Jobseekers (Back to Work Schemes) Bill

Jane Ellison Excerpts

Tuesday 19th March 2013 Commons Chamber

[Mr Liam Byrne (Birmingham, Hodge Hill) (Lab)]

This is a very dark day for the once-proud DWP, and it beggars belief that this once-proud Department has found itself in this position under the Secretary of State’s leadership. The organisation of back-to-work schemes is now in a state of total chaos. Once upon a time, back in 2010, the Secretary of State boasted that the Work programme would be the

“most comprehensive, integrated work programme in existence, certainly, since the war”.—[Official Report, 22 November 2010; Vol. 519, c. 17.]

What do we have instead? We have a Work programme that is literally worse than doing nothing. Just 2.3% of people referred on to the programme have found sustained jobs. As has been said, the Public Accounts Committee stated—

[Jane Ellison (Battersea) (Con)]

rose—

[Mr Byrne]

The hon. Lady will want to reflect on this. The Public Accounts Committee said this about the Work programme:

“Actual performance was even below the Department’s assessment of the non-intervention rate—the number of people that would have found sustained work had the Work programme not been running.”

Maybe the hon. Lady can tell me whether she is proud of that.

[Jane Ellison]

I am grateful to the right hon. Gentleman for giving way, but I was going to tell him that this morning the Work and Pensions Committee was at Willesden Jobcentre Plus. I asked the staff running the programme there, helping people get back to work, how they felt about their efforts being described as worse than nothing. They said it was deeply demoralising and incredibly insulting to their efforts on behalf of the unemployed.

[Mr Byrne]

The truth is that jobcentre staff have so little confidence in the Work programme that they are not referring people to Work programme contactors at anywhere near the rate the Department has estimated. That is the reality of how jobcentre staff feel.

We have had universal credit now beginning its descent into universal chaos, and now we have the news that the regulations designed to encourage jobseekers to take work were so badly drafted that the Court of Appeal struck them down and the Department may as a result be on the hook to repay £130 million in sanctions. The judges could not have been more unequivocal. Here is what they had to say:

“The 2011 Regulations must be quashed.”

I therefore put it to the Secretary of State that this is a day of shame for his Department. The House of Commons Library cannot find an instance of DWP legislation being struck down in this fashion since 1996, under the last Conservative Government. If the Secretary of State had delusions of adequacy, they have been swept away by today’s proposed legislation.