hard and fast about all the rules, but I think that the Secretary of State has set out a very clear metric going forward.
I thought about what I would say to you today—obviously, none of this is scripted—and my personal view is that we are very much buffeted by events. Those tend to be the labour market stats, which we disclose on a monthly basis and are a huge body of evidence. We do some things on a quarterly basis, and other things on a yearly basis, and we try to respond to FOIs, requests and parliamentary questions on an ongoing basis, but the key thing, surely, is that we try to set out the way ahead. My recommendation to the Secretary of State would certainly be that we target that around two big events in the parliamentary calendar: the Budget and the autumn statement. Those two events should, effectively, involve a significant data release around them, with labour market stats and other things as and when necessary. That would be my approach but, Lord knows, I am a junior Minister.
Q388 Chair: At the moment, statistics are published quarterly on the Work and Health programme and annually on Access to Work, but there is no regular data at all on Restart, the main programme. We have heard from Restart providers that they receive monthly performance data. Should that not be published, as it was for the Work programme a decade ago? There was monthly publication by provider and by area. Given that that data is supplied to the companies involved, should it not be published?
Guy Opperman: We dealt with that largely in our letter, which Tom and I sent to you in March. You will understand that data the has to be appropriately analysed and fact-checked in the usual way, as does all Government data—but not the interim data that you describe, but again you need to ask the Secretary of State about that.
Q389 Chair: Your colleague John Penrose wrote to the Secretary of State in January. I quote from his letter, which was signed by everybody from the Fabian Society to the Adam Smith Institute: “It is crucial that DWP commits to publishing detailed and timely performance data to ensure that jobseekers have the best opportunity to find work, that suppliers are held to account for underperformance and that any mistakes made in previous schemes are not repeated.” Is that not a fairly compelling case for publishing regular data?
Guy Opperman: John is an esteemed colleague; I worked with him in the Whips Office and I understand the work he is trying to do on data but, with great respect, that is what DWP is doing. We can have arguments and discussions—I am not really capable of much of an argument today, I am afraid. We can have a discussion about the extent to which that is done on a monthly, tri-monthly or 12-monthly basis, or at the end of a particular programme, but I am in total agreement with John, and that is what we are doing already.
Q390 Chair: But there is no regular data being published on the Restart programme.
Guy Opperman: Because the Restart programme is an ongoing piece of work.
Q391 Chair: That is surely why there should be regular data published on how it is doing.
Guy Opperman: With no disrespect, Stephen—you have held this role twice in the Department for Work and Pensions—if you have an ongoing running commentary on a programme, you divert massive resources to its assessment on an ongoing basis, and do less of the actual programme. Secondly, you are not in a position to assess the programme’s long-term merits until it has run for a period. I think I have given my answer. Sorry.
Q392 Chair: This is to the officials: we have heard from Restart providers that they are sent data on their performance, and perhaps the performance of peers in the same contract area. Surely it would not be a very large task to prepare that data for publication, given that it is already circulated.
Sophie Dean: As the Minister said, we are absolutely looking at what we can sensibly produce that is helpful to the Committee, providers and our customers. The balance is, of course, in making sure that we are both transparent and giving information that is helpful and useful, and measuring what we are trying to achieve, which in a lot of our programmes is sustained employment. Kickstart, which we may come on to discuss, started a year ahead of Restart, and we are producing an evaluation of that programme this summer. Indeed, we will do that for Restart, but the questions are: when is the right time and, as the Minister said, what is the most useful format? We are absolutely looking at what we can do in the very near term, in terms of more regular production of data, so we absolutely take that point.
Chair: We look forward to seeing what emerges. Thank you.
Q393 Selaine Saxby: Morning. Apologies for being late. My questions are around economic inactivity and vacancies. Changes in economic activity after the pandemic have not been distributed evenly among all groups; the most recent ONS stats highlight that there has been a particular growth in economic inactivity among young men, for example. How is the Department tailoring its support for those who are struggling the most to return to the labour market?
Q394 Guy Opperman: It is a work in progress, but my key straplines are that vacancies have fallen in successive quarters; employment is up; the claimant count is down; economic inactivity has fallen; disability employment is up; and payroll employment is at a record high. None of that means that we are complacent, but over the last couple of years, slowly but surely, this country has been recovering. Economic inactivity is a focus of the Budget. I do not want to repeat the Red Book and the entirety of Jeremy’s speech at the Budget, but by and large I would say: go and read the Budget and the Red Book.
People are really concerned about economic inactivity, but two points jump out at me. First, even in our present state, we are at the level that we were at in 2016, and when I last checked, in 2016, the world was not coming to an end. We are at a better level than we were at any time in the Labour Government of ’97 to 2010. Our economic inactivity levels are actually pretty good, including in comparison to our international comparators’. The G7 stats are well known, but in broad terms, we are better than pretty much all the G7 on economic inactivity—better than the Americans; the French, I think; and the Italians, who have huge difficulties on this issue.
Selaine Saxby: Thank you. Did anyone have anything they wanted to add?
Tom Pursglove: I can certainly add something from the health and disability side. Obviously, we think it is really important that we work constructively with disabled people and those with health conditions to try to improve employment outcomes for them, particularly where there is a willingness and desire to work, and to unlock that potential. You will, I am sure, recognise the real commitment shown and announcements made in the Budget on our aim to have better join-up of health and work.
We recognise that for many people, work is a determinant of better health outcomes. That has been reflected in the commitments around universal support and place and train, which support people to retain roles, as well as the commitment to rolling out the Work Well partnerships. They are all about that lighter-touch support, alongside the primary care and health support that people may be receiving for particular conditions, and they really try to improve some of those outcomes and unlock that potential. There are 1.7 million economically inactive people who would like to work. We think it is right to get on the front foot and put support in place, so that we can unlock some of that.
Q395 Selaine Saxby: If you have details of when you expect to see more of this following through into the labour market statistics, it would be helpful to hear them. I was interested in that because of the data for my area. My area may be an anomaly. We historically have very low unemployment, but in last month’s figures, we saw a 10% increase in youth unemployment. At the same time, we still have this huge number of vacancies. Is there anything particular to do with this group of youngsters that might be contributing to that? Or do I have a rogue datapoint?
Guy Opperman: Let’s start with the international facts. We have the second highest youth employment rate in the G7. Only Canada’s is higher. Don’t ask me why the plucky Canadians are better than us, but we are better than the French, the Americans, the Italians and so on.
Why does North Devon have a 10% increase? I can’t tell you off the top of my hat, but I can say that we will be speaking by the end of the week to the regional DWP manager to find out, and to see what we can do to address that. There are new hubs that are being established, and hubs that have been established for some time, which our colleague Mims Davies is running, which are making a real difference in this space.
We need to understand the nature of the vacancies. As you know, I was in North Devon a week ago. It has a specific jobs market—very summer-based, very tourism-based. There are many complex issues there. I was at the Newquay jobcentre, not far down the road. Other jobcentres in the area are doing a great job of trying to tailor the training that we have—we have SWAPs, and we have skills bootcamps, which try to assist individuals with getting the training for the vacancies out there. Do we need to do more on that? I hope we are trying to do that already, but we can double down and check.
Sophie Dean: At the Budget, we announced an extension of the youth offer. That involves youth hubs, which bring together our work coaches, local authorities and other services. There are youth employability coaches, who specifically try to reduce barriers for younger people, and then, finally, there is extra support for them in their first 13 weeks out of a job.
Q396 Selaine Saxby: ONS statistics for February still show vacancies at more than 338,000 above pre-pandemic levels. What do you think is preventing employers from filling these vacancies, when there is still significant unemployment? What more do you think the Department could do to match the right person with the right job?
Guy Opperman: The first thing is that the economy pre-pandemic was exceptionally good, but, again, vacancies are way better than they were for the duration of the Labour Government. We are basically back to the position of about five or six years ago.
On the vacancies, the blunt truth is that we have a problem with almost full employment and record payroll levels on the one hand, and the nature of the jobs that need to be filled by people on unemployment support—the people we are working with—on the other. Some people are outside our control. The over-50s are not people that we have a huge amount to do with, because they tend to have retired early, and therefore they are not DWP customers.
We are trying to tailor—I again go back to the Budget—the individual aspects of our offer, whether that is in health and disability, which Tom can talk a great deal about, and helping to beat the record numbers of disabled people who presently work, or whether it is trying to enhance the over-50s offer, in a whole variety of ways, such as through the mid-life MOT, pension changes or a variety of other things. Returneeships have been pioneered very successfully in some areas. We are trying to enhance the youth offer, and to assist parents with the care work that we have done. There are about six or seven different things that we are doing to try to address this.
The single biggest package in the Budget was the support and care for children, which will transform the situation for mums and dads who are attempting to go back to work. Whether they are UC customers, or Mr and Mrs Normal living at 43 Acacia Avenue, the offer for them on ongoing care and support, and childcare generally, is transformed by what the Chancellor has announced.
Tom Pursglove: To speak to the point about tailoring—we will no doubt touch on the White Paper reforms later—we are really focusing in on that and trying to show impetus around the direction of travel that we want to take the reforms. That is reflected in the additional work coach time offer that we are making available. That was piloted in a third of jobcentres. The second third of jobcentres went live last week, and we are rolling out to the final third by 2024.
We think that is a really important mechanism to achieve precisely what it is that you have explained so eloquently as being really important: that tailored understanding of a claimant’s circumstances and what their aspirations are. We are re-pivoting the system to be very much focused on what people can do, rather than perhaps what they cannot, which has always got in the way historically, and then matching people to the right roles.
