2. The Department’s objectives and strategy
Aim and objectives
The Department for Work and Pensions exists to promote opportunity and independence for all. It provides help to individuals and supports the country’s economic growth and social cohesion.
The Department helps individuals to achieve their potential through employment, to provide for themselves, their children and their future retirement. It works with others to combat poverty, both of aspiration and outcome.
1. To support this aim, the Department has a number of strategic objectives which aim to:
- ensure the best start for all children and end child poverty by 2020;
- promote work as the best form of welfare for people of working age1, while protecting the position of those in greatest need;
- combat poverty and promote security and independence in retirement for today’s and tomorrow’s pensioners;
- improve rights and opportunities for disabled people in a fair and inclusive society; and
- ensure customers receive a high quality service, including high levels of accuracy.
2. These objectives are underpinned by the Department’s Public Service Agreement which sets out specific targets that must be met.
The Department’s strategy
3. To achieve a fairer and more inclusive society, the Government is moving further away from a passive welfare system to one which encourages the development of potential and supports its realisation across people’s lives. This entails a preventative approach to social problems which involves supporting people to develop skills and financial assets, and to manage their health conditions throughout their lives.
4. Tackling the medium- and longer-term challenges facing society requires close working between this and other government departments, employers, healthcare providers, those providing opportunity through education and skills, as well as other stakeholders across the economic and social sectors.
5. The Department recognises that it needs to support people to achieve the best possible outcomes for themselves over the course of longer, active lives.
For the individual, outcomes are largely determined by experiences in earlier periods of their life.
For example:
- where parents, particularly lone parents, are out of work for prolonged periods, it increases the probability of poverty for their children;
- childhood poverty is a predictor of less successful outcomes in adult life, including inactivity and unemployment; and
- a pensioner’s retirement income is determined by patterns of working and saving during their working life.
6. The Department’s approach to supporting its customers across the lifecycle was set out in its Five Year Strategy Opportunity and security throughout life (Cm 6447 February 2005)2 and comprises the following key elements:
- more people in work, choosing to work longer and save more;
- supporting families and children; and
- security and dignity in retirement.
7. Equality for disabled people supports successful outcomes at each stage in the lifecycle.
Main elements of the Department’s strategy
8. The benefits of work – for individuals, families and society – are clear. Work is the surest way out of poverty and towards greater independence and inclusion. It is also the only way to meet the challenges of an ageing, and increasingly globalised society.
9. The success of the Government’s welfare to work reforms has been within a clear framework of rights and responsibilities, matching a strong economy with an enabling welfare state. In particular this has meant enhancing support for the unemployed through Jobcentre Plus and the New Deals, while extending employment policies for those traditionally seen as outside the labour market, like lone parents and those on incapacity benefits.
In the last year, the Department has:
- continued the rollout of Jobcentre Plus with over 700 fully integrated offices in operation, ensuring that everyone benefits from the improved support offered;
- further refined the Jobseeker’s Allowance regime, including piloting alternative approaches to delivery. Research shows that regular, frequent face-to-face contact is essential to helping people back to work, and that sanctions provide critical reinforcement of the rights and responsibilities agenda;
- continued to make work possible and make work pay for lone parents. Work-focused interviews and the New Deal for Lone Parents have been extended, with further support through the National Childcare Strategy, Minimum Wage and Tax Credits. The Department is continuing to build on its success by piloting financial measures to assist with work search and provide in-work support;
- begun testing new ways of using public procurement to promote race equality, and extending outreach services for ethnic minorities, focused on non-working partners in low income households in the cities with the highest ethnic minority populations (to be delivered by Jobcentre Plus);
- extended its Pathways to Work programme for people with health conditions and disabilities. Early evidence is encouraging, with an increase of around eight percentage points in the number leaving benefits in the first six months of their claim. The Department has also continued its current employment programmes for disabled people including New Deal for Disabled People; Workstep; Remploy; Access to Work; and Workprep; and
- launched a National Guidance Campaign in May 2005 to enhance employers’ awareness of, and ability to adopt, non-ageist practices such as flexible employment and retirement opportunities to improve the recruitment, training and retention of older workers.
10. More needs to be done to provide a welfare state that enables people to escape poverty and long-term dependency. The Green Paper A New Deal for Welfare: Empowering People to Work3 sets out how the Department will build on its success and make progress towards the long-term aim of an employment rate equivalent to 80 per cent of the working-age population.
