Jobcentre Plus

Anne Begg Excerpts

Thursday 10th July 2014 Westminster Hall

[Dame Anne Begg (Aberdeen South) (Lab)]

I am delighted to lead this debate on the report by the Select Committee on Work and Pensions, “The role of Jobcentre Plus in the reformed welfare system”. It is a bit of a mouthful, but the report contains a lot of interesting things. We published it at the end of January this year, and the Government responded at the beginning of April. It seems a long time between that and this debate, but that is because Parliament prorogued somewhat earlier than expected and our debate got dropped as a result. Some of our findings, therefore, might be slightly out of date, but in general, most of what we discovered when we considered the work of Jobcentre Plus is as relevant today as it was in April and May.

Jobcentre Plus is at the coal face of the benefits system. It is part of an administrative system that processes out-of-work benefit claims from hundreds of thousands of people each year. At the same time, its staff work with people one-to-one to help get them off benefits and hopefully back to work. They are both difficult tasks, but Jobcentre Plus performs them well with limited resources. It is well organised, has hard-working staff and has been officially recognised by the National Audit Office as offering value for public money. Jobcentre Plus has also coped well with the inherent uncertainty that it faces, not least from the large fluctuations in the claimant count brought about by the economy’s shifting fortunes. It has even coped with the innumerable policy changes imposed by the Government.

It was in the context of the unprecedented change brought about by the current Government’s extensive welfare reform agenda that we considered Jobcentre Plus’s effectiveness now and the challenges that it will face in future. Our central finding was that JCP is not currently good at prioritising those claimants who need the most help looking for work and providing them with the personalised support that they need. I know that that is no easy task, and given the volume of out-of-work claims made each year, Jobcentre Plus does remarkably well, but a range of witnesses, particularly those representing the most vulnerable groups, told the same story: there is generally very little in-depth assessment of claimants’ needs at the start of the job-seeking process, meaning that claimants facing particular disadvantages—the homeless, people with disabilities or people with drug or alcohol problems—all too often go unrecognised and get no help beyond a brief fortnightly signing-on meeting at the jobcentre.

Not for the first time, my Committee called for a much more systematic approach to the initial assessment of claimants’ needs. A classification instrument, to use the jargon, was the first of our key recommendations. In plain English, that means making a thorough, systematic assessment of each claimant’s needs and categorising them according to the level of support they require. That must surely be the logical first step in all effective employment support; otherwise, claimants with the most challenging barriers to employment will continue to be poorly supported and will remain unemployed for much longer than they should.

For some reason, however, the Government continue to dither on the issue. The Department for Work and Pensions told us that classification instruments are the holy grail. I thought universal credit was the holy grail of welfare reform—if so, it has not been found—but if the holy grail is classification instruments, it has already been found. They are already in use in Australia, where a jobseeker classification instrument has been used to good effect for more than 15 years and has been honed and improved through several iterations during that time. I would be grateful if the Minister could offer a proper explanation as to why we in the UK cannot replicate something similar here.

[Stephen Timms (East Ham) (Lab)]

I welcome the report. One of the points it makes is that the Government’s response on that issue was not entirely clear: was it that they cannot do that kind of segmentation assessment, or was it that they are developing something along those lines? It was not clear to me from the Government response which of those was the Government’s position. Has my hon. Friend been able to work that out?

[Dame Anne Begg]

I am not sure whether I can shed any more light on that than my right hon. Friend. Perhaps the Minister can reply. Certainly, in our briefings with the DWP and relevant officials, they have suggested that the Government are trying to work something out, but that they believe either that it is not effective—although the figures that they quoted to us did not necessarily have the interpretation that could have been made from the reports that have been published—or that it might cost too much money in the long run, because an up-front payment would inevitably be involved in setting up a classification system.

