WEDNESDAY 29 APRIL 1998

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

  200. I was not going to come back, but I was goaded into it; I was so hurt at the suggestion that I was being cynical whereas in fact I was merely being sceptical. The figures that I have before me give me, I think, some grounds to be sceptical. I am growing more sceptical the less inclined you are, Secretary of State, to give figures or to tie yourself down to dates to achieve those figures on set targets and the figures that I have got—admittedly yours will be more up to date than mine—that is, between October and January, suggest a remarkable consistency in pattern in the way in which people are responding to the scheme, suggesting that the percentage of people who had interviews following the letters being sent out started at 23.4 per cent, went to 24.4 per cent and then down to 20.8 per cent and finally rallied to 22.6 per cent. Those who got jobs started at about 5 per cent, went to 6.9 per cent, then 6.2 per cent and then 5.5 per cent. It suggests a kind of clustering of figures around certain levels. It does not suggest an incremental process which is building exponentially in the way in which you suggest, Secretary of State. So I am a little sceptical about that and I would be interested to hear your reaction? Finally, I also worry, given that you have recently—or today, I think it is—launched these new pilot schemes on the £750 training grants, given that there were pilot schemes before the New Deal for Lone Parents as a whole and given you are not prepared to tell us what targets you are setting for it, given that you are prepared to extend it nationwide without looking to see whether it meets the targets which you have in mind or waits for the evaluation? I am also interested to know what criteria you will set for extending these other pilots and why indeed have pilot schemes if you are not going to wait for the results before going nationwide?
  (Rt. Hon. Harriet Harman) As far as the targets are concerned, it is not sensible—I am sure you will agree—to set targets before you have actually had the result of the evaluation, because you set the targets by working out what is achievable and therefore the order in which we are doing it, which is piloting, evaluating it, and then setting the targets is clearly the sensible thing to do it. I am sure you will agree. But the broad area in which targets will be set is about the number who actually are interviewed and number of those interviewed who get jobs. That is where the target criteria are clearly going to focus. As far as the piloting—we have not started today; I have actually announced it today by way of telling you about it, of the £10 million—those are not going to be introduced and up and running until January so that what we are doing is we are asking people to put in bids and we have to set up the process before it is established and then what that will tell us is how we best invest in in-work training. So there is nothing mysterious about this; it is a phased programme, evidence based policy making, working out what works and we are not being coy about the figures. We have published figures and that is why you will be able to read them out but we do not have the evaluation of the additionality point and we do know that the numbers are growing. There is sometimes a dip around the summer holidays, around Christmas holidays, but generally speaking it is still on an upward trend without giving you the absolute details of that trend, but to say that you will have to wait for the evaluation.

  201. It is a long way from being an exponential growth, is it not?
  (Rt. Hon. Harriet Harman) What I mean is that there is great potential on the basis of word of mouth as well as invitation and people understanding what this is. There has never been a New Deal for Lone Parents before. It takes a while before people work out that there is something on offer and therefore the process is not just going to be by virtue of sending out the letter. It is going to be word of mouth getting around that there is something new going on here.

  202. Finally, Secretary of State, you very kindly indicated that there would be broad targets set around the percentages getting interviews and the percentages getting jobs. May I press you one more time on where you would like to see those targets?
  (Rt. Hon. Harriet Harman) You mean what percentage levels?

  203. Broadly?
  (Rt. Hon. Harriet Harman) I do not think you actually finance £1 million worth of academic evaluation and then make up your own targets on the back of an envelope. That would be pointless.

  204. Personally, I would not spend the money without waiting for the evaluation, but that does not seem to be an impediment to the Government?
  (Rt. Hon. Harriet Harman) We are not going to set the targets before we have waited for the evaluation, but we do know that how the scheme works will be moulded dependent on the evaluation. One of the things that the evaluation is doing is that there are some different things going on in different areas. As you have heard, one of the things is that sometimes they put a date and time on the letter and others they do not. There have been controlled differences between the different areas to see how different things work and the evaluation is not to tell us whether we want a New Deal for Lone Parents—we have to have a New Deal for Lone Parents—the evaluation is about telling us what works best by way of a New Deal for Lone Parents and therefore of course we have the national roll out, but as we develop the programme we do it on the basis of an academic evaluation which tells us what works best.

