WEDNESDAY 29 APRIL 1998

RT HON HARRIET HARMAN, MS ANN BAILEY AND MR MARC CAVEY

  123. Secretary of State, you are very welcome. Thank you very much indeed for so readily agreeing to come and give evidence to the Committee. We have been looking forward to it; it is an important session. I do not know whether you want to make an initial statement yourself and also to introduce your colleagues?
  (Rt. Hon. Harriet Harman) Thanks very much. I am very grateful for the opportunity to come at this very early stage in the New Deal for Lone Parents and just tell you how it is going so far and perhaps initially explain why it is so important for the Government. As you know, we have got welfare reform around the two principles of work for those who can and security for those who cannot and we have got a number of new deals and I know that your Committee is paying close attention to what the objectives for those new deals are and how they are working out in practice. The New Deal for Lone Parents is distinctive from the New Deal for the Young Unemployed and the Long Term Unemployed because it is completely new. Previously the expectation was that lone mothers would remain, as far as public policy was concerned, on Income Support support until their youngest child was 16 and that all we did was simply check up that they were still living at the same address, receiving their Income Support. What we are doing with the New Deal for Lone Parents is actually inviting them in once their youngest child is five to meet a Personal Adviser and to discuss what the possibilities are for them to work and our objectives here are to extend opportunities to those who have not had them previously, not had help and support, and if they are able to be in work then that makes sure that they are no longer a workless household, that their children grow up in a household where someone is working, that they are likely to be better off in work than they can ever be on benefit. So it helps us tackle the concern of children being brought up on a low income. I have brought with me today Marc Cavey and Ann Bailey who are pioneering New Deal Personal Advisers and I would just like to take the opportunity of saying to the Committee that we simply said to the Personal Advisers "Go out there and do it. Cut through any red tape. Work out what you think needs to be done" and they have shown tremendous initiative and enthusiasm, so I have really plunged them in it by bringing them here with me today because I am so proud of the innovative work that they have done. I also very much welcome the interest this Committee is showing and I know that you will continue to show and to bring new ideas onto the agenda which you have already been doing.

  124. Thank you very much indeed. Well, I will launch in and then I am sure my colleagues will follow me fairly quickly. First of all, the budget was helpful in one or two respects, but the National Council for One Parent Families suggested that the impact of the budget upon access to education and training for lone parents would be, and I quote, "slight or negligible". Do you think that was a fair comment?
  (Rt. Hon. Harriet Harman) I think the primary focus of the budget in terms of this New Deal is about help into work and certainly I make no apology for that because it is the issue of work and income from work which enables people to be not on benefit and better off and not being a workless household. So I think the centrality of work in terms of new opportunities for lone parents is very much there. But I do not think that that is because we have lost sight of the importance of education and training and qualifications. We want lone parents to be able to get into work, but also to be able to get on in their work and that is why the budget made available an extra £10 million to augment the £20 million for training that was already in the New Deal for Lone Parents. Of course lone parents already have access to adult education and there was a great deal of investment from the budget in education and training for adults.

  125. We welcome very much the statement that you yourself made during the course of the budget debate. I wonder whether you are yet in any position to give us more information about how the £10 million is going to be allocated?
  (Rt. Hon. Harriet Harman) I think it is fair to say that the parallel interest that the Committee was taking in the issue of educational opportunities and training opportunities for lone parents, parallel to my own, was extremely helpful and we have got this extra £10 million. What I am able to tell you today is that we think there are two ways in which we are going to be spending it and both of them are going to be by way of piloting because we have to find out what works before we invest more. So the sums at the moment are just sums which are going to finance pilots. One of the things that we are going to do is pilot extending the opportunities to lone parents under the New Deal of a £750 in work training grant. You will know that is available for the young unemployed, but we are now piloting to see how much help and support it is for lone parents to have access through their work to a £750 in work training grant. Because one of the things that the New Deal for Lone Parents has done has attracted a lot of interest and support amongst employers and voluntary organisations and training providers, instead of saying we are just going to pilot the £750 training grant, we are also saying—we are issuing a challenge—to those organisations to bid for money to work with us in the New Deal to extend training and other opportunities to lone parents in work. So it is going to be a two-part process, some of which is the straightforward training grant and others which are the bidding process; we will see the partnerships come up and how we can help. I do not know whether or not at this stage Mr Cavey or Ms Bailey want to say anything about the issue of when lone parents come in whether they want training, or whether they want work and how they see the way forward? I do not know whether you just want to pitch in there?
  (Ms Bailey) I think a lot of the time people come to us who maybe have not worked for a very long time and need the self-confidence more than anything else. They have not worked in an office environment for maybe 10, 15 years and a lot has changed in that time. So it is a matter of self-confidence rather than skills. I think what we are finding is that some of the training providers already are coming to us with ideas for personalised training for women returners to work and specifically for lone parents.