With universal support and with Work Well, really meaningful support packages are going to be in place alongside that to help to sustain people in these roles and provide the training to make this a success. I think it is welcome that individuals who have perhaps not had the opportunity to access that work coach time historically, or who felt that they have not been able to, are now able to do that in a greater number of jobcentres, with that final third coming on stream as we move forward.
Q397 Steve McCabe: Morning. I want to ask about how we engage with people who do not normally come into contact with jobcentres and other parts of the agency. I think the Government quite rightly said that we need greater participation in the labour force, and we probably all agree with that.
I was struck by some of the evidence we had from Jonathan Cribb from the Institute for Fiscal Studies, who pointed out that, traditionally, Governments tend to leave alone parents who have chosen not to work to bring up their young children. Likewise, with people over 55 who have a good private pension and have made a life choice, we do not tend to try to persuade them. So I wondered, apart from the new childcare offer and the mid-life MOT, how are we going to go after these people and persuade them? Is there a big idea? Is there a fresh idea that is going to change the way Government engages with people who traditionally, for understandable reasons, we have not tended to pursue?
Guy Opperman: I will try and go first on that. I feel like I am slightly in the “Life of Brian” and you have just asked me, “What have the Romans ever done for us?” Apart from the childcare offer, which was a massive award to parents, the likes of which has never been done before and which you did elucidate in your question, and apart from youth hubs, which are innovative and game changing to ensure that we reach out, outside of jobcentres, and get young people involved, I could give you about four or five different things, and officials and others and Tom could give you more.
The mid-life MOT is something that I have pioneered at the Department for Work and Pensions for only five years, but it is genuinely transformational. It reaches out to people. The work we are doing now is obviously online and in jobcentres, but we also have three private sector pieces of work across the country. That is reaching out way beyond the jobcentre; it is something DWP never normally does.
I look at the over-50s stuff. Now, I realise that the Labour party has backtracked from Wes Streeting’s position on pensions reforms, but clearly we have changed the pension rules to enable people to stay in work on a long-term basis. Looking at what we are trying to do with the over-50s, traditionally we would do an over-50s fair in the jobcentre. I have been to them. I went to one in Hackney in December. Your point is entirely right that people would not go to them if they were not actually benefit recipients, so we have changed that.
Please, have a word with Richard Graham; I went to his Gloucester 50-plus jobs fair and it was incredible. It was at the local theatre and cinema. It involved volunteering opportunities and was a partnership between the DWP, the county council, the chamber of commerce and local businesses. Everybody was involved, including about 30 different charities and volunteering groups. It touched on many of the things that Tom is so eloquent and passionate about—namely trying to get people to volunteer first before they get into work. It is a totally different and innovative way of reaching out to people and getting them engaged. I massively love 50-plus fairs. I am doing one myself in Ponteland on 1 June—nice plug there.
I would keep going, but my voice is slightly going, so I will pause there. However, genuinely, I could think of about 10 different things. If you look at the budget and at the work that we are doing for older people—and for younger people—I think we are totally reaching out.
One final thing to finish: traditionally, we have more than 2 million students in this country. Some cannot work because of visa rules, but it has struck me that very few of those students are actually working. That is totally different to when I was at university, when we all worked in a pub for a night or two a week. The way in which I want to try to go forward is that we will do employment fairs at student venues up and down the country in September. When people go to university in September, I want DWP and jobs to be there front and centre. If they want to work while they are learning, they are perfectly able to do 10 to 12 hours a week, and we should be encouraging that. However, we are not going to get a student to come into the jobcentre nearly as easily as going to them, so that is what we are going to do.
Q398 Steve McCabe: Thank you, Minister. I think you widened your answer to cover groups that I didn’t specifically refer to, but fair enough. I certainly heard—and I think that anyone listening to you would have heard—that the big idea is jobs fairs for the over-50s. Is there anything else that you have in mind?
Tom Pursglove: I would just touch on some of what we are doing in the health and disability space. I would argue that we want to do more of what works, and that employment advice in NHS talking therapies has been hugely successful. The advocacy that I hear for that when I am out and about on my visits—most recently in Tower Hamlets—is really powerful. That is from not only the staff delivering that advice, working in collaboration with the NHS, but also the individuals who had benefited from that support.
It is really welcome that, by the time that we get to 2024-25, 100% of talking therapy services across the country will have that employment advice built into them. The success rates around that are stark: two thirds of those surveyed who accessed the service reported that they had either remained in work or found work 12 months after using the service.
To really go to the heart of the initial point of your question, that join-up between work and health is key, because of the referral routes that that brings into scope, which become relevant in the context of getting people to access those services and supporting them in that. Where, for example, a clinical professional that someone comes into contact with thinks that exploring employment could be a worthwhile thing for their recovery or wellbeing—to help with that—that can be facilitated through talking therapies, so it is really welcome that we are doing that. There is a commitment, as I say, to roll that out more widely.
That learning is also reflected in some of the wider support that we will introduce through Work Well and universal support. The pioneers for universal support are the IPSPC structures that we have in place, which are operating in six areas across the country and we are committed to seeing expanded further. That is very much about “place and train”, bringing forward employment support and helping people into roles—alongside the primary care treatment that they are perhaps receiving—to really try to ensure that people have the best opportunity at a recovery, supported by work, where that is appropriate for them.
Q399 Steve McCabe: Thank you. I think that Ms Farrington referred to some of that work the last time she was here. I am not dismissive of the efforts; I am asking about this because these are groups who we need to engage with and who it has traditionally been extremely difficult for Governments to engage with.
Can I just ask one last question? The largest group of benefit claimants, as I understand it from my Selly Oak constituency, and in fact nationally, is people aged 25 to 39. Why is that group so difficult to work with?
Sophie Dean: I can start on that. One of the really important things we did in the Budget is talk about childcare reforms within universal credit, as well as wider childcare reforms. We found that quite a lot of parents on universal credit were not using the childcare offer. One of the reasons was that childcare providers were asking for payment up front, and universal credit is paid in arrears at the end of the month. We have switched that around, so we are now paying an up-front subsidy direct to the providers for childcare. That will make a real difference for that age group, we hope. We have heard a lot from stakeholders on the importance of that.
Q400 Nigel Mills: Guy, can I pick up on a question that I asked the Secretary of State? I couldn’t get my head around how the mid-life MOT for 40,000 over-50s on UC was going to add very much. Presumably if you ask someone, “Have you saved enough for your retirement?”, they might say, “No, I have less than £16,000 and I am out of work. That’s why I am here.” That is not anything like what we envisaged the mid-life MOT being when you first had the brilliant idea, is it?
Guy Opperman: First, I am taking it as a massive endorsement that you called it a brilliant idea. Please put that in your final report. To be fair, you are right. The original assumption was that this would be a private sector-led drive to ensure that people at 45—from 45 up to 55—who were doing a particular type of job or who had not seen a GP for years or who did not understand their wealth would go for a review and then be in a position to change their life.
The first thing is that they would stay healthy and go to see a GP or have a physical MOT. The second thing is that they would consider the amazing opportunities to retrain. Lifelong learning is something that this Government is trying to do more of. All Governments are trying to do more of it. We know we need to put rocket boosters up that—and long may that last.
Thirdly, people are obviously motivated by wealth, and it is very much the case that we need to try to explain to everybody what their assets currently are and what the likelihood is in terms of retirement value and so on. You and I have discussed many times in the past the pensions dashboard and people’s capability of understanding.
This is a slightly long answer, but please bear with me for a minute or two more. When it came to the commissioning process, I got £5 million off the then Chancellor, now Prime Minister, at the spending review in ’21 to take this forward. I wanted to try to do two things, the first being the private sector work, which is ongoing. We have commissioned people to do that and it is rolling out literally as we speak. It is early days, but we picked three parts of England, as I recall—I am a bit hazy on the details—and that is beginning.
Secondly, we are producing an online digital mid-life MOT. We also had some money allocated for jobcentres. It struck us that we could ignore jobcentres and say, “We are just not going to bother with the mid-life MOT at all,” or we could try to do an innovative approach to a mid-life MOT in a jobcentre.
I have sat in on three of those mid-life MOTs, which is something I would strongly recommend. I hear that Hounslow in outer London is doing very well. I was in one in Fulham jobcentre and there are others I have sat in on. I was recently in Watford jobcentre, where I sat in on one. They are actually really good. They genuinely are: they engage the individual and explain things to them. It widens everybody’s perceptions. A 50-year-old will realise that the state pension does not kick in for many years, and the MOT explains that the state pension is worth a certain amount and explains what the retraining opportunities are worth. It does genuinely change people.
It is early days, and of course the Select Committee will want to know data immediately, but the feedback on mid-life MOTs in jobcentres has been outstanding—it really has. They are done as group sessions. There is a definite benefit to the group session. It is a group of individuals who tend to be 50 to 55, who are unemployed and are not wealthy for obvious reasons. They then realise that there are other people in the same boat, and it is collective work together.
Over-50s fairs are a natural follow-on from that. People say, “I couldn’t do this job. There are no jobs out there for me,” and you then have a conversation with them and say, “Yes, there are jobs out there for you. You could retrain or get training to do this or this. There are sector-based work academies. You can do skills bootcamps. You can do apprenticeships. You can do all these things.”
I will give you one example—because you have me on a pet project—and then I will stop. Halfords has undertaken to take on nearly 1,000 over-50s as apprentices. That is a huge number of people. If we can get other businesses to take the approach that Halfords has taken, we will really begin to make a dent in a market that we do not necessarily deal with but who we can very much do things with. The nature of the mid-life MOT is that it is a steer to future employment that you can do aged 50-plus, whatever your condition.
