Welfare Reform and Work Bill (First sitting)

Debate between Stephen Timms and Hannah Bardell

Thursday 10th September 2015 Public Bill Committees

[Hannah Bardell]

Q 7 Surely we need something. There needs to be something around quality and decent work, rather than it being purely numbers based.

Marcus Mason: I guess it depends how you define quality.

[Stephen Timms]

Q 8 I want to ask a question about apprenticeships. This is really a question to Rebecca. We gather that you are concerned that the only way the 3 million apprenticeships target will be hit is if quite a lot of the apprenticeships are rather poor quality. Could you explain to us why you have that fear? Could you also tell us what it would take, in your view, to deliver both the target and the quality that all of us would want to see?

Rebecca Plant: I have been involved heavily with apprenticeships over the past six years, with the previous Government and the coalition really putting their hands around it and making it a credible work route. Specifically, my interest is around young people. The concern comes from sitting in the middle of some really heavy apprenticeship reforms that are taking place currently with Trailblazers. I am part of the digital Trailblazers group and have worked tirelessly for two years creating new digital apprenticeship standards for the sector.

Purely in my opinion, what you are starting to see with those new standards being released is that, for the tech sector particularly, the high-level skills that are needed are stuck at the moment. So the apprenticeship reforms in Trailblazers are making the ability for us to release and get young people on to Trailblazers really difficult, because we cannot get the standards through.

All of us who are interested in apprenticeships then look at myriad examples, such as apprenticeship barman and of apprenticeships in really low skills. How is that an apprenticeship? I understand about work and I am not patronising that as a job role but, when you are reporting on a number, you have to dig deeper than that number. How much of that 3 million is dedicated to higher skills?

My interest particularly comes with those young people who are “okay”. How do you use apprenticeships to progress them through a lifelong learning route, as the Prime Minister said when he released the new apprenticeship standards nearly two years ago? The idea is lifelong learning. Those people in those low-level jobs are put in there just to gain money for skills, for training. This is my opinion, but what is the route out? How does that help social mobility, when people are just turning a job role into an apprenticeship? That is not right.

Welfare Reform and Work Bill (Second sitting)

Debate between Stephen Timms and Hannah Bardell

Thursday 10th September 2015 Public Bill Committees

[Stephen Timms]

Q 18 To clarify, in your discussions with Department for Work and Pensions officials, there is still the intention that those flexibilities will be available but your experience, in practice, is that they are quite often not?

Octavia Holland: Yes, absolutely. To clarify, it is even quite difficult to establish where in guidance those lone parent flexibilities are now. They are in disparate pieces of guidance that are given to jobcentres and work coaches. It is not like you can get your hands on one piece of guidance that says, “Look, if you want to support a single parent into a decent job, these are the kind of things you want to consider.” There is a real lack of clear information.

[Hannah Bardell]

Q 19 Thank you very much for coming to speak to us. On that point about lone parent flexibilities, do you not believe that those important flexibilities should therefore be brought into statute, so that they are very clear and people can understand them?

Octavia Holland: At Gingerbread, we absolutely feel that the lone parent flexibilities should be in regulations, as they were previously, because that makes it very clear to jobcentres and work coaches the best way they can support single parents into employment. Single parents are generally very keen to work and over 60% of them do, but you do need to consider the fact that they are not going to have childcare in the evenings or the weekends. You do need to think about that kind of thing. Yes, we do support that they should be back in regulations.

[Stephen Timms]

Q 20 This is a question mainly for Tony. We are told that there is evidence that the benefit cap has encouraged some people to go into work who would not otherwise have done so. Can you tell us how compelling you think that evidence is, and how big an effect there appears to have been from the application of the benefit cap?

Tony Wilson: The Department published some ad hoc analysis about a year ago on the estimated impacts of the benefit cap. That was peer-reviewed by the Institute for Fiscal Studies. That was a good piece of work and it did show a statistically significant positive impact on some people in households affected by the benefit cap, on the likelihood of their moving off benefit and in to work. It showed some interesting things. It showed that those impacts were greater where the financial impact of the cap was greater. They were greater in London than in other parts of the country, so things you would intuitively expect to see.

However, there are a couple of points. One is that the total numbers moving into work are very low. This is a group where the likelihood of entering work, where you have been capped, is very low. A percentage increase in the likelihood of moving into work, you might see a 30% or 40% increase in likelihood of entering work. But if your likelihood was originally one in 20, then that might increase to only about one in 15 and still look like a very large impact. The research found percentage points. If you like, the absolute impact of the cap on the likelihood of entering work was pretty small—it was three or four percentage points. In other words, out of every 100 people capped, an additional three or four may move into work. That was the average. It was greater where the financial impacts were greater, which is what one would expect.

The benefit cap is probably one of the only measures in the last Parliament that created a really strong financial incentive to move into work. Out of all the welfare reform measures, if you move into work, you get your benefit back, essentially. You get your £200 or £300 income back. To some extent, it might be surprising that there was not a greater impact. The impact in terms of actual numbers was relatively small.

More interesting still, we evaluated a programme called the Brent Navigator. Brent Council invested in adviser support to help capped households back into work. We used a statistical technique to try to find the additional impact of that, and we estimated that that had about a 50% positive impact. Having intensive, adviser-led support to help people move back into work led to a larger-again impact on the likelihood of people moving into work. It highlights the importance of joining up the support you deliver and ensuring that those who are affected by reforms also get access to appropriate support to move back into work.

With the lowering of the cap, there will be more people with quite small losses compared with what happened under the previous cap. In those groups with small losses, the evidence found a far smaller impact. It was a negligible—pretty much a zero—impact on people whose losses were £10, £20 or £30 a week. That is consistent with the impacts of many of the other reforms such as the spare room subsidy, or the bedroom tax, or the lower uprating of benefit, which add quite small impacts and probably did not have a behaviour effect.