  126. So may I just ask then if you are suggesting that as part of your function as a Personal Adviser you are able to point the lone parent in the direction of courses which are almost tailor-made to enhance their own personal esteem and confidence?
  (Ms Bailey) Yes.

  127. That would be a help if that could be done?
  (Ms Bailey) Yes, absolutely.

  128. Thank you. Did your other colleague want to add to that?
  (Mr Cavey) I just wanted to confirm what Ms Bailey said. We do see a lot of lone parents who have not worked for a long time because they have been bringing up their family, but another part of what we have done is that we have got together with local training providers to actually try and set up courses aimed specifically at lone parents. For example, there is one in Croydon which is called pre-vocational training to give them confidence and help them assess what direction they want to go in and which they run between 10.00 and 2.00 Monday to Friday and they break for school holidays and it is very convenient for the lone parent to go to.

  129. May I just ask the Secretary of State; these courses which your two colleagues are mentioning, which we welcome very much indeed, is that out of existing resources or will those be developed out of the new resources that you are talking about?
  (Rt. Hon. Harriet Harman) A combination of both. Sometimes there has been provision which would have been very useful for lone parents but they did not know about it and therefore when the Personal Adviser has invited them in, they have been able to tell them. Many lone parents would not have known about the availability of the sort of course Mr Cavey is talking about, which is absolutely within school hours and term time, and we are actually using these and giving better access to lone parents to existing courses, but we are also, with the combination of the £10 million extra from this budget and the £20 million within the existing budget, going to provide extra training opportunities. I think one of the things which has come out of what Ms Bailey and Mr Cavey have said is that there are two reasons sometimes why lone parents might want to do pre-work training. I think the issues about in-work training are very well understood and that is why we want to have good investment in in-work training, so they are in work and they are getting on in their work and that is what the £750 is for. But talking to lone parents it is clear to me that some of them have worked before they had their children, they know their skills are out of date, they have had quite a good position in the world of work and they simply know they have to get a particularly up-dated qualification in order to get back in at that level. The Personal Advisers can help them to work out where to get that, how to finance that. Others are doing training by way of what Mr Cavey alluded to which is that they are trying to work out how confident they are to be outside the world of the home and their children and sometimes you can take on the responsibility of a training course where the responsibility is largely to yourself in a way that you do not feel you could undertake the responsibility to an employer. So sometimes training is very specifically about skills and qualifications and partly it is a kind of stepping stone of going from the world of where you are only bringing up your children, to where you are bringing up your children and you are doing something outside the home as well. It is important that we do not lose sight of that as well.

  Chairman: I am going to bring Yvette Cooper in and then Mr Brady, but before I do so may I just say that the £750 grant you have announced this afternoon is particularly welcome, because one of the problems that we foresaw as a Committee was that we might get a lot of women back into work but they might be locked in the low pay sector and that would not enable them to get out of poverty. It struck me that training in the workplace, while they were actually at work, was going to be a vehicle to actually enhance their employability and enable them to get better jobs and then leave those jobs vacant for someone to come in as their first opportunity. So that is particularly welcome, if I may say so.

  130. I just want to quote some figures. If you compare women in general with single mothers, firstly those with degrees: 84 per cent of women withdegrees overall are in work and 88 per cent of single mothers with degrees are in work. If you look then at women with no qualifications: 47 per cent of women with no qualifications are in work and 22 per cent of single mothers with no qualifications are in work. Do you think that those figures show that qualifications matter even more to single parents in terms of determining whether or not they are able to work than they do for the population as a whole?
  (Rt. Hon. Harriet Harman) They are certainly a very strong indicator that with the situation as it was before the New Deal for Lone Parents that you were likely to have all the things that enabled you to get into the labour market as a lone parent if you have higher qualifications, but I think one of the things that the New Deal for Lone Parents does is it equalises the situation so that even if you do not have a very high level of skills you have the advice and information about how to get into work and even if you are not able to land, right away, a very highly paid job which might make it well worth the risk, if you like, of moving off benefits and into work which if you have a degree level is a much lower risk because you are likely to be able to get a much higher income right away, but the Personal Advisers are able to help lone mothers, whose earnings might be low to start with, move across that gap from being in benefit into work. So I think those figures are particularly acute because of the absence of Personal Advisers. I do think that they show that we need—every single set of statistics that you look at show that the more education and qualification you can have the better off you are in the labour market across the board and the more relatively disadvantaged you are, the more important it is. But I think those figures tell an important story.