Q401 Nigel Mills: That sounds like a useful exercise. How do I equate that to the Way to Work campaign that the previous Secretary of State introduced last year, which basically said, “You’ve got to get into a job—any job—as fast as you can, else we’ll start applying conditionality”? That seems to be a very different approach to having what are almost group therapy sessions and talking about what retraining might be available to you.
Guy Opperman: It is a different Secretary of State, a different Employment Minister and a different Government.
Q402 Nigel Mills: So Way to Work was wrong—that was a bad idea that you will not be repeating.
Guy Opperman: No, I do not think Way to Work was wrong, as such. The fundamental principle—that it is really important to get people into work—remains the case, and you and I believe that, but it is also about trying to have a conversation with long-term unemployed people who are 50-plus and who are very hard to shift. It goes back to Steve’s point, which is that these are very difficult situations, and to pretend otherwise is naive. Successive Governments have struggled with them.
There is a whole suite of tools that you use to try to deal with these people, of which presenting them with job opportunities is one, but the second bit is making sure they have the capability and the belief that they can do that job. It goes to a lot of the work that Tom is doing on health and disability, which is giving people capability and belief in themselves, so that we can then address those long-term problems.
Q403 Nigel Mills: I am intrigued about the journey. If I lose my job aged over 50, presumably I look for a job myself for a bit. I eventually have to claim some benefits because I run out of money, and then I go into the jobcentre. You use a light touch on me for a while, thinking that I will find a job, and then at some point you get stricter with me and make me apply for 30 jobs a day or something. At some point, you then get more cuddly with me and offer me group sessions and new skills training. Is my understanding of the journey right?
Guy Opperman: I will let Sophie come in if there is anything she wants to add in a second, but on the mid-life MOT, I do not want to overstate what is happening. I have a set amount of money that I am using to pilot this around the country, and individual jobcentres—not all of them—are running mid-life MOTs. I have gone out of my way to go to the ones that are doing it. We have done a bespoke pack for each jobcentre that is doing it. They are definitely finding that they are utilising this as part of all the engagement they are doing—it is one element of all the engagement that the jobcentre and the work coach are doing with the individual. As you know, there are sessions that are done individually, but occasionally claimants are asked to come in as a collective group and have a discussion about x, y or z. That is all that is.
Q404 Nigel Mills: I am just trying to get my head around this. You are telling us that you think this more supportive approach is great, whereas actually your Department’s policy is to be really quite strict and push people into any job for weeks and months before you get to that intervention. I am trying to work out whether you think “any job” was a sensible approach, or whether trying to match people up with jobs that they can sustain and grow in might be a better approach for the long term.
Guy Opperman: If I go back one stage, I am absolutely certain that volunteering is a fantastic thing to do for those who cannot do any work whatsoever. It is a great first step into getting responsibility, getting out of the house and doing all the things—
Q405 Nigel Mills: That is not the question I am asking, Minister. The question I am asking is whether you think pushing a newly unemployed person into any job is the right approach, or whether there should be a longer period when they can try to get themselves into a job that will be good for them for the long term and that they can progress in.
Guy Opperman: I am perfectly happy with the system that has evolved under successive Secretaries of State. It requires people to take employment, as per their employment commitment, which is the basis of this conversation, if they are fit and able to do that job. At the same stage, for the over-50s in those particular circumstances, I am trying to provide a bespoke offer. Mims would say, if she was here, that her youth hubs are a bespoke offer that is genuinely transformational for young people. There are different approaches to different cohorts. Tom would say, in respect of the disabled, that there are over 500 DEAs in jobcentres up and down the country. They are doing a particular job.
Q406 Nigel Mills: Okay. I think we have done this for long enough. May I switch to Kickstart? You said in your written submission that you would publish a process evaluation in spring 2023. I know that these definitions are a bit slippery, but spring ends this month, doesn’t it? Will we see that evaluation this month?
Guy Opperman: I think what we said—I can be corrected if I am wrong—that the fieldwork for the commissioned process evaluation concluded in spring 2023, and we will publish the findings once complete. If that is a typo in our submission, my secondary answer is always that spring is a very long thing in parliamentary terms and can go, as we all know, almost into July. The answer is that we are going to publish soon.
Sophie Dean: I was just going to say the same—the summer.
Guy Opperman: The one thing that I will say is that it is going to be published before the end of term. It is not acceptable for us to wait for—
Nigel Mills: Being outside in the last couple of weeks has not felt like spring.
Guy Opperman: It has not felt like spring with the cold I have.
Q407 Nigel Mills: More seriously, I suppose that the danger of doing full and lengthy evaluations that take some time is that you end up with a gap between programmes. Are you thinking of having another or similar Kickstart in place, or are you going to wait and see how this one has landed before you think about that for the future?
Guy Opperman: I can answer that unequivocally: no, we are not going to be doing another Kickstart straightaway.
Q408 Nigel Mills: Okay. Finally, there was an aim to get young people in the scheme to spend 52 days or more off benefit and 80 or more days in work compared to those not taking part in the scheme. Are we on target to hit that, or do we have to wait for this evaluation, which is not as imminent as we hoped?
Guy Opperman: Unless Sophie has access to amazingly good data, I could not possibly answer that off the top of my head, with the addled brain that I have at present. We will write to you, unless Sophie has the answer.
Sophie Dean: We can absolutely write to you on that specific question. What I can say, if it is helpful, is that we know that more than 70%—more than seven in 10—of those who have been in the Kickstart programme are still in the job after 12 months.
Q409 David Linden: Minister, it is disappointing that you are not able to deliver your bombast in person, but we will have to do with you virtually. We have heard that there is a negative perception of Jobcentre Plus and certainly a bit of a lack of trust in work coaches. I think we would probably all agree that trust is pretty vital in terms of delivering effective support. How do you plan to address that problem?
Guy Opperman: David, I am only too sad that I am not with you. I am on eight antibiotics a day, six paracetamol a day and about two packs of Strepsils. Trust me, I would far rather be with you and hale and hearty.
On your question, I want to stick up for jobcentres and the amazing staff who work in them. I personally think that they do a phenomenal job, and this is an opportunity for me to say thank you to the team. I am directly responsible for the best part of 20,000-plus employees who work up and down the country, in every part of the United Kingdom, in well over 600 jobcentres. They do a phenomenal job, they really do.
Now, could they do a better job? Yes, of course they can, and we are looking at that. This country and this Department are on a journey post covid. We are reviewing the way in which we deliver our service, on an ongoing basis, in the brave new world post covid. Getting people to come out and go into jobcentres—changing the way that people have behaved over the last few years—is very difficult. My personal view is that jobcentres do a phenomenal job.
Q410 David Linden: Two or three times now in the last few months, you have increased the administrative earnings threshold. You are putting more pressure on claimants, and therefore more pressure on those work coaches that you rightly pay tribute to. Is that actually something that is going to work? Why have you had to do it two or three times?
Guy Opperman: The first point is that we will know at the end of the programme whether it has worked. The second point is that we believe it is better to try and give more support, interventions and assistance to claimants, and to try and address many of the problems that we have identified, whether that is trying to fill vacancies and getting people trained up into the skills where we would like to see jobs filled, or whether that is helping people come off UC and into full-time employment. That is what we are doing.
Q411 David Linden: During this inquiry, witnesses have told us—we saw this on our trip to the USA as well—about the benefits of support being provided on a more holistic basis. What plans do the Government have to provide more holistic support through its network of jobcentres?
Guy Opperman: I think you will have to define holistic. The disability and health White Paper that Tom set out at Budget and in the statement thereafter does exactly that—that is a massive point there. What exactly do you mean by holistic?
Q412 David Linden: Part of the problem that we are seeing at the moment is that people are required to attend the jobcentre; they go, they have that discussion with their work coach, and that is pretty much the sum total of it. We have seen all sorts of other things. For example, could we have more support for people who are interested in being self-employed or moving into different areas of the labour market? That support is not there. That is what we mean in terms of more holistic support.
Guy Opperman: We are constantly looking at the nature of the offer that we have in jobcentres to try and see whether we are providing the best way forward. I don’t personally believe that we are doing a bad job at all. At the same time, we are definitely looking at the nature of jobcentres and the work that they are doing, the match-ups between employers, on a national basis—what is called the NEPT team—the employer advisers in the jobcentres, the individual work coaches, and how it is that they are trying to provide that support to individuals. That is an ongoing piece of work.
I have been to about 15 jobcentres in about the last three months, all over the country, from Cromer to Gloucester and Anglesey and beyond. There is no doubt that there is an appetite to improve our offer, and I think we can do that. That is a work in progress. Tom may want to come in on the innovation, because clearly the Budget and the health and disability White Paper are the major changes of the offer.
Tom Pursglove: To go back to the very origin of your question, on confidence and trust, I would argue that the disability employment advisers have a really important role to play in this, building that work coach knowledge about how to deal most effectively with claimants who perhaps have a health condition or a disability, helping to support them in a way that is most appropriate to them, helping to match people to roles that are most appropriate for them and acting as a better link with other support beyond the jobcentre that may be beneficial to people.
The whole thrust of what we are trying to do is to bring together work and health more closely. Actually, from a work coach perspective, I would argue that through the wider package of support that was announced in the Budget, they will have greater tools to be able to do more of that personalisation and to provide more support through a channel external to the jobcentre but with referral, for example, to tap into what interests them and what their aspirations are, to work through any barriers that there might be, and to help people to achieve what they want to go on and do. Perhaps we can bring Katie in on the operational side.
