Jobseekers (Back to Work Schemes) Bill

Liam Byrne Excerpts

Tuesday 19th March 2013 Commons Chamber

[Mr Hoban]

The sinner has repented on this occasion.

Let me be clear. I want the review to proceed as quickly as possible. It is in all our interests for it to do so. I am keen that we improve the quality of decision making on sanctions and that we ensure that they are applied consistently. The right hon. Member for East Ham was right to highlight the fact that my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State made it clear that there should be no targets, and that if there was evidence of targets being used at any jobcentre, we would stamp them out. We do not want targets; we want good quality decisions made consistently from jobcentre to jobcentre. I do not think targets have a role to play in that regime. [Interruption.] The right hon. Member for Birmingham, Hodge Hill (Mr Byrne) laughs. Is he saying we should have targets? I suspect not.

[Mr Byrne]

I look forward to the evidence of the next few days.

[Mr Hoban]

Given that my right hon. Friend said that he would stop the practice, we would stop it again if it reappeared. We do not want to see it happening.

I want to pick up on some of the points raised in the 10 or 11 questions put by the right hon. Member for East Ham. We have published, and will publish annually, tables setting out the number of sanctions. The data for 2011-12 were published online on 15 August 2012, and we gave a breakdown of sanctions, so it is not correct to say that there is no information. There were 108,000 variable length sanctions for employment-related failures; 378,000 sanctions were of fixed length, which included 58,000 that were for not attending ESE—employment, skills and enterprise—regulation schemes, 55,000 for not complying with training requirements or for not carrying out a jobcentre’s direction or for a failure to participate in mandatory work activity.

The reason there is a range in the impact assessment is that we were trying to be helpful to the Committee. We used a combination of official statistics and an estimate based on management information to give Members an up to date figure of the numbers involved. The final numbers will be available when we publish the next official statistics. Having been a DWP Minister, the right hon. Gentleman will appreciate that we take the validation and verification of statistics seriously. These are official national statistics and they need to be published to appropriate quality. That is the basis for the numbers in the impact assessment.

Communication is really important, and we need to ensure that we get it right. We talked about some of the measures that we set out in the recent regulations to ensure clarity in universal credit. There is a challenge here. We want to ensure that communications between the Department and jobseekers are clear, whether they are oral communications between a personal adviser and a claimant, or items of correspondence. But I think there is a tension here. The hon. Member for Slough (Fiona Mactaggart) said in her Second Reading speech that she felt that the notice we sent out was defective, and the courts said the letter should have contained more detail about the sanctions regime.