  131. So what you are saying is that the purpose of the New Deal is to shift the single mothers with no qualifications from the position where only 22 per cent of them are in work to effectively a comparable situation to women in general for whom the 47 per cent with no qualifications are in work?
  (Rt. Hon. Harriet Harman) It is to help extend opportunities where there were none before. One of the things that has been very marked is that even at the same level of qualifications, married women with a partner who is working are much more likely to be able to work than a lone parent with the same qualifications. So there is something about being on your own, with the responsibility of children, without help and advice, depending solely on benefits which is where your security is. It is about moving in that transition; it is not just about lacking the qualifications. That is not to take away from the points that I am sure we all agree with. I do not know if you want to say anything, Mr Cavey, about or around the issue of the reason why lone mothers are not working and how much the issue of their educational qualifications is a pertinent issue? I mean, the ones who come to see you, why are they not working? Is it because they do not have enough qualifications or are there other things going on?
  (Mr Cavey) I think to a certain extent there is a background about the expectation to work. A lot of lone parents have actually said to me that they felt in the past that even if they wanted to go to work they come into a Job Centre or an Employment Service Office and people have said: "Oh, a lone parent. We cannot help you or anything". So there is the expectation of going to work but I think if you have qualifications it is going to help you. But, for example, we may get people coming in who have had office jobs in the past and they come in and say: "Oh, I have not got any computer knowledge" and part of what we try to do is give them a little bit of confidence and say to them: "Well, no, to be perfectly honest if you want to go back to work in an office you will have to get some IT skills, but you do not have to have a brain the size of a planet to work a computer necessarily". This is why it is good that if there are lots of short courses, pre-vocational courses, which take people through the basic steps and then people can get a handle on that sort of thing and go off and do a course in computers which might be ten weeks but will give them computer literacy. They will be in a position then where they might be able to start applying for jobs as administrators, administration officers, clerical assistants, whatsoever. That is what we want to see.

  132. Do you think there is a tendency or there has been in the past, to take the skill needs of men more seriously than the skill needs of women to the extent that unemployed men are seen as having a skills problem and need training and need education, whereas unemployed women are seen as having a children problem and it is the children that are their problem, it is the skills that is the men's problem and that as a result women who do not have qualifications have tended to do less well in terms of getting access to education help?
  (Rt. Hon. Harriet Harman) I certainly think that there has not been enough focus on the need for equality of opportunity for lone parents to get into work and to get into education and training, but I think the problem has been that as far as public policy is concerned, it is not a question that public policy got it wrong and thought it should address itself to childcare and failed to address itself to training, it addressed itself to neither because it did not address itself to the desire by some lone parents to work. Certainly therefore bringing the issue of the opportunities for lone parents to work on to the agenda has raised the issue of childcare and the budget has put extra investment into that and we are going to have the national childcare strategy and the childcare tax credit, so we are addressing that. But there are also very important issues of access to training and education which we are addressing at the same time. So I think we are addressing both for the first time because we are no longer blind to the fact that lone parents, even though they are not registered as unemployed and required to make themselves available for work, are still nevertheless often wanting to work.

  133. When single parents come in to talk to the advisers and have their first encounter, is there any guidance on you to help them into jobs in the short term where actually perhaps in five years they might be better off if they took a training course first or they got qualification for it first?
  (Ms Bailey) No, not at all. I think we rely much more on what the lone parent wants. Some come into us without any qualifications, but just want to go back to work. They do not want to go on the training course and you cannot shift them from that view. Others, yes, they want to go on a year long training course, others want to go on a short term one. I do not think there is any pattern that they follow, but we are very much guided by what the lone parent wants.

  134. What kinds of education and training things are there that they can already access that they simply do not have the information about?
  (Ms Bailey) There are the services that are offered by the Employment Service—the Training for Work schemes—and a lot of lone parents are not aware that they can go to local education authorities and get most of the courses for nothing because they are on Income Support.
  (Rt. Hon. Harriet Harman) I think one of the things that I would like to see progress is for the TECs nationally to know in each area what is the proportion of courses that are available flexibly so that we can be confident that in some areas there are lots of courses which are appropriate, in terms of the times they run, for lone parents. In others we will see that actually the courses are not organised in that way and therefore progress needs to be made. At the moment there really is no national picture on that. The Personal Advisers on the ground know the picture because they find it out by all different ways; they just contact people and find out what is going on. But it should not really be like that and we cannot progress public policy on that basis. Because we know that there is this skills gap amongst lone parents and we want to make sure that we can address it, we have to make sure that there are family-friendly courses available for them to do and that means at least knowing where they are and progressing with that.