  205. But we will have target figures in the Autumn then when the evaluation is done?
  (Rt. Hon. Harriet Harman) We will set target figures which are around the areas of what percentage come in for interview of those initially contacted and what percentage get jobs and it will be based on what looks possible as a result of the academic evaluation. I am sure you will agree that that is the sensible way of doing it.

  Mr Brady: Most interesting. Thank you.

  206. I have several questions just from evidence given us from the National Council for One Parent Families. It is slightly moving on to a different subject area, but the first has been raised with me by several people in my surgeries which is about people who are on benefit who are then seeking to go to College where it is assumed that they have student loans, even though they do not, and so that is taken into account. The assumption is that they have it and that affects their benefit entitlement. Is that an issue that has been raised with you?
  (Rt. Hon. Harriet Harman) I can answer it and I think perhaps Ms Bailey and Mr Cavey can answer it as well. Lone parents are not affected by the 16 hour rule. They can actually do full-time education and still claim Income Support, but often they do not know that and therefore they have to be able to be in a position to be told that. If there is a cost to the course that is not financeable by other means locally, then there is some money, up to a certain limit, as Mr Cavey said, to help with the cost of training in further education.

  207. As I understand it, though, the benefits assume that they have taken out a student loan to cover their costs. That is not something that has been raised with you?
  (Ms Bailey) Not at all, no.

  208. Right. Well I might raise that with them?
  (Rt. Hon. Harriet Harman) We have further answers to give you on student loans because Mr Brady asked as well, so we will get back to you on that.

  209. The other one that they raised was that many providers of State funded training do not appear to welcome lone parents on their programme and I wondered whether you had come across and similarly what resistance there is from employers about taking on lone parents, saying that they are clearly going to want more time off with the children, or for the providers that they are not going to be able to get jobs at the end of the day, so what is the point. Has there been that kind of resistance?
  (Ms Bailey) As far as training providers are concerned, Mr Cavey and I regularly go out into the area to meet with the training providers. Just yesterday one of the training providers actually offered an idea for a new type of course specifically aimed at lone parents so I do not think there is a problem at all with providers.
  (Mr Cavey) I think we would be seen as a two-way conduit between providers and lone parents. We need to find out about schemes that might be available; providers need to be able to get in there and be able to access lone parents to be able to sell their schemes to them and we can do that for them, so it is a sort of two-way process. However, as Ms Bailey said, we certainly have not had any reluctance from training providers to lone parents.
  (Rt. Hon. Harriet Harman) Do you want to say anything about employers, whether or not you have met any blind prejudice?
  (Mr Cavey) No, we have not. I have not met any blind prejudice. It is more subtle than that and of course I am not there when a client goes into a job interview, but I do ask them to give me feedback if they do go into a job interview, particularly if they are not successful, so that I may be able to give them some advice on how they could improve their performance in future. But of course if you have somebody putting information on an application form or CV we do not know whether it has been screened out at that stage, but I have never actually come across it.
  (Rt. Hon. Harriet Harman) Many of the employers that I have spoken to have taken the view that because lone parents have children depending on them, that does not make them unreliable employees; it makes them reliable employees. But one of the things that research has shown is that whilst lone parents demands about how much better off in work they are are quite low because they are working for lots of non-income reasons as well as lots of income reasons, one of the things that they do want to be clear of is where they are. They want security. They want to be knowing how long the job is going to last and such-like. But by the same token they are reliable employees because their children are depending on that income and they do not have a take it or leave it attitude. So I found employers very keen indeed to think of ways that they can change their shift patterns in order to enable lone parents to have that access to that part of the labour market that they have not had access to before. We also have had some Personal Advisers liaising with big employers locally and saying: "If you have a problem recruiting people and you cannot find enough people or you do not feel you have a big enough choice of people, why do you not think of running a shift that looks like this?" and have actually discussed with employers changing shift patterns.
  (Ms Bailey) I think that as well we would approach it from maybe a slightly different point of view. When we see people and they say: "We have an interview next Wednesday. I wonder what sort of questions they are going to ask", one of the things I personally will always say to them is: "Have ready in your own mind a plan of action, what you will do when your children are ill", so that they have the answers ready for the employers. It is the question that is always asked of a lone parent. It is not asked of a married mother or a married father; it is always asked of a lone parent, "What will you do when your child becomes ill". So you have to have in your own mind an action plan.
  (Rt. Hon. Harriet Harman) And what is the answer? What do they usually answer.
  (Ms Bailey) The answer is that you have this ready band of neighbours and relatives who will, at the drop of a hat, come round and look after your ailing child.