Katie Farrington: I will just add a bit of detail about two of the big investments being funded through the spring Budget: one is Universal Support, which is designed to be a supported employment programme; and, in rolling that out, we are building on a programme called IPSPC—individual placement and support in primary care—which, as the Minister said, is now funded in six areas, with we hope some more to come. That is designed to be tailored around the needs of the individual, delivered locally and with referrals through the NHS—community healthcare and primary care. It is absolutely trying to tailor around the needs of individuals for whom being placed and supported to remain in a role is the right support.
The other thing I will mention is Work Well, which is a pilot that is, again, delivered through the NHS. We are working in partnership with integrated care systems and local authorities. It is designed to help people gain a direct pathway into the health service. As the Minister was saying, we have the work coach, but it is very important that the work coach is able to access other forms of support according to the needs of the individual.
Q413 David Linden: If we can come back to Minister Opperman, I am conscious of time and I have a couple of policy areas that I want to cover. At the beginning of this segment, we had a discussion about work coaches—I was proud to see some of the work coaches who were out on strike last week at Shettleston jobcentre. Minister, if you can appear virtually before a Select Committee, why such a desire to get all the work coaches back into jobcentres, instead of making more use of the technology that you are using today?
Guy Opperman: I know the jobcentre you visited, because I think I went to it a few years back myself. Clearly, it is not ideal that I am not present—
Sir Desmond Swayne: Quite right.
Guy Opperman: Thank you, Desmond. You just criticised me for not being present, so I think you have answered your own question.
May I go back to one point? You rightly raised whether we can be more holistic in jobcentres. I should probably have made the point that there are examples of that. If you go to Basildon, for example, which is a vast jobcentre, or to other, smaller ones—there are smaller ones out there—you will find that they are already doing things like debt advice. The council will be co-located with them. If you go to Cromer jobcentre in East Anglia, which I was in about six weeks ago, that is in the heart of the county council building. Every access to county council services is already provided—you can literally walk someone to housing, debt advice, the credit union and all the support services.
There is no doubt that that is not the norm up and down the country in various places. It is difficult to do, because jobcentres and county councils have evolved organically, rather than on a bloc basis, but where we are able to do so, we are attempting to have integrated services. I think that is what you meant with your holistic question. Sorry, I did not give a very good answer, but I am not on the greatest of form.
Q414 David Linden: That is helpful. I am glad you mentioned the partner work with council services. That is certainly outwith my constituency. I know that Madam Deputy Speaker, Dame Rosie Winterton, would be keen to draw your attention to the proposal that has been made in Doncaster about co-locating with the council. Thus far, the Department has given that short shrift so, given the Department’s new-found enthusiasm for co-locating with council services—
Guy Opperman: First, it is not new-found; we have always been doing this. Secondly, I think you will find that the issue with Doncaster is dealt with in the letter yesterday from the Secretary of State. If you read through it—I think it is on page 5—he addresses in great detail the issue of Doncaster. I have spoken to Rosie myself about the issue.
Q415 David Linden: Excellent, thank you. Let us move on to sanctions. The Government, after a degree of resistance, finally published their own research last month, which showed that sanctions are largely not effective. On what basis was the decision made in the spring Budget to strengthen sanctions?
Guy Opperman: I think you misunderstand the nature of the FOI proceedings that were involved, and you misunderstand the decision making of the previous Secretary of State bar one in respect of the draft report. Clearly, this Secretary of State has taken a different approach and decided to publish the report.
In terms of the situation with the Budget, there is the additional support project that we are engaged with that we have just begun, in which, after 13 or 26 weeks, appropriate individuals—many, many people are screened out of this for obvious reasons—are brought forward and given two weeks of intensive support. I have been to Crawley jobcentre and met the individual work coaches who are doing this. I have met the individuals who are trying to take the project forward. It is very early days, but we also find it is most important to try and give people the maximum amount of support to help them into work, and that is what we are doing.
Q416 David Linden: I think we would all agree, and certainly the Secretary of State suggested when he appeared before the Committee recently, that we should make policy based on evidence. On that basis, are you familiar with the academic work from Dr David Webster of the University of Glasgow? Have you read that?
Guy Opperman: I think the Secretary of State has dealt with the support for the assertions of why we are doing what we are doing in a lot of detail in his letter. You really need to look at that.
Q417 David Linden: I have read the letter, but, with respect, Minister, that is not the question I was asking. Are you familiar with the work of Dr David Webster, who, as an academic, is an expert on sanctions?
Guy Opperman: I am familiar with a variety of forms of work. Dr Webster’s particular piece of evidence I have not got in front of me right now.
Q418 David Linden: Excellent. I look forward to your looking at that. Can you tell us what the evidence is that tougher sanctions produce better job outcomes?
Guy Opperman: I think the Secretary of State’s letter sets it out in copious detail on a local and international basis.
Q419 David Linden: I am asking you, Minister.
Guy Opperman: I will find the Secretary of State’s letter and read it to you. The letter is dated 2 May. On page 2 there are four different footnotes and it goes on for two pages.
Q420 David Linden: Minister, that has not been circulated to the Committee yet, but we will look at that.
Guy Opperman: I think you will find it has. If the Chairman says the Secretary of State’s letter, sent yesterday, was not communicated, I would like to know.
Chair: It has not been circulated to members of the Committee. I think it has been received in the Committee office, but it has not yet been circulated.
Guy Opperman: I apologise, because I had presumed—I should have checked at the start, and that is an error—it had been communicated. I cannot really do any better, David, than give you the two pages-plus on the effectiveness of sanctions and the great detail that it goes through, over and above what the Secretary of State gave evidence on as to all of the particular points that he talks about: the international studies, the work of the IFS, the stats in respect of UC claimants and JSA, and so on.
Q421 David Linden: Right. Can I then ask whether the Department holds quantitative evidence that sanctions have a deterrent effect?
Guy Opperman: I think the Department holds evidence. We have obviously had to publish a draft report, and it also has other evidence in respect of a whole host of different things that support the assertions that we make.
Q422 David Linden: But does it have quantitative evidence that it supports the deterrent effect? This is just a simple question—a yes/no question.
Sophie Dean: May I come in? We do have that—I think it is in the letter, but we will check—on the deterrent effect of sanctions. More than 70% of claimants say that the potential for sanctions makes them more likely to look for work.
Q423 David Linden: Is that quantitative evidence?
Sophie Dean: I believe so, but I will check.
Q424 David Linden: If it has not been provided, will the Department publish that?
Sophie Dean: I believe it is all in the letter, but we will look at that.
Q425 David Linden: My last question goes back to the issue of work coaches, which I meant to ask about earlier. Why, Minister, would work coaches have to use food banks? Are you comfortable with the fact that food banks operate in jobcentres to support the staff that administer benefits?
Guy Opperman: I cannot comment on any individual cases; sorry.
David Linden: Okay. I will come back with some other questions later.
Chair: Let me just check—Sir Desmond, did you want to come in at this point?
Q426 Sir Desmond Swayne: Without having read the letter, we have received evidence from Manchester Metropolitan University—Dr Fay, I think it was—who had done a survey of people who had been sanctioned. Surprisingly, they found it a negative experience that had negative consequences for their ability to find work. Is the evidence that you have cited in the letter any more objective than that might be considered to be?
Guy Opperman: The answer to that is fundamentally yes, I believe, but obviously the letter was only sent by the Secretary of State yesterday. I think that while we can argue this in real time, the safest and best policy is for the Committee to have a good read of the letter and the various footnotes in the international examples given from Denmark, the Netherlands and others to support the assertion we are making.
Q427 Sir Desmond Swayne: Is there anything to support my prejudice that the cohort of people who are generally sanctioned will by their very nature be more difficult to find positive work outcomes for?
Guy Opperman: I have never, ever found you prejudiced in any way whatsoever, and I would like that on the record—robust, but not prejudiced. Clearly, it is never a situation that any work coach wishes to go down the route of. I have visited so many jobcentres, and I am absolutely satisfied that individual work coaches start with a fundamental ethos of trying to help an individual into work and to navigate their journey, slowly but surely, back into employment. I do not think it is right to label any individual better or worse by reason of the journey they have been on, and I am certainly not going to start to go down that route.
Q428 Steve McCabe: I want to ask a couple of quick questions about conditionality as well. I suspect the letter would not have covered these, but if it does do help me. I will make the assumption that the Government make some savings out of a sanctions regime, either through the fact that benefits are not paid or that people subsequently find work as a result of the sanctions regime. Is it right to make that assumption that there are some savings through conditionality?
Guy Opperman: I will try to answer that. In terms of conditionality, I do not have to hand any stats on savings by Government by reason of doing that. I would also go further than that: I am clearly not Treasury, and I never will be—they definitely would not have me there—but it is not the purpose of the process.
Q429 Steve McCabe: I appreciate that. I just wondered if that was something you collected information on.
Guy Opperman: I am not even sure that it is something that it would be appropriate to even measure, because I do not think it is a very good thing. What I think you have to start—
Steve McCabe: Minister, would you know, then—
Guy Opperman: Hang on, let me try to answer—
Q430 Steve McCabe: No, I just want to ask a second point that may help in your answer. If you do not know whether or not there are any savings, because that is not what you are interested in, do you know how much it costs to administer the sanctions regime?
Guy Opperman: I will try and answer the question you asked me first, then I will address the second point.
