Oral Answers to Questions

Bridget Phillipson Excerpts

Monday 9th March 2015 Commons Chamber

[Mr Duncan Smith]

Apart from the technical changes, the reality is that at the moment when someone falls unemployed then takes a part-time job they have to sign off and go through the whole rigmarole of claiming tax credits with no one talking to them. Under universal credit, they do not sign off. They stay with their adviser, who helps them enormously in negotiating their way through all their job applications. There is therefore a human interface, which is much better and which will help people who are unemployed and who have difficulties. People can look forward to that.

[Bridget Phillipson (Houghton and Sunderland South) (Lab)]

12. What proportion of people over the age of 50 who have been referred to the Work programme have found work as a result.

[The Minister for Employment (Esther McVey)]

The objective of the Work programme is to move more people into sustainable employment, and so the available data relate to people’s job outcomes, not starts, which means they have been in work for three or six months. To September 2014, there were 300,410 referrals of people aged 50 and over, resulting in 42,750 job outcomes.

[Bridget Phillipson]

The Work programme is failing older people, with the figures the Minister has just given meaning that only 13% of people aged 55 to 59 have found a lasting job as a result of the programme. What would she say to the constituents I meet, who are desperate to work and doing all that is asked of them yet feel badly let down by her Government?

[Esther McVey]

The Work programme is the largest programme of its kind, helping people into work on an unparalleled scale. It is superseding all the expected levels and targets; it is better than anything that has gone before it.