The Committee contends, however, that doing it properly at the beginning would ultimately save the Government money by ensuring that the correct level of help was given and that the barriers to work were identified early, so that a much more personalised approach could be taken to jobseekers in particularly vulnerable groups. We are talking about more vulnerable and difficult-to-reach groups, because we know that by any measure, Jobcentre Plus is relatively successful in getting mainstream jobseekers into work. That is what it does; it is Jobcentre Plus’s bread and butter. It is what staff do week in and week out.

[Stephen Timms]

One point in the Government response is that if there were such a tool, it would be only 70% accurate. That struck me as not bad, actually, compared with what happens at the moment. What did my hon. Friend think of that particular statistic?

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[Dame Anne Begg]

We have been consistent in requesting that the Department introduce a classification tool, so the Select Committee has certainly been convinced of the efficacy of such a tool, and 70% seems not too bad. I think the figure ranged between 50% and 70%, but that is better than nothing. At the moment, it can be a bit hit and miss whether someone is even identified as homeless. Their personal adviser has to recognise that the address they have given indicates that they may be homeless. As well, people with mental health problems will not necessarily reveal all in a short, cursory interview with a complete stranger, but that kind of information would be and is useful to anybody trying to get an individual into work or back into the workplace.

Our report recognised that JCP is good at what it is currently being asked to do: it has become adept at getting people off benefit in as short a time as possible. Since April 2011, JCP’s primary performance measure has been what is called “benefit off-flow”. The old mantra “What gets measured gets done” certainly comes to mind. About 75% of jobseeker’s allowance claimants come off benefit within six months, and some 90% are off benefit within a year. But—and this is a big “but”—is getting someone off benefit quickly always good enough? Is off benefit always a good and sustainable outcome?

Our answer to those questions was a clear no. The evidence suggests that measuring JCP performance primarily by benefit off-flow is unsophisticated. Jobcentre staff are likely to say to themselves, “Let’s concentrate our efforts on people who are most likely to come off benefits quickly—we need to meet our 13-week target—and let’s keep a very close eye on anyone coming up to 26, 39 or 52 weeks on benefit too.” Who can blame them for that? That is how their efficiency and effectiveness is measured, and that is the task that they have been set by Ministers, but JCP needs to be incentivised to take a more sophisticated approach.

Our second key recommendation was that JCP’s performance measures be amended to ensure that Jobcentre staff are more clearly incentivised to get people not just off benefit but into sustainable and long-term employment.

[Nigel Mills (Amber Valley) (Con)]

Does the hon. Lady agree that that would also tie in with the way we assess the Work programme providers and make much more sense in the world of universal credit, assuming that it is fully rolled out? Under universal credit, people will not be coming off benefit. Their level of benefit will perhaps decline based on how much work they are doing, but their level of work could fluctuate from week to week or month to month, so the measurement would be largely meaningless.

[Dame Anne Begg]

Indeed; that was one of the things we pointed out in our report. We drew particular attention to it in our more recent report on the implementation of universal credit, which was debated in the Chamber on Monday—that is two reports in a week, showing that we are a really busy Committee. Although we might be sceptical of how far universal credit is being rolled out, there is no doubt that, as my friend the hon. Gentleman pointed out—he is my friend because he is on the Select Committee—its introduction provides an opportunity for the Government to think differently about how to measure the real success of Jobcentre Plus.

[Sheila Gilmore (Edinburgh East) (Lab)]

The other side of the question of what is being measured is the lack of any measurement and follow-up on people who are not moving into work—it appears that no record is kept. A large number of people flow off benefit, but not only do they not flow into sustainable employment, they appear not to flow into employment at all.

[Dame Anne Begg]

I think people would be surprised to learn that Jobcentre Plus does not routinely record the reason why someone leaves benefit. As far as JCP is concerned, because the primary focus is on benefit off-flows, the important thing is that the person is no longer on a job-seeking benefit. However, as my hon. Friend says, why are they no longer on a benefit? It could be because they have a new job—that is what we hope—and it is possible that they have transferred to a different benefit because they have become ill, but they might be in prison or have gone into the black economy. We do not know, and nor does JCP because it does not gather that information or track claimants’ destinations. We think it is important that JCP does that in order to judge how efficient and effective its work is.