  135. I am very glad you said that, Secretary of State, because I was going to press you on just that point after Mr Cavey had spoken because we received evidence in previous sessions that really there were insufficient courses available in the family-friendly kind of way. One, there is insufficient childcare in Colleges of Further Education often; you know we may be dealing with it for people going into work—the budget has made a big contribution there—but in Colleges of Further Education there is still a lack of childcare which will enable many of the people that you are trying to help to actually go for the education and training that you perceive and many of the courses, so we were told, are not really designed to the convenience of parents. I know that is probably the responsibility of another Department but I am sure you will be using your influence within the Cabinet to try and get that particular problem addressed?
  (Rt. Hon. Harriet Harman) We certainly will and the more evidence that you have in that respect, that comes out in front of the Committee, the more this brings forward an issue which has previously been too far hidden from the public policy agenda out there and it brings forward the evidence on which we are more than ready to act. We put an extra £5 million as part of the national childcare strategy, out-of-school clubs initiative, into Further Education Colleges to actually support childcare and within the New Deal for the Lone Parents there is some money that the Personal Advisers can use to pay for childcare before a lone parent gets into work and therefore that can be childcare whilst the lone parent is training, but it is a combination of childcare to support a lone parent in education or training, plus education and training which is flexibly available so that it matches term time and school time.

  136. There is one other point, before I bring Mr Brady in, that Ms Bailey mentioned which I was delighted to hear, but I would like to hear it from you, if I may say so. I think that Ms Bailey gave the impression that there was no pressure within the system to get women into work, at any price almost. That there was no pressure coming from any direction to say: "Ah, we have to prove that this is working by getting them into jobs. They could go into courses of one kind". Now is that the way you want the system to work?
  (Rt. Hon. Harriet Harman) This is basically a New Deal For Lone Parents and it is entirely voluntary and therefore it would not be any good Ms Bailey or Mr Cavey having a kind of secret plan for them, that I give them a secret plan that they foist on lone parents. This programme has been uniquely based on working out where the lone parents want to go and simply offering the help and support. I knew that many lone parents wanted to work and there was no help and support for them. Mr Cavey mentioned that lone parents have said to him that they might have tried to work before but met a brick wall and that the authorities did not respond to that, so we knew that work was an issue. I think something like 9 per cent of those who have either got work or training, 9 per cent have gone into training which is actually more than we thought; we thought it would be less. So the vast majority have gone into work and about 9 per cent have chosen to go into training, but that is not because there is any blueprint whatsoever. There are no targets which we have laid down for the New Deal Advisers as to where they should send people. It is about opportunities in the best sense.

  137. And you have set your face against any element of compulsion in this programme?
  (Rt. Hon. Harriet Harman) It is an entirely voluntary programme and actually when we did our costings and made our initial request to the Treasury about how many people we thought would come in for interview, we were about more or less right. We thought it would start relatively slowly because it is an entirely new programme, but the lone parents have been coming in very much in the numbers that we thought they would. So we feel we are well on target in a very pioneering, innovative programme.

  138. Secretary of State, the figures I think came out a day or two ago about the number of mature students going into higher education which showed a 7 per cent drop. Do you have any estimate of the number of lone parents who are going into higher education? Has the drop been of a similar percentage or greater or less?
  (Rt. Hon. Harriet Harman) I am afraid I am not completely familiar with what that figure you quoted is based on. Certainly we are looking across education, higher education, further education and employment to evaluate what the current situation is and what the trends are. I will see if I can find out what the specific answer to that question is. But we are talking about operating from quite a low base line here. I think that we are only seeing the figures moving forward. I cannot conceive of the idea that there should be a drop back, because what we are doing is contacting people who really have had no access into the system of either work or training or education before, so we only expect to see plus signs in our figures for lone parents whether it is work or training. The only minus sign is that there is going to be fewer having to live on Income Support because they are going to be in work and claiming Family Credit.

  139. My understanding from universities and other institutions of higher education is that the thing that is driving this reduction is the introduction of tuition fees. Surely whatever the New Deal for Lone Parents may do is set against that in the context of higher education; obviously there are other areas that you are dealing in. Would you not expect a similar proportion of decline in lone parents going to higher education?
  (Rt. Hon. Harriet Harman) I will have to get back to you on that one.