06 March 2008
Rt Hon Stephen Timms MP
Minister of State for Employment and Welfare Reform
Jobcentre Plus National Conference
Hilton Metropole
Thursday, 6th March 2008
[Check against delivery]
I am delighted to be able to speak to you today. I want to take the opportunity to reflect on the successes of the recent past, and on the challenges ahead.
For me, the role of Jobcentres is at the heart of what a Government like ours needs to do. We are committed to building a strong economy and a strong society – both of those goals at the same time – and Jobcentres are key institutions helping us do it. I have lived in my constituency in East London for thirty years, and I saw the consequences of sky high unemployment in the 1980s as jobs disappeared after the closure of the docks. As a local Councillor, I observed how getting a job was the opportunity above all others which could transform people’s lives for the better. And I put in train initiatives to bring jobs back into East London which – according to my version of history – led in due course to the decision to bring the Olympic Games to East London in 2012.
After the General Election in May 1997, I became Parliamentary Private Secretary to Andrew Smith, the then holder of my present post.
Our first priority was to complete the design and implementation of the New Deal, working with the then head of the Employment Service, Leigh Lewis. I know many of you played a key part in New Deal delivery in 1998.
The New Deals have been hugely successful, in making our society stronger, and our economy stronger. They have helped more than 1.8 million people into work and lifted 600,000 children out of poverty. They helped to transform attitudes to welfare: the strengthened framework of rights and responsibilities has given benefit claimants access to the right support, but also placed on them a clear responsibility to seize the opportunities on offer.
We should do more to celebrate success. You and your colleagues can be very proud of the commitment to public service, the flair and enterprise which have delivered those positive outcomes. I want to hold a New Deal 10th anniversary celebration later this year and look forward to welcoming many of you – and your former customers – there.
The creation of Jobcentre Plus in 2002 also marked a key step in the development of the welfare state. Since the introduction of Jobcentre Plus, you have helped over 6.3 million people into new jobs and halved fraud and error. Immense progress has been made in a short time. The modern, professional and welcoming environment in jobcentres today is unrecognisable from the offices I remember from the late 1990s. Jobcentre Plus has rightly been commended by the National Audit Office for delivering the roll-out under budget and on time, earning a warm tribute from the Chairman of the Public Accounts Committee. “Other government projects”, he said, “should look at the successes that this project has had, and try to introduce the best practise lessons into their own work.” Commendations like that don’t come round often – and from that particular source they are rarer still!
Within just 5 years you successfully rationalised an estate of 1,500 offices and overhauled over 800 former Jobcentres and Social Security offices. You have created a network of Contact Centres winning external awards from the Contact Centre Industry, and a new network of Benefit Delivery Centres where we can drive up productivity and deliver benefits more efficiently. Greater use of telephony, and overcoming technical problems to achieve a now very impressive Jobcentre Plus capability, are delivering now very impressive customer service.
And you have done it while also successfully delivering very tough and difficult efficiency savings across the service. The stringent demands of the current spending review for your service left no room at all for coasting. For me as Chief Secretary, successful delivery on your part was key to the Government’s overall financial management. And you didn’t let us down.
I am an enthusiast for the potential for smart use of technology to improve public services. Jobpoint terminals were the first – and in my view still the best – example of a public service being transformed. They give much more information about far more jobs than the old postcards pinned to noticeboards, and they do it in a way that it is much more effective and more dignified too. That’s public service at its best.
It all adds up to a hugely radical transformation and modernisation of the citizen’s experience of job seeking and claiming benefits. That has underpinned successful employment outcomes for millions of people. It enabled me to announce as one of my first tasks in this new job that the number of people claiming incapacity benefit had fallen into the seven hundred thousands for the first time since June 1975. And it has established Jobcentre Plus’ reputation as one of the foremost public service delivery organisations in the OECD.
The new customer satisfaction survey underlines the point. The great majority of people are happy with the service they get from Jobcentre Plus. Lone parents and customers from non-white ethnic minority groups are more likely than average to have perceived an improvement in the quality of service. They are impressive results.
Further challenges lie ahead, but we have firm foundations to build on. In 1997 we had hopes, but now we have experience. Its time to build on the success of the New Deals, and redouble our efforts to get the most disadvantaged into work. We need some new approaches – and a further wave of reforms to ensure the system addresses today’s needs. We want to increase the employment rate to a historically high 80 per cent, up from the current rate just below 75 per cent. And Jobcentre Plus will again be at the heart of what needs to be done.
We understand today that many people on welfare are capable of much more than we have previously expected. We know that people in work are not just financially better off, but healthier and better off in themselves too. And, once in work, we want people to be able to progress. So we need to raise our expectations, and give people the support they need to achieve what they are capable of.
“Pathways to Work” has been a key breakthrough, signalling a big change of emphasis. Employment and Support Allowance, from October, will continue that change, helping people see, through the new medical advice, what they can do in the future, and figure out a way forward for themselves, rather than trapping them on benefit as the system has too often in the past. The new arrangements will turn things on their head with a new, robust, work-focused regime.
I am not pretending its going to be easy. Implementation of Employment and Support Allowance presents a very difficult operational challenge for Jobcentre Plus. But I know you will make it a success.
