Employment: Universal Jobmatch

Lord German Excerpts

Wednesday 19th March 2014 Lords Chamber

[Lord Freud]

My Lords, there is a great deal of confusion around this. I am pleased to be able to straighten it out, because there has been a lot of misrepresentation. There is a small amount of fraud on the site, as there is on other sites. It is less than one in 1,000. We clear them off. This is a hugely successful site. It has more than 500,000 employers on it and nearly 6 million job searches a day. It has transformed the service of getting people back into work, which is of course now at record levels.

[Lord German (LD)]

My Lords, despite the extremely good news today of the trend once more being employment up and unemployment down, there will always be a need for a website of this sort which matches the jobseekers with the job vacancies—and not just Mafia couriers. Can my noble friend tell us whether the security issues around this site are the responsibility of the aptly named Monster Worldwide Inc, which runs it on behalf of the Government? Can he also tell us, under his commitment under his department’s privacy policy, what security measures he has taken to avoid people’s personal details being circulated widely to those who should not have them?

[Lord Freud]

My Lords, we take security very seriously. One of the reasons that there is a difference between the standard Monster site and that run by the state is exactly to make sure that there is security in our site. We work closely with Monster on that. People have to be careful with their information on the site, as for anywhere else on the internet. We make sure that there is proper support for people and instruction on how to keep their information safe.