1 April 2008

Rt Hon Stephen Timms MP

Minister of State for Employment and Welfare Reform

Employing service users in the homelessness sector

Thames Reach Conference, Smithfield

Tuesday, 1st April 2008

[Check against delivery]

I am delighted to be here this morning – thank you for inviting me. I want to set out my Department’s plans to improve the opportunities for homeless people and others facing disadvantage.

Work of Thames Reach

But first, let me acknowledge the contribution of Thames Reach in helping homeless people in London move into secure accommodation and stable employment. Thames Reach is at the forefront of a broad movement recognising that addressing homelessness effectively requires joining-up services – services to address the full range of problems often faced by homeless people – from lack of skills and qualifications to mental health problems and drug and alcohol dependencies. 

The ‘Adults facing Chronic Exclusion’ pilots are a cross-department initiative jointly funded by my Department, which has committed £1.5 million over the next three years, together with the Home Office, Communities and Local Government and the Department of Health. Thames Reach is running one of the twelve pilots, specifically addressing employment needs of homeless people.

My Department has commissioned the Institute of Employment Studies to carry out an evaluation. I look forward to seeing the results, and to being able to draw important lessons about how we can foster closer links between a wide range of agencies, including Jobcentre Plus.

I also welcome and support the Thames Reach Grow Project, helping homeless people into work by offering employment in the homelessness sector itself, having reviewed the employment policies to eliminate barriers which prevent homeless people from applying successfully. I strongly support the approach. It sets a good example to all employers. I will be interested to hear your conclusions today about the potential of the approach, and I will be keen to be kept informed on how the Grow project and similar initiatives progress.

CLG New Places of Change Programme

I am pleased that my colleagues in the Department for Communities and Local Government have committed a further £70 million of capital funding over the next three years to the ‘New Places of Change’Programme, to build on the success of ‘Hostels Capital Improvement’. 

Caroline Flint at DCLG recently announced her Department would support Thames Reach in a new employment academy for London through ‘New Places of Change’. It should help hundreds of rough sleepers and homeless people into education, training and employment. It will include employment advice, classroom-based activities, skills training and a restaurant run as a social enterprise helping homeless people learn new skills. It will also provide business start-up advice and fund training, and I hope it will prove to be a very impressive model.

DWP/Jobcentre Plus support and provision

Many here work closely with people from across my Department – and in particular with Jobcentre Plus. In London, for example, you may work with the Jobcentre Plus London Homeless Partnership Team which undertakes valuable outreach services right across the capital.

The journey for each homeless person will be different. We need to work together to provide the right kind of tailored support. For example, progress2work and its complementary sister programme, Link-up, are dedicated to helping back to work people with a history of drugs or alcohol misuse, or those who are homeless or ex-offenders, or those who fall into several or sometimes even all those categories.

Targeted initiatives like these are key to helping us achieve our overarching target of an 80 percent employment rate – up from just under 75 percent today, itself one of the highest employment rates we have ever had. The tightness of the labour market today – the fact that this month’s employment figures showed the highest number of people in work we have ever had in Britain – that means employers recognise that they have to be prepared to look wider than in the past to find the people they need. That is what gives us an unprecedented opportunity. It won’t be easy – to achieve it we need to be very focused on the target, and all work closely and effectively together. 

Local Employment Partnerships

Through Jobcentre Plus Local Employment Partnerships, a growing number of employers – recognising the need to look a little wider – have signed up to recruit disadvantaged jobseekers. The partnerships are based on a simple deal in which Jobcentre Plus gets disadvantaged jobseekers ready for work, and employers with vacancies give them a fair shot at getting a job.

So, for example, I visited in February the Wilton petrochemicals complex on Teesside.  At the moment, 5,000 people work there, but they envisage that number expanding by 50 percent in the next few years – and they signed a Local Employment Partnership with Jobcentre Plus while I was there to help meet their needs. Just 3,000 people have gone into work through partnerships so far, but our aim is that 250,000 will have done so by the end of 2010. And the employers I have spoken to, acknowledging that taking on a disadvantaged jobseeker, someone who may have been out of work for a long time through ill health, does require more effort, say also that the effort is well worth it because of the commitment and enthusiasm they gain from the employees recruited in this way. I met someone from Marriott Hotels in Glasgow who made that point specifically about people who had come from homelessness.

