Work Programme

Stephen Lloyd Excerpts

Thursday 10th October 2013 Westminster Hall

[Stephen Lloyd (Eastbourne) (LD)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Walker. I congratulate the Minister on her elevation. The question is, can the Work programme work for all user groups? That is the nub of this debate. I share the broad views of my hon. Friend the Member for Aberconwy (Guto Bebb) and his passion for the programme. The Chair of the Select Committee, the hon. Member for Aberdeen South (Dame Anne Begg), knows very well that I am absolutely passionate about the Work programme. One of the key things that got me back into politics was the whole issue of dignity of work and the challenge for the long-term unemployed, so I feel very strongly about the Work programme and I think that in many ways, despite its bumpy start, it is beginning to deliver and is making a significant difference for a lot of people.

The challenge—this is the nub of our report; this is what it focuses on—is whether the Work programme works for all user groups. My view is that, as currently configured, it does not, and I urge the Minister, in her concluding remarks, to deal with the specific issues that have been mentioned. The Department has already had an opportunity to respond to a number of the key recommendations, but I do not feel that it has responded properly.

In the first report, we clearly supported the principle of the programme, but we flagged up two key concerns. The first was whether the differential pricing would be sufficient to incentivise, and the second was whether the Work programme supply chains would be suitably managed to ensure adequate specialist services. The Work and Pensions Committee recognises, as we all do in this area, that for many people who either are a long way away from the job sector or have very specific impairments and disabilities, the best way to help them into work is for them to receive support from those very specialist and often quite small groups that really understand the issue. One of the concerns about the configuration of the Work programme was that we were not confident that the supply chain, when it came down to it, would include all those specialist groups. The Committee made a commitment to return to the Work programme a year later to see whether our concerns in those two specific areas had held water or had been dealt with.

Let us consider differential pricing. I am slightly frustrated about this, because before I came into politics, a lot of the work that I did with Governments of both colours—Labour and Tory in the old days—was in this area. The whole issue of creaming and parking, as the hon. Member for Aberdeen South knows, is old hat. It has been around a long time, so I was very hopeful that differential pricing would crack it, and that this time we would head towards the sunny uplands. Unfortunately, that has not happened, or not to the extent that I would have liked. I need the Government to address that. I need the DWP to be quite fierce about it with the Work programme providers.

I shall give a local example. In Eastbourne, my constituency, the first tranche of those who unfortunately are called two-year returners are coming through the sausage machine. I have had a meeting with a number of the local training providers. Like my hon. Friend the Member for Aberconwy, I work incredibly closely with my local training providers, the chamber of commerce, Jobcentre Plus—you name it—and I am discovering that a fair number of those individuals have had very little support indeed. I am talking about a couple of face-to-face meetings in two years, and then follow-up phone calls. They have been parked. The reason why I am so hopping mad about it is that under the Work programme, those individuals each had a £600 attachment fee. I want to go to the local Work programme providers—my subcontractors, as it were—and, on behalf of the Department for Work and Pensions, claim back £550 per person so that I can feed it into other training operators and get those people jobs. There are issues with differential pricing.

My hon. Friend the Member for Aberconwy talked about benefit versus impairment. I agree strongly—it was one of the recommendations in the report—that how benefit is assessed needs revisiting. I am not urging the Government to revisit the attachment fee at present; however, I do not believe that Eastbourne is any different from any other part of the country, other than that it is the sunniest town in the UK, and for some early people there, the attachment fee has not been used properly. I am disappointed that in some instances, the primes clearly used specialist providers on the list to help them get contracts, but did not use them properly after that. The DWP must look closely at that.

I do not want to tar all providers with the same brush. Like everything else in life, there are good ones, middling ones and bad ones. One thing that I liked about the business model for the Work programme is that the DWP and the Secretary of State always said to us that as time went on, the better Work programme providers would be rewarded and the worse ones penalised. I want to see that happen, and I want the Department to be absolutely vigorous. I am quite prepared to have competition in this challenging and difficult area, but I want it to be genuinely robust, so that better Work programme providers are rewarded and worse ones are not.

The other challenge that we face is helping people with disabilities back into work. I am disappointed—every Government has failed on this issue—but I share the view of my hon. Friend the Member for Aberconwy that we will get better at it. I feel strongly about it. It is difficult. If someone has been out of work for 10 years with a mental health problem and is in the Work programme, it is hard for them. Anyone who says that it is not is in denial. I appreciate the challenge, but I am disappointed that 90% of people with a disability do not succeed in getting a job through the Work programme, and only 6% of those on ESA get a job. I know the issue well, and I know how challenging it is, so I will not jump up and down on the Government, but I demand that we do it differently. All of us—the Select Committee on Work and Pensions, the Opposition and Government Members—know that it has been a crime. It is a waste of human capacity and ability. I urge the Minister, in her response, to take on board the fact that more needs to be done on disability and helping disabled people into work.

Our report made numerous specific recommendations, as the Chair of the Select Committee mentioned. I will focus on two, to keep it simple for the Minister when she responds—the two that the Government did not address. The first was on the accuracy of the work capability assessment. To quote the report, the Committee

“heard some quite shocking examples of participants referred to the Work Programme who had clearly been incorrectly declared fit for work following a WCA. We recommend that DWP work with providers to agree a process by which participants whom providers believe are clearly unfit for work can be referred back to Jobcentre Plus.”

However, we also recognised that a system was needed so that providers could not game the system by saying, “These people are too difficult; send them back to Jobcentre Plus.”