At some point, hopefully in the not-too-distant future, off-benefit is likely to cease to make much sense as a performance measure, particularly with the introduction of universal credit. I think Members agree that a system that merges out-of-work benefits and in-work tax credits, and in which benefits taper off gradually as earnings increase, would be a huge step forward. That is what universal credit is intended to do, but it will require creative thinking from the Government about new performance measures for JCP.

The Department says that it will think about how to formulate such measures once universal credit is implemented—whenever that is going to be. We think that it should be thinking about and testing them now, not leaving it until much later. Even if universal credit continues to slow down, the Committee certainly thinks that the development of a new measure is worth while anyway, whether in conjunction with universal credit or not. The Department must pilot more meaningful performance measures that track JCP’s effectiveness at getting people into work and helping them to stay there for the long term. I hope that the Minister can reassure us that the Government understand the importance of achieving longer-term positive employment outcomes.

Another part of our report that has received quite a lot of attention—perhaps because many Members have experience of it in their constituencies—is Jobcentre Plus’s use of sanctions. There is an inherent tension in what JCP does, between helping and supporting people to find work on the one hand, and, on the other, enforcing strict rules, including financial penalties for claimants deemed not to be trying hard enough to find work. Such is the everyday experience of the Jobcentre Plus adviser and the job-seeking benefit claimant, and it can make for an uneasy relationship.

[Pamela Nash (Airdrie and Shotts) (Lab)]

Does my hon. Friend share my concern about sanctions data? In preparation for this debate, I requested figures on sanctions from my local jobcentre. The staff there said that they had not received any data back since March and so are themselves unable to keep track of the number of sanctions being issued and the reasons for them.

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[Dame Anne Begg]

I see the Minister taking a note, so hopefully she will address that in her response. It is important that we track very carefully not only the number of sanctions but to whom they are issued.

Almost by definition, the payment of unemployment benefit has always been conditional. To get the dole, people had to prove that they were both out of and looking for work. The concept of conditionality is not new, but conditionality enforced by financial sanctions is much newer. My Committee’s view has been consistent throughout this Parliament: we agree that a conditionality regime is necessary, but have noted the lack of evidence that sanctions on their own incentivise claimants to look for work.

Meanwhile, the system has become progressively more stringent and punitive. Tougher sanctions legislated for in the Welfare Reform Act 2012 include stopping a claimant’s jobseeker’s allowance for three years; prior to the Act coming into force, the maximum sanction was six months. Not only have sanctions become tougher, but they have been applied much more frequently in recent years. The pre-eminent expert in this field, Dr David Webster of the university of Glasgow, highlighted a “dramatic rise” in the use of sanctions under the coalition Government.

Currently, if someone is on JSA for any length of time, there is a good chance that they will suffer a sanction. Sanctions do not happen only to a small minority; some 860,000 people were sanctioned in the year to June 2013. That is almost 1 million in a year, and the more recent figure might have reached that level, although it is difficult to find out the exact figures locally. Over 5% of all JSA claimants are sanctioned every month, and that proportion rises to over 8% for jobseekers aged between 18 and 24. We should ask whether that is a reasonable proportion—is that the proportion of JSA claimants who are not doing enough to find work? It seems particularly high to me.

The evidence we heard suggests that it is not a reasonable proportion, and that a significant number of sanctions are incorrectly and unjustly applied. There are innumerable examples of people being wrongly sanctioned, and I suspect that some colleagues might want to discuss some from their own constituencies. Many people—we heard lots of examples—have been sanctioned for missing a jobcentre appointment when they had good cause and had informed Jobcentre Plus in advance or, indeed, had not received notification of the meeting until after it was due to have taken place.