Q431 Steve McCabe: I thought you had answered it.
Guy Opperman: I don’t think I had, actually. The point I was trying to make, in a very ham-fisted, antibioticky way, was that the purpose of our welfare is to support people through difficult times. It is with reluctance that the Government of the day, and every Government—Labour Government, the coalition and this Government—has to impose some degree of conditions on that.
We do it based on the claimant commitment, which an individual enters willingly and voluntarily as part of the bargain that it is making with the state to provide ongoing support to a significant degree paid for by taxpayers. That is the key point. I do not think it is a question of us then measuring things otherwise.
Sophie may be able to say that I have the stats totally to hand, but I am not aware of them in my addled brain right now. But again, if we have those stats—we do collect them, and of course we are able to provide them—we will obviously provide them.
Q432 Steve McCabe: Minister, I just want to make sure that I have understood you correctly. I was simply asking whether or not there were any stats that showed if there were savings from conditionality.
Guy Opperman: I cannot tell you whether there are.
Q433 Steve McCabe: You have said that if there are any, you will provide them. Are there likely to be any that show the cost of administering a sanctions regime?
Guy Opperman: Sophie had better come in, because I don’t know—I am obviously doing this live—whether there are any specifics on that particular point at the present stage. I am not aware of them, personally, off the top of my head.
Sophie Dean: Just to agree with the Minister, it is not something that we would measure; as the Minister says, the sanctions policy is not to sanction claimants but to encourage claimants to comply, so it is not something we would measure.
Q434 Steve McCabe: Can I just clarify one final point? The Chancellor did say in the Budget that the intention was to step up the sanctions regime, alongside the other measures to try to get people into work. Presumably, there must be some cost associated with that. How is it budgeted for?
Sophie Dean: As the Secretary of State said when he was here with the Committee, the sanctions policy has not changed. Some of the measures in the Budget increased the conditionality, in the sense that we brought people into that, which, as the Secretary of State said, is a support mechanism for people to try to get them into work. But the sanctions policy has not changed.
Q435 Steve McCabe: So the cost of sanctions is the same, irrespective of the number of people who are sanctioned.
Sophie Dean: As I say, it is not something that we would measure, because it is not something we are trying to do. The sanctions are a last resort. It is not something that we would—
Q436 Steve McCabe: No, I understand that. It is a bit hard for someone like me to understand that the cost is identical, irrespective of the number; I would have thought that each individual case would have attracted an administrative cost. I am just surprised that it remains static, irrespective of the number of people involved.
Guy Opperman: I will attempt to answer your point, Steve. I will give you one specific example, which I have answered PQs on, so it is a chance to try to address that.
There is a time involved in terms of an individual work coach taking the regretful decision that a claimant has not met their claimant commitment and is not agreeing with what they have previously agreed to. Previously, it took a long time for a work coach to create a paper-based form, which I think is called a referral form, off the top of the head. That required a bunch of data to be manually inserted into the referral form, which would then get passed on to the decision maker.
The Budget does talk about automating that particular process, which is a saving of time—if you want to try to look at cost savings—by automating a process that takes a great deal of time from a work coach, when he is not actually seeing an individual, to create such a referral form. That is now being automated and it is also done in a better way, because there are none of the mistakes made when you are manually inputting the very complex nature of a referral form. I suspect that at some stage I could give the Committee some information as to the amount of work time saved from a work coach having done that previously on a manual basis.
My simple point is: go into your local jobcentre and speak to those who have done a sanction referral. They will all complain about the time it takes to do such an administrative form by hand on a manual basis, and they will speak of their desire to get that particular process automated. It is then done in exactly the same way by the decision maker and the individuals involved in terms of the proper review—that bit is not automated at all. But you asked me if I can give you examples of savings, costs and things like that, and that is an example.
Steve McCabe: Thank you.
Chair: We go back now to David Linden.
Q437 David Linden: I have a couple of questions for Minister Pursglove relating to disability and the Disability Confident scheme. We have certainly heard evidence during this inquiry, and in constituency casework, that being a Disability Confident employer does not necessarily mean that there is a better experience for disabled people, or that disabled people are supported by that company. How are you going to address that problem?
Tom Pursglove: I really want to have a root and branch look at Disability Confident to see how we take it to the next level. It is fair to say that it has been very successful in getting a strong message out there about the huge benefits that exist around disability employment and the enormous wealth of knowledge, capability and experience that disabled people can bring to our workplaces. We need to continue to look at how we progress that journey further.
One of the things that I am looking at is what we can do around soft support for employers that acts as a gateway through to Disability Confident membership, and to really engage in that in a meaningful way. The information and advice service is a part of that, but it is also about how we get trusted, good quality, accredited information in places that businesses go to, as well as how members of the Disability Confident scheme can best engage with it.
When you look at the schemes that we are introducing through the Budget—we have had a bit of a debate about that already—with the opportunities around place and train and sustaining that employment, I think there are some obvious synergies there with precisely what we are trying to achieve with Disability Confident.
There is a partnering, I would argue, that ought to be brought about to make sure that all these objectives are in a line and everything in the system is pulling in the same direction, to try to make sure that we go considerably beyond this principle of trying to get disabled people into work—that we then sustain that employment. I want workplaces that are benefiting from disability employment to go on and do more. I am actively looking at the resources and guidance around that to try to deepen people’s commitment and involvement with the scheme.
Q438 David Linden: To press that a bit further, my own experience, and I think that of a number of colleagues, has been that people will sign up for the Disability Confident employer scheme, get the badge and all that kind of thing, but it is very much focused on process rather than outcomes. Would it be fair to say that the Department is now going to pivot to focus more on outcomes than on the actual process?
Tom Pursglove: One of the things that was really unhelpful in the context—I am limited somewhat in what I can say about this—was the national disability strategy and the court proceedings around that, which mean that we are not able to progress with some of the measures that were contained in it. That was intended to be a root and branch review of Disability Confident, to look in detail at what we do to take it to the next level. I need to continue to revisit what more we can do, respecting that court position as things stand at present, to see where we can go with Disability Confident.
I want to have that proper join-up that really does focus on outcomes, and that makes sure that everything that we are doing is all pushing in the same direction. I think people would want that to happen. I would argue that Disability Confident employers wanting to engage with Work Well and universal support, and to provide meaningful work opportunities for people who come through those schemes, can only be the right thing. We need to think about how that is best harnessed and structured.
Q439 David Linden: Thank you, Minister; that is certainly a helpful approach and one that, party politics aside, I know we would all like to make progress on.
Tom Pursglove: Can I also say that one thing I am really exercised about is trying to make sure that we get more small businesses signed up as Disability Confident employers? I am looking at ways in which we can encourage colleagues to help us to do that.
David Linden: Excellent, thank you.
Q440 Nigel Mills: Guy, when we had our exchange about over-50s, we did not quite get to returnerships. I know you directed us to read the Red Book, but there is not a lot in the Red Book about how these things will work. Do you have any more details you can share with us about when they will start, how many there will be and what they will involve?
Guy Opperman: The answer is yes I do, because—not that Government is in any way recycling a previous policy or expanding a piloted policy—the returnerships, which are what the Chancellor has announced, look suspiciously like returneeships. That is something that has been piloted by the Department for Education in quite a lot of detail.
I have to be careful, as this is run by a constituent of mine, but I would strongly recommend Release Potential. It does a whole bunch of work up and down the country, in north of Tyne and particularly in the west midlands and the midlands themselves—in Dewsbury, for instance. I have been on the courses it runs. They tend to be two to three-day courses for long-term unemployed people aged 50 and over. They are about giving confidence and enabling a change in behaviour and an understanding of capabilities going forward. If that is what we are going to be doing more of, I will be strongly in support.
The evidence behind returneeships and the work that I have seen is outstanding. It is a co-commissioning by the DfE, regional Mayors in particular and work with the local DWP base—because most customers are DWP customers. I can provide more detail on that to the Committee.
Q441 Nigel Mills: What do you mean by long-term unemployed? Is that three months, six months, or 12 months?
Guy Opperman: I can only talk from what I have seen. I went to several of these sessions in my former role, because over-50s employment is something I am really passionate about. Almost everybody there had either been out of employment for a considerable period, in some cases because of childcare on a long-term basis or because of a long-term illness. There were a lot of people who had had mental health problems as well.
This is work that Tom and the health and disability White Paper team will be looking at in great detail. Bluntly, there are a cohort of people who successive Governments have struggled to shift and assist into employment. I find that this type of work—it builds on the discussion we were having on the mid-life MOT—is the way we will have that change.
Q442 Nigel Mills: I am sure we will all agree with that. The Chancellor announced this as a policy, but it does not seem like you have a lot of thinking in the Department about where they will fit into your pathways or how many people will be involved.
Guy Opperman: I can give you that in more detail if you let me find my copious 380-page briefing, but Sophie may want to give me a bit of help.
Sophie Dean: Yes, of course. One of the tasks for the returnerships is making sure that as a campaign it raises the profile of a lot of the existing programmes that are available to over-50s. There are, for example, skills bootcamps that the DfE run, and we work closely with them on that, and then there are apprenticeships. Part of it is bringing together the different elements of provision, some of which we have talked about today, but making sure they are tailored to over-50s, by taking in mind the skills they need and the vacancies that may be suitable to them.
Guy Opperman: Why don’t we write to you with more detail? I think the two of us have been a bit thin in our answers to Nigel.
Q443 Nigel Mills: Minister, I noticed from your tweet earlier of your 380 pages of briefing that you had the BEIS Committee report, which gave you 10 or so recommendations for how returnerships could work. Are you minded to accept those and implement them?