11. To support families and children, the Department’s strategy is to:
- extend the work-focused interview programme by introducing mandatory action plans for all lone parents, and quarterly work-focused interviews for those lone parents with children aged 14 and over;
- pilot New Deal Plus for Lone Parents in five Jobcentre Plus Districts from April 2005, bringing together the existing pilots (including Worksearch Premium, In-work Credit and Extended School Childcare), supported by a range of other measures into a coherent package of support to enhance the existing New Deal for Lone Parents/ work-focused interviews model and encourage more lone parents to participate in the New Deal. A further two pilots, one in Scotland and one in Wales, are planned from October 2006;
- through the 10 Year Childcare Strategy, provide good quality, affordable, flexible early education and childcare, which meets the needs of working parents, for children between the ages of 3 and 14 years. To support this aim the Government is putting in place a network of 3,500 Sure Start Children’s Centres for pre-school children by 2010, and Extended Schools for school-age children; and
- implement the Child Support Agency’s Operational Improvement Plan to improve the Agency’s performance while work to redesign future policy and delivery arrangements is undertaken.
12. For pensioners, the Department’s strategy is to:
- tackle pensioner poverty by increasing the take-up of Pension Credit and working with partners to help pensioners access the full range of financial and other help available to them;
- improve the security of, and bolster confidence in, private pensions, to enable people to make informed choices about their retirement, and provide opportunities for a more flexible retirement;
- drive forward effective pensions protection and regulation, building on the foundations of the Pensions Act 2004 through the Pension Protection Fund, the Financial Assistance Scheme and the Pensions Regulator; and
- promote individual responsibility and raise awareness of pension provision among people of working age through the Informed Choice programme.
13. The Pensions Commission, led by Lord Turner of Echinswell, was established following the Government’s Pensions Green Paper in 2002 to review the UK private pension system and long-term savings, and make recommendations for change. The Commission delivered its second report4 in November 2005.
14. It highlighted the challenge posed by increasing life expectancies and the need for people to save more to provide security for their retirement. In addition, the Pensions Commission analysis underlined the importance of the measures already being promoted to give individuals the choice as well as the opportunity to stay in work longer.
15. To raise awareness of the choices ahead and to build as broad a consensus as possible around the way forward, the Department launched the National Pensions debate, culminating in National Pensions Day on 18 March, when over 1,000 people across the UK took part in a deliberative discussion on the pensions challenge and the Commission’s options for reform. The Government will shortly set out its response to the Commission’s recommendations in a White Paper.
16. To improve rights and opportunities for disabled people, the Department’s strategy is to:
- implement the provisions of the Disability Discrimination Act 2005 and take forward related work to deliver enhanced civil rights for disabled people, including sponsoring the Disability Rights Commission and ensuring that institutional support for disability rights will be maintained in the planned Commission for Equality and Human Rights;
- drive forward the long-term, cross-government programme of work to improve outcomes for disabled people, including implementing the recommendations of the Strategy Unit report Improving the Life Chances of Disabled People5;and
- create new mechanisms for involving disabled people throughout the policy making and service delivery process.
17. To ensure customers receive a high-quality service, the Department’s strategy is to:
- move to more efficient ways of communicating, transform the Department’s operations, continue to tackle fraud and error, and simplify the benefit system;
- make changes to the Child Support Agency’s structure and processes to bring about reductions in uncleared cases, faster clearance of applications and increased levels of compliance;
- introduce significant improvements in the administration of Housing Benefit and the way in which the Department works with local authorities;
- improve the quality of service and reduce the complexity of claiming benefits by:
- tailoring its services to its customers so that it is able to provide the right level of support for their needs;
- supporting its staff to deliver performance at higher levels of productivity; and
- transforming its supporting operations to be as effective and efficient as possible.
Simplifying the Benefits System
18. The Department accepts the need for a simpler, more transparent benefit system that makes it easier for customers to access the support they need when their circumstances change, and to help them move on and into work where they can.
19. As announced in the Five Year Strategy, the Department is exploring and developing ways to tackle benefit complexity while continuing to protect social security expenditure. In doing so, the intention is to continue providing the best support for helping people into work while protecting the position of those in greatest need. This difficult balance was recognised by the National Audit Office in its report Dealing with the complexity of the benefits system6, published on 18 November 2005, which equally acknowledged that the Department has already taken a number of steps to tackle complexity.
20. In response to the report the Department has, in addition, established a Benefit Simplification Unit to focus and take forward its efforts to simplify the benefit system.