A wide range of witnesses believed that JCP staff were generally much too quick to refer a claimant for a sanction. We were given many real-life examples of JCP applying the strict letter of the law in circumstances in which common sense would suggest that discretion should have been applied. Just yesterday I heard an example of an older person who had fallen out of work and was sent off to use Universal Jobmatch, the new computerised job-search system that all JSA claimants have to use to apply for jobs. But this person had no IT skills, and so was sanctioned for not applying for enough jobs. That is the kind of thing that we feel should be weeded out of the system, because it does not demonstrate the proper use of sanctions.

What is the impact of all these sanctions? The truth is that we do not really know. The assumption of the policy is that it will positively affect the behaviour of claimants who are not doing enough to find work, but does it actually work? The evidence seems flimsy at best. If so many people are having to be sanctioned, presumably the punishment is not working. If the punishment is supposed to reform behaviour, why are people being sanctioned more than once and why are the numbers so high? As an ex-teacher, I always thought that I had failed if I had to repeat a punishment, or indeed if I had to carry out the punishment, because the threats had not worked beforehand.

There is certainly a need to find out whether these sanctions are just punitive, whether they are just to increase the numbers of people off-flowing from benefits, or whether they are working more effectively. There is evidence that sanctions increase benefit off-flow because people who are not receiving any money do not bother to turn up to sign on. Of course, if they turn up to sign on, they remain on the unemployment register, but if they do not turn up they drop off it. That is another reason why benefit off-flow does not necessarily indicate a positive outcome.

The Public and Commercial Services Union represents Jobcentre Plus staff, who are the real experts on this issue, and it told us that sanctioning

“just does not work in terms of getting people into work.”

Perhaps the Minister can refer to some hard evidence to the contrary—evidence that sanctioning has a positive impact on employment outcomes—as the Government’s response to our report could not do so.

What about the impact of sanctions on claimants? Do they cause severe financial hardship? Some witnesses were convinced that they do, to the extent that claimants often require charitable handouts to feed themselves and their families. During our inquiry, Oxfam and Church Action on Poverty published a report that made a direct link between the undoubted increase in sanctions and the unquestionable increase in referrals to food banks during the past few years, and many hon. Members wrote to the Committee to ask us to look specifically at this particular issue. The report estimated that in May 2013 half a million people in the UK were reliant on food aid, and that up to half of that number turn to food banks

“as a direct result of having benefit payments delayed, reduced, or withdrawn altogether”.

So, some of that is about sanctions, but in other cases it is about the barriers that many people face in accessing the welfare system, including benefits.

The Trussell Trust recently published data that showed a 54% increase from 2012-13 to 2013-14 in the number of meals provided by food banks. In total, some 20 million meals were given out to people in food poverty last year. We were unable to confirm a conclusive causal link between sanctions and food poverty, as there are insufficient hard data on this issue. While JCP does refer people to food banks, for some reason it does not record the number of referrals it makes or the reasons for those referrals.

I think that is bizarre. By their own admission, it is sometimes necessary for the Government of the UK in the 21st century to refer people to food banks because they cannot afford to feed themselves or their families, but the Government do not take a note of how often that happens. I cannot understand why they would not want to know why this is happening but, judging from their response to our report, it would appear that they do not want to know. They reject outright our recommendation that the DWP monitors the extent of financial hardship caused by sanctions, including collecting and publishing data on the number of claimants referred to food banks by JCP. I look forward to the Minister explaining why the DWP could not accept this perfectly sensible recommendation.

Our other key recommendation in this area was for a thorough and fundamental independent review of the operation of the conditionality and sanctions regime across the jobcentre network. We want a much wider reaching review than the limited one recently undertaken by Matt Oakley, whose report—by the way—is now more than three months overdue. We understand that it has been finished, but it has not been published.

The review that we called for would investigate whether sanctions are being made appropriately, fairly and proportionately across the jobcentre network; the link between sanctions and benefit off-flow; and, crucially, whether sanctions are having the desired effect of encouraging claimants to engage more actively in job-seeking.