Guy Opperman: We are already doing a lot of it, to be honest. Looking at some of the particular points, they recommend that the Government conducts reviews into future reform of job centres. We are doing that already, as I outlined earlier. They talk about the expansion of mid-life MOT, and we are doing that. They talk about returnerships. I can’t remember where but there is one bit where they say, “There must be a job offer at the end of the day.” I mean no disrespect to the good people of BEIS, but I do not think they have been to a jobcentre lately.
It is not the nature of the beast; you cannot say, “We guarantee that there will be a job for you at the end of the day if you come back and engage with a returnership.” What we can do is say, “Look, come back. We will help you back into employment, whether it has been six months, six years or 16 years since you last worked. There is a whole bunch of things that we can help you with, mainly to do with confidence, capability and all those particular aspects”—nothing to do with the actual nature of the job itself. Then there is the training that we need to ensure is available on an ongoing basis. They make a bunch of recommendations. I have to say, most of them I think we are already doing. The bit that makes me laugh slightly is that I am not totally sure the good people of BEIS even asked the DWP for their views on the matter. I may have been asked to give a short letter to them, but I have not given evidence to them at all, but I am happy to do so in future.
Q444 Nigel Mills: Possibly the confusion they, and maybe I, had was that the Secretary of State was tasked with a big “getting economic inactivity down” strategy. These were the announcements in the Budget, and we thought maybe they would be quite substantial and that this would be an over-50s version of an apprenticeship, and there would be all the support, the reduced national insurance and whatever else. What you seem to be suggesting is this will not actually be that exciting; it will be signposting and rebadging to existing programmes.
Guy Opperman: I am not sure, actually. I think it can be exciting, but the devil is in the detail—I accept that entirely. What I am pushing for very strongly is an expansion of the returnership programme in partnership with DFE, particularly with regional Mayors, and I think that is genuinely the way forward. The Budget was a month and a bit ago. Government do not move quickly. Trust me, I am acutely conscious of how slow and ponderous we are at times. We are still working forward those particular things, but I think you make a fair challenge to us—and it is right to do so—which is, “It’s all very well the Government announcing something. What is the devil in the detail?” Can I actually use that—you are actually helping me—to go away and try to give you relatively quickly some more detail on what is happening there?
Q445 Selaine Saxby: The Committee has heard a lot of evidence that part of the reason behind the increased rate of economic inactivity for younger people since the pandemic has been mental health. Obviously, the spring Budget did announce measures to target young people into employment, but none of those specifically tackled the issues around mental health. Does the Department have any plans to tackle this issue?
Tom Pursglove: Yes. Obviously, this is something we are acutely conscious of and is very much at the forefront of our thinking about next steps. That is reflected in, for example, the work that I set out earlier around talking therapies and the fact that, over the course of the coming year, we will see 100% of those NHS talking therapy services having employment advice built within them. We think that that is a really effective mechanism, as I illustrated by that 68% figure earlier in the proceedings. That is about making sure that, as part of that journey of trying to get well, to get better, people have access to employment advice. It is working with people on a whole host of fronts. That can be as simple as helping with CV writing, helping understand what people’s aspirations are and how those are best achieved, and how those connections can best be made with that proper join-up in place.
Of course, with Work Well and with universal support, we have those issues at the forefront of our minds as well. With Work Well, we want this to be alongside the primary care treatment that people might be receiving. Again, this is about trying to increase the amount of resource we have within the systems in local areas. We will design Work Well, working in partnership with local care systems, local NHS commissioners on the ground and, of course, local authorities and others, to ensure that we get our offer right and that it is responsive to the needs that exist within particular communities.
Mental health will undoubtably be an area that we will concentrate on, by the very nature of the query that you raised and the fact that this is something that comes up consistently in the conversations I have. On the universal support programme, as I said earlier, the pioneers will be the IPSPC model. In the conversations I have with Mind as an important stakeholder for the Department, it says that it considers the programme to be a really important intervention in terms of helping to support people with mental health conditions. I am really pleased that we have a commitment to getting on and delivering that in six areas. I anticipate being able to say more about it in due course. It is an impactful programme with that support, place and train emphasis behind it. That is how we should move forward. It was foundational in the United States. I know the Committee is particularly interested in the United States example; the scheme was developed there. IPS was a US-based scheme that was then adopted in various European countries. We think we can capture a lot of learning that is particularly prevalent in helping people of all ages with mental health conditions.
Q446 Sir Desmond Swayne: As far as the DWP offer is concerned for self-employed people, the cupboard is pretty bare. Why did you close the new enterprise allowance to new entrants in January 2022, and have you measured at all the impact that has had?
Guy Opperman: I will take that first and then I will let Sophie come in on the specifics. None of us personally was responsible for the closure, I hasten to add. It was due to close in March 2021, and it was extended until 31 December 2021 to support claimants through the pandemic, as you can understand. As the economy recovered, it was right that we focused our resources on getting jobseekers into work and progressing, particularly given the number of vacancies that we were facing in the labour market.
It is not the case that we have no offer whatsoever for the self-employed. There is a whole host of different offers. I went to Gloucester jobcentre and spoke to the specific team dealing with self-employed people in Gloucester. That team would tell you that they are extremely busy and they have a whole host of things they would cite, including start-up loans to universal credit, small business helplines and support available for self-employed claimants. There is clearly a whole host of self-employed claimants who are on UC but also working as self-employed, and we are navigating and assisting them on an ongoing basis. I would politely but robustly reject the claim that there is nothing on offer for the self-employed. Sophie may want to add something else.
Sophie Dean: Nothing further to add.
Q447 Sir Desmond Swayne: Anyone who has started a small business will know how tough it is. Are you confident that the offer you have, which imposes the minimum income floor after a year, is proportionate? Surely, two years would be much better—much more realistic.
Guy Opperman: The answer to that is I am confident that the process is the appropriate one going forward, but you also have to go back to the legacy system. The minimum income floor as part of UC is light years ahead of the legacy system, which had virtually no offer whatsoever to the self-employed. We have the most amazingly flexible offer through UC to the self-employed, so that slowly but surely, they can navigate themselves to full employment and no reliance on UC. That is the beauty of UC. If you want an example of a cohort that is being helped by UC, then surely the self-employed is it. I look at the numbers and my stats. Clearly, they have been affected slightly recently by the pandemic, but we are still at approximately 2013 levels, so it is not like the world has come to an end.
Q448 Chair: Thank you. Can I just follow up that question? Most people think the new enterprise allowance was a helpful and supportive scheme for people wanting to go into self-employment. Has the Department decided not to do anything more along those lines, or is there a live consideration of further support for self-employment?
Guy Opperman: The jury is still out, in the sense that our door is open for recommendations by the Select Committee, which will then be considered in the usual way, but at the present stage there is not an intention to replace the new enterprise allowance programme. I have only been the Minister for five and a half months. It is not top of my priorities in the next 12 to 18 months up to the election to introduce a new enterprise allowance mark 2. My personal focus is on other aspects of the Department, whether that is addressing vacancies, addressing economic inactivity or driving forward more modern jobcentres, so that they are better able to cope with a post-covid world.
Q449 Chair: I probably should know this, but is an evaluation of the new enterprise allowance being undertaken, so that we can see what the costs and benefits are?
Guy Opperman: I am delighted that you have also confessed to being in a position where you should know something. I am not aware whether there has been an evaluation of the NEA, but we will get back to you. Sophie may know.
Sophie Dean: We will come back to you on that, if we may.
Chair: The Committee would certainly be interested to know.
Q450 Nigel Mills: Minister, you talked about the important role that devolved Mayors have in your returnerships. As a general principle, the Budget suggested that the Government were keen on more devolution and working with local partners. Can you talk us through what that will look like and what the plan is for work support in that climate?
Guy Opperman: There are basically three aspects to that, one of which is very much Tom’s portfolio, but I will talk about the first two. We have been engaged in pilot projects with regional Mayors—particularly the West Midlands and Greater Manchester, which are the two most developed devolved mayoralties—to drive forward better outcomes by the DWP working with local Mayors. The product of those pilots has, I think, been published. Since then, the Chancellor has announced greater integration and greater efforts to be made. Forgive me, I am a bit addled, but I think what we are about to do on that has been published. I am pretty sure we can disclose that and give that to you, but if not, we can certainly give a bit more detail.
There is certainly an expansion of the partnership that is going on between Greater Manchester and West Midlands and the Department for Work and Pensions. There is no doubt that that is rolling forward. There is not a full devolution of all jobcentres, as some people want to persuade us to do, because it is just not feasible, and it is not the right policy anyway. But, bluntly, there is that—there is no question. We are also doing a huge amount in health and disability on an ongoing basis, and Tom may want to come in on that.
Tom Pursglove: Yes. For example, it is worth noting that the six areas where individual placement and support in primary care is happening include Greater Manchester, South Yorkshire and the West Midlands. There has been good support from those politicians for those schemes, the intentions of the schemes and what we are trying to achieve.
As we look to develop Work Well, we very much want to work in partnership with locally elected leaders and with health systems to try to identify what works best in those areas, what the particular needs are that we need to cater for and how that can best be achieved. Work Well is a partnership, and we will take it forward in that spirit. It is an opportunity to build greater resilience within local health systems, as well as making sure it has the desired employment effects that I think all of us would hope to see. It is a good thing. It is right to focus on that work and health join-up—helping people to be well and seeing employment as an important part of that—and I can absolutely give the undertaking here today that we will be doing that in a collaborative way, working with elected leaders and with care systems in local areas.