We saw that the situation would get worse, and it has. The coalition Government have done a lot of work around the Harrington report, so it is better than it was a few years ago, but the number of people coming down the pipe is huge compared with a few years ago, so I do not believe that that is good enough. I never had the automatic loathing of Atos that a lot of my constituents and the media have, because I know that we are talking about a difficult task—and, frankly, Atos was appointed by the previous Government. I had hoped that after the Harrington report, Atos would improve and fewer clearly unsuitable people would be passed. The situation is not good enough. I have come to the point where I do not think that Atos is meeting its contract to a level with which the Government should be satisfied. I urge the Minister to take a serious look at that provider. I am seeing too many personal cases.

I have been involved with disability for many years, and if someone with a disability says, “I have a disability; I can’t work,” I have no problem telling them, “Yes, you can. Have you tried it?”. I am quite firm about it, but I get extremely angry when I see what has happened in my constituency over the past 18 months to some people who are clearly not fit for work. I even send one of my casework officers to tribunals more often than not. The Government must address that seriously.

The other recommendation to which the Department did not respond involved provision for unsuccessful participants. I have already mentioned the people coming down the pipe after two years—two-year returners. As the Chair of the Committee will know, we identified them as a concern. I remember personally addressing the Secretary of State about it a year or so ago, and asking for confirmation that a proper system would be in place to manage the people who had not got a job after two years and to keep them going in the direction of travel to get a job, rather than just emphasising their sense of failure. I was given an absolute commitment that the JCP would have a set of programmes ready, but it does not. Things are patchy.

Again, I acknowledge the comments made by my hon. Friend the Member for Aberconwy. Certain JCPs are working well—to be honest, mine are; I get on extremely well with the middle managers there, who work extremely hard—but there is no systemised process, which means that there can be a rubbish service in one constituency because there is no systemised instruction from on high, and a good one nearby because an MP or councillor is enthusiastic about it, or the JCP has a good manager. We must get service provision up to speed right now. I had 31 cases three weeks ago and 12 the week before that, and I have 26 coming down next week. They are beginning to come out of the pipe.

I have met a lot of people who have been on the Work programme and did not succeed in getting a job. Hon. Members will be unsurprised to learn that their emotions vary from enormous rage to a sense of deep shame, depression and so on. I understand that. If I were them, I would be feeling all those things. This is a crucial challenge, to which I urge the Minister to respond in a way that makes me confident that the Government will do some serious thinking about how they can make a difference in helping those people into work.

I will share something that I am doing in Eastbourne, because it might help. Forgive me, but I am liberal: I do not buy and never have bought the concept of the workshy poor. It is dim and ignorant, and it shows no understanding of what things are like. That does not mean that I believe everyone out there is perfect—it does not work like that—but I know that if I had not worked for three or four years, my self-worth would be extremely low. I would almost certainly be taking some nonsense that the doctor had given me for depression, and I would be anxious and nervous about getting a job. The last thing that I would want to be told is that I was workshy vermin and that the only thing that would work was for me to be forced to get a job.

If the Government told me that I had to employ those people, as a good orange booker and someone who has employed dozens of people over the years, my first thought would be to tell them, in words of few syllables, to get stuffed. That is not how things work; this is a free country. I would say, “I am an employer and I am not going to take on these people who have not worked for five years.” To help those folk to get a job, we need to make a difference. We need to step up to the plate as a country, a nation and a Government.

I will tell the Minister what I am doing in Eastbourne. Straight after the election, I launched “100 apprenticeships in 100 days”. I had it all organised because I hoped I was going to win, so I was the first new MP to get going, and the programme has been a huge success. We got 181 apprenticeships in 100 days. The latest figures show that there are 2,500-plus Eastbourne apprentices, and that unemployment is down to 3.9%. I am pounding the town and I have everyone on board in a big tent—I even have Tories in the tent—all working to transform the economy of the town and get people jobs.

Over the past few months, I have begun to meet the people who did not get a job in the past two years, and they are a challenging group. I would be the same if I had not worked for years. I am going into town and saying, “I want 100 work experiences in 100 days”, because the only way that those people will have a prayer of getting a job is with work experience. There will be people who used to be employers. An employer will not employ someone who has not worked for five or seven years—they are not a charity—but if that person has work experience and has done 100 hours’ work experience, that will give them discipline and perhaps tick a few boxes for an employer.

The scheme will work, as long as the MP and the whole town go to employers and say, “Do it for Eastbourne. Do it, not because they’re losers, but because they are our friends and neighbours. They are our family, for God’s sake. Let’s do it because we are all in it together”—excuse me for misquoting the Prime Minister. In fact, I am certain that it will work. I start in a couple of weeks and I look forward to coming back to the DWP and saying, “Listen, this is a way we can make it happen. Please, for the love of God, don’t either say you are going do something and not do it, or demonise this group.” Yes, I know that there will be people who game the system, but the majority are people who feel, for one reason or another, that they are failures. What is happening is just not good enough and I have had it up to here.

I have addressed a few issues to which I would like the Minister to respond. In this very partisan place—I am not very keen on partisanship, but that is probably because I am from a business background—the Work and Pensions Committee was pretty united over this issue. Even when we disagreed, we understood and supported the basic premise of the Work programme, but we want to make it better. We want to make it work, not only for the group of people who, after losing their job, are turned around quickly, but for the challenging group of people who have been stuck for a long time, and for the tens of thousands of people with disabilities, who have tremendous resources and skills to give to the country, which we need. If we do not give the right level of support, we will have failed, despite successes at getting those at the top end into work.

Finally, this debate is important, and not only in this place. The topic exercises the views, personalities and thoughts of literally millions of people. The Select Committee produced a good report. I look forward to the Minister’s response on some of the areas where I think the Government can do better.