In evidence given to us, the Minister appeared to provide an assurance that a proper and in-depth review, along the lines that we suggested, would happen. In fact, she told us that she had “already started” on one. Perhaps she can now explain why the DWP has utterly backtracked from that position. It is very clear from the Government’s response to our report that there are no plans for a second, broader independent review. The Oakley review looks only at communications, but I would have thought that it was crucial for the Government to find out whether or not the sanctions regime actually works.

The use of sanctions has been increasing inexorably in recent times, but what is the evidence that sanctions are having a positive effect on the behaviour of job-seeking benefit claimants? Given the widespread concerns about the severe impacts that sanctions can have, and the tensions they inevitably create in the relationships between JCP advisers and the jobseekers they are trying to help, surely it is time to establish whether or not they actually work?

My final set of recommendations concerns the issues with the Universal Jobmatch system. Trying to match jobseekers to suitable job vacancies is a core task for JCP. For years, the system involved jobseekers checking vacancies posted on cards stuck on boards in the jobcentre. Things have moved on quite a way from there, through vacancy databases to “job points” in the jobcentre, and Universal Jobmatch is the latest development. It is essentially a recruitment website, with a vacancy database and an online platform through which benefit claimants and other jobseekers—that is quite important to point out, as other jobseekers are able to access this system too—can search for and apply for jobs.

Expert witnesses broadly felt that Universal Jobmatch represented an improvement on previous systems, and they also believed that it had huge potential to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of claimants’ job-seeking. However, improvements to its functionality are required if it is to reach that potential, but that is not the responsibility of Monster Government Solutions, the company that developed Universal Jobmatch; improvements depends on what the DWP asks the company to do and what it is willing to pay for.

Universal Jobmatch is currently a pretty basic online jobs board. To transform the job-seeking experience, the system needs further development to provide, for example, the functionality to offer online training modules or to assess the quality of claimants’ CVs. The Government’s response to our report talks vaguely about planned updates to the system. I would be grateful for some more detail today on the Government’s plans to improve the functionality of Universal Jobmatch, because I am pretty sure that the people who run the system would be happy to do more work in that area.

More worryingly, we found that the DWP appeared to have very little oversight of the vacancies being posted on Universal Jobmatch. Witnesses reported seeing highly dubious vacancies, such as for “diplomats” in the north-east of England; large numbers of duplicate vacancies; and a significant number of vacancies that were no longer in date. This issue is extremely important. Universal Jobmatch is increasingly being used to monitor claimants’ job-seeking, and to check that they are fulfilling their obligations to look for work and apply for jobs. With a significant proportion of dubious, duplicate and out-of-date vacancies on the system, claimants could be wasting their time applying for vacancies that offer no prospect of employment, and they could even face sanctions if they refuse to use the system.

The Government “partly agreed” with us that the oversight of Universal Jobmatch needed to increase. Will the Minister set out what the DWP has done so far to purge the system of those types of vacancies, which threaten to undermine its effectiveness? Just today, I received a briefing from Monster Government Solutions, in which it said it had been working hard to provide an update on fraudulent and duplicate job postings. However, I know from experience that it is quite easy to post a job on Universal Jobmatch, whereas it has actually got much more difficult to take it down.

My right hon. Friend the Member for Birkenhead (Mr Field) and the media have highlighted a very worrying issue, which is the appearance of fraudulent jobs or jobs that would defraud the claimant. The incident highlighted by my right hon. Friend involved a bogus employer fraudulently charging jobseekers £65 for “criminal background checks” as part of a supposed recruitment process, only for the jobseekers to arrive for what they anticipated would be their first day in a new job and finding that no job existed. The concern is that Universal Jobmatch is open to abuse of this kind because it has been designed as a self-service system, making it easier for employers to use. In effect, this means that anyone can advertise on the site with a few clicks of a mouse, and it can make a job more difficult to take down.

The Minister told us in her reply to our letter that the number of fraud cases was “very low” and that DWP has

“well-established procedures to minimise the risks of fraud occurring”

on Universal Jobmatch. I should be grateful if the Minister reassured us today that DWP takes fraudulent use of the system seriously and if she updated us on the actions the Government are taking to tighten up the system, to protect claimants from this type of unscrupulous behaviour and from being accused of not applying for jobs that do not exist.