Guy Opperman: Can I come back in? Nigel, I didn’t raise one point, which I should have done: if you want other examples of devolution and local areas, you need to look to the genuinely transformational work that DLUHC are doing. The DWP is on the inter-ministerial group, and we have done it in a variety of sites, including Blackpool, Grimsby and Blyth. We are just beginning the process in Sandwell, I think, and there is a fifth one that eludes me.
Bluntly, we are picking areas of disadvantage—areas where there are difficulties—and taking a cross-departmental approach to working with local Mayors and local providers and individual departmental elements. There is good evidence of that working well. It is cross-departmental more than anything else but it is actually genuinely driving forward good change. With no disrespect to what the local Mayors are doing, the stuff that Michael Gove has been leading on at DLUHC has been fascinating to see. I was with him in Blyth. I am aware of what is going on in Grimsby and Blackpool. These are places where real change is occurring. The budget is fundamentally from DLUHC, but individual Departments are being asked to step up as well.
Q451 Nigel Mills: Thank you. The problem we have is that devolution is quite patchy. My own county will hopefully get a Mayor in a year’s time. Are you saying that the full devolution of Work Well schemes only really works for the big cities with big powerful Mayors and a coherent geography, or do you think that can work with all the devolved Mayors?
Tom Pursglove: I don’t accept that characterisation. This is a scheme that I genuinely believe will make a difference, but we want to pilot this and ensure that we get it right. I think the principles of it are applicable regardless of where you are and regardless of the local democratic structures that are in place. Clearly, in relation to it, there is an important link to the health systems, because we want this to be complementary to the existing provision. We want a neat dovetailing. We all have the same objective: we want it to have the largest employment impact possible. I would argue that it also has the advantage of helping to build capacity within the NHS to perhaps deal with some of these issues that people present with in a more effective way for them. Katie may have an operational insight to add on this.
Katie Farrington: Thank you, Minister. Just to support what you said, as we are designing Work Well, we are definitely not focusing solely on the areas that are more mature in terms of devolution. It is a scheme and a programme that we want to work right across the country.
Q452 Nigel Mills: Can you talk me through how you would commission? I do not mean a specific programme, but in general. We want a new disability support employment programme across the country. We think Manchester and the West Midlands can do it, and maybe the new East Midlands one can do it and maybe the Teesside one can do it. Yet, there will be Leicestershire next door. Surrounded by those, it doesn’t have a Mayor. Presumably it can’t do it. How do you put a contract in place in those situations and get outcomes for everyone that have a chance of being the best? Is that going to be a really hard thing to do?
Katie Farrington: Perhaps I can talk a bit more about individual placement and support in primary care, or IPSPC, which the Minister has already mentioned. We trialled it successfully in two areas. We are now funding four more, so there will be six in total. We think there are definitely more to come in the next few weeks. The first six are: Cheshire West and Cheshire; Greater Manchester; Norfolk; South Yorkshire; West London Alliance; and West Midlands. As the Minister said, represented among those areas are places that are quite mature but also places that are not.
The way that we do this is we set out our requirement. The local authority brings forward a proposal. We then agree that proposal with them and the funding goes. The principle is that it is delivered in health settings, and it is delivered in partnership with the NHS and the local authority.
As we go forward and we are thinking about Work Well, you could imagine some areas where the health system is really mature and wants to take a driving seat, or you could imagine areas where the local authority is quite mature and wants to take a driving seat. The important thing is the partnership and for us to work together.
Tom Pursglove: I really cannot emphasise this point enough: we want this to be complementary to the existing offer. We do not really want to be duplicating; we want to be adding value and ensuring that we improve those pathways for people.
Q453 Nigel Mills: I just want to get my head around that. It is not that unusual for the DWP to commission a contracted-out service across the country to deliver certain things, and you inevitably have a situation where some parts of the country have devolution capability. You could devolve it to them and say, “We won’t cover your area. You can have the money. You do it.” You will have some areas where you are going to have to commission it yourselves. Looking at the patchwork, that is inevitable. I am just trying to work out how you ensure that the areas without devolution do not get a rubbishy version due to some private company having a completely incoherent geography because it has a few bits of the west midlands but not the big conurbations, or a few bits of the east midlands all rolled up into one contract but without any cities. How do you work in that landscape?
Guy Opperman: The answer is with difficulty, because we are in a transitional phase. That is the blunt truth. I have an example here in Hexham, which is part of the North of Tyne mayoralty. It may go into what is called the LA7, the seven local authorities. Clearly, I represent the rural outpost attached to Newcastle, Gateshead, Ashington and Blyth, which is the urban conurbation where the main focus of people is, where the main focus of DWP, DLUHC and other interventions is, and where the major areas of deprivation are.
It is clearly difficult, as I have found, to ensure that there is a rural offer in a new mayoralty that is complementary and as good as the urban offer, where things can be concentrated, delivery is easier, and so on. If you go over the border to County Durham, which does not have a Mayor, they would say, “We don’t have any kind of offer in any event whatsoever. We rely on the traditional model.” My experience as a constituency MP, and slightly as a Minister as well, is that it is a journey. Where the Mayor is good, the DWP ownership of the policy is good, and the cross-departmental working is good, this can work very well. There is no doubt about that whatsoever.
We have seen good practice in certain parts of the country. I would particularly say that the west midlands has been an exemplar. There are others—it is not political. There are some Labour leaders who have really led the charge as well, but the work that Andy Street is doing is clearly very, very innovative, and he works in a very collaborative way with Government, and with all the various parts of Government, and it really shows. We are trying to learn from that. We are trying to learn from the pilots that DLUHC is doing in Grimsby, Blyth and Blackpool, but, put bluntly, we are on a journey. It is not going to be easy. In this country, as we do devolution, there will be some parts that play catch-up.
I take the point totally that there is a problem where you do not have any devolution at all. What happens to those outlying areas? The beauty of the DWP is that we are a one-stop shop that is available to everybody. That is what we are trying to do. Obviously, our offer is different where we are fully integrated with Mayors.
Tom Pursglove: This speaks to the points that Guy has just made, and the key factors around delivery, but I would argue that the learning from IPSPC and from employment advice in NHS talking therapies, and the fact that we have had good cross-Government buy-in around that, will help us to do this well. It is fair to say that there is no preference particularly towards areas that have those devolution arrangements. We will look at this and want to take this forward in a way that is respectful of different circumstances in different areas, different geography in local areas, and different governance of local areas, because we think that, as IPSPC demonstrates, there is benefit through that, and through employment advice in talking therapies. We need to apply learning from that as we get on and deliver Work Well, and of course universal support as well.
Q454 Nigel Mills: I was hoping that you would say, “Don’t worry, we’ve got lots of experienced providers and we can still commission good services right across the country and your constituents will not get a worse outcome,” but you kind of said the opposite. You just said, “Get some devolution.”
Tom Pursglove: I’m not sure that I did, Mr Mills.
Q455 Nigel Mills: Guy did. He kind of said, “We’re on a journey, and some of you are in the third-class carriage.”
Tom Pursglove: I would argue that the schemes that we are already delivering in terms of IPSPC and employment advice in talking therapies demonstrate a good-quality service that people say to me is of real value, and I want the new schemes to be as flagship and as effective as those. We will strain every sinew to make sure that that is the case.
Katie Farrington: I might add the Work and Health programme, because that is a programme that we deliver nationally, working with local partners. The providers will work with whatever they have in the geography in a joined-up way. We commission it jointly in Greater Manchester and London, but it is a national service that we provide everywhere, so I believe that we do know how to deliver across the country.
Nigel Mills: Phew! I got the answer I was looking for.
Guy Opperman: Nigel, can I come in on that? I don’t want Tom to think I have thrown him under a bus. The only point I would make is, welcome to serious rurality. It takes me two hours to drive across my constituency; I have the second biggest constituency in the country. Trying to get a multi-academy trust or an individual occupational health therapist in rurality is really, really difficult. That is a challenge that rurality has, and we have to try to learn from the Mayors, who tend to be based around urban conurbations, how they have managed to do it in their slightly outer reaches. But it will be difficult. We cannot pretend, naively, that there is no difficulty in rurality with providing any public services, whether it is schooling, hospitals or ambulances. We are just trying to grapple that. What I think we can do is look where, in a mayoral situation, individuals Mayors have successfully provided examples whereby we could say, “How can we replicate that in an even more rural area?” That is the point.
Q456 Nigel Mills: I accept that. I am trying to work out whether it is going to make it worse or not.
As a final question, how do we handle situations where travel to work areas are different from local government boundary areas? I can think of an example that we discussed when we were in Manchester, talking to their team. The job opportunities for a young person in Glossop are likely to be in Greater Manchester, but he is resident in Derbyshire. Given that he is not resident in Manchester, he is not eligible for its programmes, even though the job he is seeking support for is located in that area. How do we ensure that we do not accidentally lock people out of the support they need just because they are on the wrong side of a border? Do we need to find a cross-border funding arrangement to make that work?
Guy Opperman: I will try to answer that. Bluntly, the £2 bus fare programme is amazing and has transformed employment up and down the country. Many thanks to DFT, and long may it continue—please lobby hard on that.
The second, serious point is about the flexible support fund. Where appropriate—Sophie can come in and correct me or expand on this, if she wants to do so—people can make a bid to the flexible support fund and utilise it to provide assistance in the right circumstances.