Lone parents have also lost out because as a society we have expected too little of them. The changes this year, and in the two years that follow, will lead many more lone parents to return to work or go into work for the first time, lifting many of their children up from below the poverty line. We are putting in place the support, including childcare, to ensure that lone parents can make the transition. I visited a beautiful new children’s centre in my constituency a couple of weeks ago – there will soon be over three thousand of them – and I spoke at the Royal Festival Hall earlier this week to almost 1,000 children’s centre leaders, urging them to work in partnership with you to make sure we get help to those parents we haven’t reached yet, to provide them with the job seeking help that they need.
Work with employers is also crucial. I was in the North East a couple of weeks ago. I visited the huge petrochemicals complex at Wilton on Teesside, employing 5,000 people today and expecting that to increase by 50% over the next five years. And the Nissan plant in Sunderland, the most productive car plant in Europe, currently exporting cars made and largely designed in Britain back to Japan, and selling them around the world faster than they can make them. They need to recruit 800 people by next month, to add a third shift and introduce round the clock manufacturing. Both those visits underlined the claim by the Engineering Employers Federation that there has been a renaissance in UK manufacturing over the past decade, and both employers signing up on my visit to Local Employment Partnerships, recognising that we have a shared interest in bringing local people out of long term unemployment and into the workforce. LEPs will be a big focus for us, a key instrument for bringing about the changes we need and for delivering to people the opportunities we want them to have.
We also need to make sure those we help into work can stay in their jobs, and then progress. Jobcentre Plus will play a central role in the new “Integrated Employment and Skills Service” from 2010, with the first pilot in the West Midlands starting in the autumn. This is a really important expansion of the mission of jobcentres, helping identify skills needs that are holding people back, and directing them to the providers best placed to help .
There will be a greater role for private and voluntary sector providers in some parts of the system. But Jobcentre Plus is also being asked to do more – and it will remain the successful public service delivery organisation at the heart of Britain’s welfare system. Some papers reported last week that we are proposing widespread privatisation of large parts of the benefit system. That is simply wrong. As David Freud’s review confirmed, Jobcentre Plus has delivered. We need it to continue doing so, in the public sector, extending employment and opportunity out to many more people yet.
We have a very strong and clear vision for the future of Jobcentre Plus, shared by Ministers, the Executive Team and Lesley and her Board. Jobcentre Plus will be pivotal, working more closely than ever with other delivery organisations: local authorities, Revenue and Customs, the Pension, Disability and Carers Service; the Learning and Skills Council; private and voluntary sector providers. A revitalised system, with JobCentre Plus at its heart.
Through the new set of Public Sector Agreements – a smaller set, more tightly focused on cross-Government priorities requiring departments to work together – we have underlined the importance of joining up policies and services. That is clear in the new three year plan for the Department, published last week.
I have seen real strength in the Jobcentre Plus people I have seen at work. I want just to focus for a moment, though, on Personal Advisers. Advisers have been one of the public service success stories of recent years. I said earlier, that commendations from the National Audit Office are few and far between, so it’s pretty remarkable that this morning I can quote two recent ones directed at you and your colleagues.
Words are powerful. It is true for our everyday lives. A comment from a family member, a friend, even a stranger first thing in the morning can set us up or knock us down for the rest of the day. With words we can encourage people who may not have been encouraged before by a Government official. With networking skills (again, mostly words) we can put people in touch with others who can help. With a vision for what can happen through the transforming impact of work – we can help people imagine a future that right now they cannot see. And it is a great privilege to be able to help in that way.
The NAO report on Personal Advisers, published a little over a year ago, highlighted the big contribution of advisers to the high UK employment rate and low unemployment rate. Advisers raise customers’ confidence, improve job-search skills and help people tackle barriers standing in their way. Ten years ago we didn’t know how to get people over those barriers. Today we have learned that – across a very wide portfolio of challenges – the answer is the committed and skilled advisers of Jobcentre Plus – personifying a new model for public service.
The role will be even more important as we work for 80 per cent employment, focusing on groups whose aspirations have been kept low by the way the system has worked in the past.
Under the Flexible New Deal, from next year, providers will be given greater freedom to tailor services to the individual. It is the outcome that counts. Advisers do a wonderful job, but sometimes that seems to be in spite of – rather than because of – the rules governing their work. The Secretary of State has asked Lesley Strathie to lead a review of how we might best use advisers’ discretion in tailoring services to meet people’s needs of citizens. I see great potential in that review and I know Lesley does too. We want a much stronger operational influence on policy. I hope you will all contribute.
We have come a long way over the past few years. I vividly remember soon after the 1997 election being despatched by Andrew Smith to deliver a speech at the Northern College in Barnsley to explain what we envisaged with the New Deal, not being quite sure whether I was going to be able to answer all the questions but discovering that in fact what we were planning exactly matched people’s hopes.
We have come a long way, but difficult challenges remain ahead. And they have to be successfully surmounted in a period when further efficiencies have to be delivered as well – staffing efficiencies not quite on the scale of those in this spending review, but very demanding nevertheless.
But the Department and Jobcentre Plus have developed very strong plans, and a very strong vision for the future. We will all need to work differently. Please tell me today and over the coming months what I can do to support you.
I want, on behalf of the whole Government, to thank you all for you work you are doing, for the achievements you have delivered already in building your world class organisation, and the leadership you have shown. I am looking forward immensely to working with you over this period ahead, to deliver the vision that all of us share.
Thank you.