Flexible New Deal

As another important step, we will introduce next year a new regime to help unemployed people on Jobseeker’s Allowance back into work. The approach, common to all groups, has been developed by learning from the successes of the New Deal.  At six months unemployment, customers will enter the ‘Gateway’, giving them regular interviews with a Personal Adviser and their own action plan with positive steps to overcome difficulties getting in the way of returning to work. 

Homeless people, however, will be able to opt to join the Gateway immediately on making a claim, rather than wait six months. Those still without work after 12 months of unemployment will enter the Flexible New Deal, a programme of support delivered by local providers, which may be in public, private or voluntary sectors, tailored to individual needs. 

Pathways to Work

For people on benefits with health conditions and disabilities, there has been a transformation in the support on offer over the last 10 years. We have moved to a much better position now, where my Department actively supports these people in their aspirations to work. 

Between October 2003 and April 2007, Pathways to Work pilots helped more than 64,000 people into work. And we have committed over a billion pounds for the next three years to extend the scheme nationally. In a majority of areas Pathways will be delivered by private and voluntary sectors.

Personal Advisers will offer dedicated support to customers as well as a gateway to a range of additional help. Where appropriate, clients will have access to our effective and innovative Condition Management Programmes.

DWP Commissioning Strategy

Last month we published our Commissioning Strategy, a new approach to sourcing, procuring and managing employability provision, the services we shall be calling on in the flexible New Deal and in Pathways. To secure the best possible outcome for every customer, we see private and third sector organisations – including faith-based organisations – alongside the public sector having a key role in delivering more specialised support, offering scope for more innovation and imagination.

The Strategy is a significant milestone in Welfare Reform, providing a comprehensive vision of the way we will work with providers. It takes us away from ‘top-down’ control, devolving initiative and innovation to the front-line.

And there will be more active customer involvement. In future, the experience of individuals and employers will help shape our programmes. 

Benefit reform

We know we need to make changes to the benefit system. From October, we are introducing a new integrated and simplified benefit, the ‘Employment and Support Allowance’, to replace Incapacity Benefits for new customers. It will be accompanied by a new work capability assessment, focusing on what a person can do in work.

And from April 2010 all those who started an Incapacity Benefit claim before October this year will be required to take a Work Capability Assessment, ensuring a robust but fair test of eligibility. The aim is no longer as in the past to abandon people on benefit, but instead to provide active help so that people can move into work.

In the past we underestimated what people with health impairments could do.  It used to be felt that only people who were 100 percent fit should be in work.  Dame Carol Black’s report two weeks ago emphasised that being in work is good for health, rather than injurious to health, and it’s clear that we need a cultural change in how we handle ill health among working age people, alongside our reforms to the welfare system.

We have simplified delivery of Housing Benefit to those paying daily for hostel accommodation. From next month, we will be able to handle third party deductions sooner for hostel residents facing eviction because they have fallen into arrears with service charges. This will reduce the risk of eviction and help reduce the debt owed to hostels. 

Next week also sees the national introduction of the Local Housing Allowance, providing a simpler and fairer way of calculating Housing Benefit and simplifying the multiple rules and restrictions facing Housing Benefit customers in the private sector. Where possible, payments of Housing Benefit will be made to the tenant, rather than to the landlord. 

We are also developing proposals to change radically how Housing Benefit is paid to people in temporary accommodation. This will be based as far as possible on Local Housing Allowance principles, and help to ensure customers in temporary accommodation are charged reasonable levels of rent.

Conclusion

We have made good progress over the past decade in tackling poverty and promoting social inclusion. But there is a lot more still to do, and homeless people are among those who need us to do a good deal more.

On behalf of the Government, I would like to thank all the organisations represented here for the contribution you are making. I hope we can all work together in the period ahead to achieve ambitions for homeless people that I know every one of us here shares.

Thank you.