Q457 Nigel Mills: You are not thinking of a broader contractual clause or tendering process when you do these devolution deals around the country, or saying, “Actually, we need to make sure that these do include people in the travel to work area.” If there needs to be cross-border funding, that could be managed by a more formal mechanism, rather than that young person having to work out that he should be getting it and then going to a jobcentre and trying to arrange a flexible support fund to pay a different council that is not in that area. That does not sound likely to be a route that that young person will go down very often, does it?
Guy Opperman: The tricky bit is that you are asking us about quite complex DLUHC policy. It is a fair challenge. Can we go away and persuade the good people at DLUHC—they are going to love you—to get back to you on how, when we are commissioning these things on a long-term basis, we will do this? The problem, as you will understand, is that budgets go to individual Mayors and individual regions. Whether they are able to support people outside is a complication, but it is a fair point and well raised.
Q458 Nigel Mills: I thought I was asking DWP Ministers whether they had thought about the problems of travel to work areas being different from devolved Government areas for the programmes they were devolving, which is Government policy. Anyway, if you think that is a DLUHC thing, that’s fine, but it should, fairly and squarely, be in your thinking, shouldn’t it? It’s your money.
Guy Opperman: Yes and no—some is our money, but some is DLUHC money. The Mayors are fundamentally funded by DLUHC. We’ll take that away, unless Sophie has a better answer.
Q459 Chair: Thank you. We will look forward to that further information.
I will just finally raise a couple of further points. You have mentioned IPS in primary care a number of times. Have I understood correctly that the six cases you have mentioned are DWP-funded provision, but within primary care?
Tom Pursglove: Do you want to speak to the mechanics of that, Katie?
Katie Farrington: Yes, that’s right. This is provision funded through the joint unit that sits between the DWP and DHSC, which is funded locally. The six we have talked about—we hope there are more to come—are funded through that mechanism.
Q460 Chair: But there has always been IPS provision in some bits of the health service on a sort of patchwork basis, hasn’t there? Is the idea for the six to fill in some gaps in existing provision, or is it something slightly different from what the NHS has provided in the past?
Katie Farrington: Yes, so IPS—individual placement and support—is typically for slightly more severe mental health conditions. We have tested IPSPC—individual placement and support in primary care—for mild to moderate mental health conditions, and also some physical conditions, and we have seen some really good successes with that. That is what we are trying to roll out. The Budget also gives funding to the Department of Health and Social Care to do some more work on IPS for more severe mental illnesses, so we have both sides of the spectrum.
Q461 Chair: That is very helpful. So, what you are doing is a little different from what the NHS has conventionally done in this area.
Katie Farrington: I would say it is complementary.
Q462 Chair: Okay, thank you. That is helpful. The second point I wanted to raise is about the UK shared prosperity fund. Support from the European social fund ended, I think, in March; the employment support strand of the UK shared prosperity fund will not start until next year. Are there any plans in the Department to try to bridge the gap between those two sources of funding, given the obvious danger, which has been raised with us in this inquiry, that the one-year gap could mean that some really good provision would be lost in the meantime?
Guy Opperman: I would like to push back on one thing. From the information I have—I will be corrected if I am wrong—the European social fund, which is part of the European regional development fund, has residual employment and skills funding that is tailing off, but it does not end completely until December 2023. That is the first point—you said it all ended in March, but I am not sure that that is the case. Certainly, that is the information I have.
To take the wider point, though, clearly one fund is ending and a new fund is starting—the UK shared prosperity fund. It is owned by DLUHC and is a key lever in tackling inactivity and life chances. We are working with the Department for Levelling Up to ensure that DWP and the various schemes that we have with DFE, the Mayors and so on are part of that on an ongoing basis. We are very live to the point that you raised—clearly, we do not want scheme A to have a particular problem on an ongoing basis because the nature of the funding is changing.
Sophie Dean: May I add to that? The Government have lifted some restrictions that were in place on the UKSPF so that money can go into people and skills interventions in local areas. That is from April this year—
Q463 Chair: Ah, so that has been brought forward, has it?
Sophie Dean: Exactly. That will help to fill the gap, we hope.
Q464 Chair: When was that announced?
Sophie Dean: Alongside the Budget, or closely alongside it.
Guy Opperman: I am pretty sure, if you look in the deliciously fine print of the Budget—we will find it and send it to you—you will see that the decision on the year 2 funding restriction was changed, upon sober reflection. The restriction has basically been lifted—certainly, reading the notes I’ve got—in response to the direction of Prime Minister to focus on building the skills capacity of people across the UK. Basically, they became live to the potential problem and changed it in Budget.
Q465 Chair: That is very helpful. It certainly seemed strange that the employment strand was a year later than the rest.
Guy Opperman: I am pretty sure that it is fixed, to a certain degree. As always, the devil is in the detail.
Q466 Chair: If there is any further information that you can provide on that, we would be grateful for it.
Finally, may I pick up the point about transparency, which we talked about right at the start? I welcome your saying, Sophie, that an evaluation of Kickstart will be published in the summer. Did I understand correctly that in that work, there will be some thought about what ought to be published regularly—on Restart, for example—in the future?
Sophie Dean: Yes, that’s fair.
Q467 Chair: And will that all be announced in the summer? We look forward to hearing that. Can I ask you about an example where things did not go so well? Way to Work was launched in January 2022. It had a target of moving half a million people into jobs by the end of June. It was announced, I think in a tweet, at the end of June that the target had been hit, but the Office for Statistics Regulation wrote to complain that there had not been any clear explanation of how the target was defined, or how it had been determined that it had been met. Do you take the criticism in that letter? Did the Department reply to it?
Sophie Dean: It is fair to say that in Way to Work, the target was to get 500,000 people into work, and that was exceeded. I will come back to you on the specifics of the criticism that you mentioned, and the reply; we can get that to you, if that was sent. In our view, it was not a programme per se, like Kickstart or Restart—there was not extra funding—but it was a big campaign that got half a million people into work. If you remember, when it was announced, vacancies were up to about 1.3 million. It was a nationwide campaign. We asked, “How do we make sure that work coaches are spending as much time as possible with claimants, and how do we encourage claimants to fulfil their claimant commitments?” We had, I think, 145 job fairs a week, and had 2,000 employers a week in the jobcentres. It was not a programme per se like Kickstart or Restart, but it was a big campaign. In our honest assessment, it was successful, as it exceeded the goal of getting half a million into work.
Q468 Chair: The half million were people who would not otherwise have gone into work—that was the idea, wasn’t it? Obviously, people are going into work the whole time, but it was half a million additional people. How do you know that you got half a million additional people into work?
Sophie Dean: The counterfactual is very difficult to define, for reasons that you will understand. The target was quite broad: it was to get at least half a million back into work, and that was achieved.
Guy Opperman: I will try to help, Stephen, if I can. As I understand it—I was not the Minister responsible, but I was in the Department—it was a campaign to move 500,000 job-ready claimants into work by the end of June ’22. The key phrase is “job-ready”. If you are asking, “Without Way to Work, would those 500,000 never have got into work?”, I do not think we can say that, but we can say that we moved the dial dramatically; I think the figure is 539,200 claimants on UC or JSA moved into work by the end of June. The programme’s purpose was to maximise the number of people moving into work, given the massive vacancy problems that we clearly had post pandemic. There was therefore a massive focus on job-ready claimants, and massive extra support.
Q469 Chair: The target was to get half a million people into work thanks to Way to Work. That presumably implies half a million more than would have gone into work had Way to Work not been there. We know that thousands of people move into work every month.
Guy Opperman: You are asking me to comment on some tweet from months ago, to comment as to what was or was not asserted on behalf of the Department, and I will do my best. What I do know is that the Department dramatically changed its offer, dramatically upped the number of jobs fairs and the employment engagement, and threw the kitchen sink at trying to get more people into work. That was the Way to Work campaign.
Q470 Chair: Yes, but in making the claim that you made a minute ago, that 539,200 people had gone into work as a result—what does that mean? I think this is the question that the Office for Statistics Regulation—
Guy Opperman: It’s really simple: compared with 31 January and June 2022, we managed to get 539,200 people who were on UC or JSA, and who were job-ready, into work in an astonishingly quick period of time.
Q471 Chair: But are you saying that none of them would have gone into work without Way to Work?
Guy Opperman: No, that is exactly what I specifically didn’t just say to you; that’s what I set out. But clearly, some of those people—and it’s the same with Kickstart: the idea that without Kickstart no one would have gone into work is clearly wrong; some people would have done so. But Kickstart and Way to Work are projects—there was a whole host of them under the Labour Government—that basically make a massive difference in terms of intervening in these particular circumstances.
Q472 Chair: Okay. I think the point that the Office for Statistics Regulation was raising was that it is not at all clear what the Department is claiming was the benefit of Way to Work. It appeared to be claiming that half a million extra people had gone into work.
Guy Opperman: As always, we are delighted to engage with the Office for Statistics Regulation and have a chat with them.
Q473 Chair: Right. Well, presumably you have replied to their letter, so if you could let us see a copy of the reply, we will look forward to—
Guy Opperman: I have no idea whether we have, but if we have, you are welcome to it.
Q474 Chair: Sophie is indicating that you have. I will look forward to seeing that.
Sophie Dean: I will look into it.
Chair: Okay. Our time is up. Thank you all for being with us this morning. Thank you, Minister, for joining us from Hexham; and thank you, Tom, for being here. Thank you to Katie and Sophie as well. We are very grateful for your contributions to our work and we will look forward to receiving the additional information that you promised us in the course of the session. That concludes our questions to you this morning.