Our report highlighted the fact that JCP staff have proved themselves capable of responding well to change and continue to deliver a value-for-money service under difficult circumstances. However, it is crucial that the systems they are asked to administer work in the best interests of benefit claimants and taxpayers. It was not clear to us in the course of our inquiry that that is always the case. I look forward to the Minister’s response to the specific points I have raised.

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[Nigel Mills (Amber Valley) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to speak in this debate and to follow the hon. Member for Oldham East and Saddleworth (Debbie Abrahams). Members of the Work and Pensions Committee have been debating different aspects of the Committee’s work in various rooms this week, and it is a pleasure to do so again.

Trying to think back six months to when the report was published was quite challenging, and it was interesting to see what has changed since. There have certainly been various improvements to various things. I was keen that the Committee held this inquiry because, with all the changes to the welfare system, actually trying to work out where best Jobcentre Plus fits and where it can contribute the most was not straightforward. At one extreme, one could say that if the Work programme is the way to go, why do we wait for people, with all their different skills, incentives and expertise, to spend a whole year unemployed before passing them on? Perhaps we should completely divorce the welfare enforcement and welfare support roles. We could use providers to do support and Jobcentre Plus could concentrate on enforcement. It was clear from the evidence received by the inquiry—I asked that question of nearly every witness—that there was no motivation for that at all. It would have been costly and would have undermined the great work that jobcentres do in all our constituencies by providing the right amount of support at the right stages for each individual claimant. The Committee completely rejected the idea of such a divorce and we can see that jobcentres have an important role to play in the future of tackling unemployment.

We are left with what the hon. Member for Aberdeen South (Dame Anne Begg), the Committee’s Chairman, referred to as the holy grail challenge. Everyone recognises that we need to provide the right kind of support at the right time. In an ideal world, that support would be more individual and focused for some and much more light touch for others. A lot of people who fall out of work might find more pretty quickly by their own endeavours, so they do not need much money spent on them. The holy grail is how to work out early in the process which people need more intensive support and which ones can be left pretty much to their own devices.

If we could find an assessment tool to do that, it would tackle the awful situation of people who have fallen out of a job but who will struggle to find another one, even though they might have had a long and successful work history—perhaps after they have been in the job for a while, their industry has left the area completely, or their skills have become completely out of date—because nothing they have been doing before is still there for them. It is a horrible situation of someone falling through the holes, because we do not realise how much support they need to reskill until they have been jobseeking hard for six months, and they will have become demoralised by failing, and so are getting further from the labour market as the weeks go by. There is a danger of that awful progress—the longer it takes someone to find a job, the harder it gets.

I agree entirely with having a tool to identify who needs intensive support right at the start, so that we can get them the retraining, the new skills or whatever early in the process, rather than leaving it for six months, until the Work programme or, heaven forbid, even until after the Work programme has failed them as well. That has to be the right answer; a key to enable the Department to focus its resources on those who need them, rather than risking simply helping those who might not need them.

In another situation, Government policy is to ask jobcentres to do a whole new area of work, in-work conditionality. If the journey of claimants with the jobcentre does not end when they find their job—once they have found a job, we want to help, support and encourage them, and perhaps even stronger than that, to increase their hours or their wage rate to get their level of benefit claim down even further—how we find the resources and mechanisms to support people on that continued journey will be a real demand on a jobcentre. It will require a different set of skills and approaches of jobcentre staff. Helping someone who does not have a job to find one in the first place, with job searches and so on, is different from helping them to increase their skills while in work or to look for extra hours or ways of getting more skills to get promoted.

How we resource and skill that policy is important if we are to make in-work conditionality work. Otherwise, I suspect, it can only be a phone call every few months to say, “What are you doing to find extra hours?”, “What are you doing to look for a better job somewhere else?”, or “Do you realise you can’t just stay where you are, doing exactly what you are doing?”, and I am not sure that that is a helpful process to get into. Exactly how we mesh that with universal credit and changes to how advisers approach such situations leaves us looking for a relatively fundamental change in work processes. Almost certainly, that means that the existing target—how many people can you get off benefits?—will no longer be a meaningful target.

If one of the advantages of universal credit is that people can be in work for a few weeks and drop out again, but their benefits will go back up automatically, or they find more work or perhaps their hours fluctuate, the target to get people off benefits will not apply, because they will not ever be off benefits under the new definition. Currently, people move off out-of-work benefits, on to tax credits and, heaven forbid, back again. Now, however, as a way of measuring what we are trying to achieve, we will need to find a more sophisticated target, one which looks at sustained employment or at how we follow people into and through their jobs. We heard evidence to say that that was a hard thing for jobcentres to do—finding out who people were employed by, phoning up the former claimants or their employer—when neither had any great need to engage. If people have found a job and stopped claiming, phoning the jobcentre a few weeks later is not on their agenda.

[Dame Anne Begg]

The hon. Gentleman suggests that people, once they have gone off benefit, are not interested in engaging at all. One of the excuses that the DWP gave us for not doing any measure other than the benefit calculation was that people did not want to be bothered, or that employers were not interested in letting the jobcentre know that the person was still in a job.

[Nigel Mills]

That is exactly the problem—how we motivate engagement on both sides, which we will need with universal credit and any in-work conditionality. We have to find a way of gathering reliable data. It is similar to a high-level instinct, or perhaps real-time information will provide something. Perhaps the RTI feed will show that the person is still in employment or even at the same employer—if we wanted to track the data that far back—but that looks to be a pretty clunky and limited way of checking things. Unless there are flags that show when employment has stopped, flagging it back to the jobcentre, we would not know that people had ceased to be in sustained employment, perhaps meeting the 12 or 26-week target, or whatever was set in that situation. I am not sure that there is an easy solution to anything, but for us to find a set of targets and work routes that work in such a situation will be important to how the jobcentre role develops.

The next area that I want to touch on is one that was topical last summer, when we started the inquiry: what happens to people when their two years on the Work programme finishes and they become the jobcentre’s responsibility again. This time last year, I remember speaking to the staff at my local jobcentre and they were not entirely sure what they were going to be doing with people in that situation when the first Work programme cohorts finished. Jobcentres have an important role to play, because we are talking about people who have not got a job in their first year of unemployment and who then got through the Work programme for two years and have not found sustained work. We could expect them to need some intensive support, but it is a little hard to see that jobcentres would be geared up for that, having not been doing it for people in that key two-year period previously. So what would we do with them?

Last week, I was pleased to meet a new subcontractor, Acorn, which is in Derbyshire dealing with what I think are now called community work placements, a new set of rolled-out private sector providers offering a different type of Work programme service that is not the Work programme and does something subtly different. I confess that the procurement of the service and how we chose the providers has passed me by, but in the east midlands, for example, we have G4S. Luckily for the east midlands in some ways, it is not one of the Work programme providers, because we have a completely separate, third firm in Derbyshire to do things. We have, however, found a sensible programme of community placements that are not meant to be free labour for unscrupulous private sector operators, but are meant to be getting people who have gone through three years of support finding something that at least gets them used to working normal working hours and some skills on their CV, making them more employable.

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[Dame Anne Begg]

I have less than a minute to respond. I pay tribute to the hard-working Jobcentre Plus staff; they do their core ventures well, work in difficult and ever-changing circumstances and they are at the front line, having to take a lot of the criticism of Government policies, which they are implementing but over which they have no control.

There are a lot of questions that the Minister did not manage to answer. We still need the best help for those facing the highest barriers. There is a huge increase in the use of sanctions and we need an independent inquiry on that. The Minister did not give any reasons why there is such a huge increase in food banks and, unfortunately, she has not said anything about off-flow measures.

The Minister’s own Universal Jobmatch has thrown up a job that was supposedly 20 miles from her constituency, but was actually in Japan.