  210. One more question from me. We received some very interesting evidence yesterday from Professor Jamie Peck from the University of Manchester who has been surveying Welfare to Work programmes in the United States over a 30 year period and he was claiming that programmes like this one, the New Deal for Lone Parents, which wanted to encourage people to get into work fairly early only worked in buoyant economies and also only worked in those parts in the economy which are buoyant. In other words, where there is a concentration of unemployment, where the unemployment figures are the worst in the country, then you will have the most difficult job of getting women into work—fairly common sense really. Have you got this in mind in your planning for the programme or is it something that you have not taken into consideration?
  (Rt. Hon. Harriet Harman) Well, I think there is the issue of the jobs that are available in the economy and obviously we know that the jobs that are coming in, many of them part-time, many of them service sector, many of them are the sort of jobs which women have been likely to take up, but I think that one of the things that we are concerned to do with the New Deal for Lone Parents is equalise between the opportunities that married women have had in whichever area and lone parents, because what we found is that whilst in other parts of Europe married women are less likely to work than their lone parent counterparts, here married women are more likely to work and lone parents are less likely to work and more likely to depend on benefit. So it is a question of, in a way irrespective of what is going on in the labour market, the equality of access to the labour market, enabling lone parents to be in a more equal position compared to the position that married women are able to be in. Obviously part of our economic approach is to have steady growth in the economy, to have job creation, to have good regional development strategies so that we do not have just an average but we make sure that those areas which are particularly vulnerable are getting the levels of investment to create jobs. But part of our approach is to ensure that we have a job ready, properly educated and skilled workforce so that the economy can expand, so that we have a greater capacity in the economy. I will not mention the post-modern, endogenous growth theory, but that is the one.

  211. We are very grateful for that, that you will not mention it! Finally, the other evidence that we heard yesterday was that the very high quality programme which I know you were ambitious to run and you spoke glowingly about the quality of service which the Personal Advisers give. The higher the quality obviously the more effective throughout the whole range of opportunities, but this is going to be really quite expensive. Really, Welfare to Work programmes are not cheap. There is no sort of pot of gold that we get. Do the Government have this in mind?
  (Rt. Hon. Harriet Harman) It is not cheap to have a growing number of lone parents bringing up their children on Income Support. We ended up with more than £10 billion being paid to lone mothers with 2.2 million children entirely dependent on benefit with no other income and the figure is going up. So the alternative is not only expensive in benefit terms, but it is expensive in social terms, so we think it is very important that we tackle this, that we have a better income into those families. It will mean that there are fewer lone parents who are dependent solely on Income Support and that we turn the rising tide of Income Support figures, because what happened is that even when registered unemployment was going down, the number of lone parents on Income Support was going up and that is why even against a background of falling unemployment, we were having a growing number of workless households. Now what we are concerned about is children being brought up in households where no-one is in work. We are not just concerned about the unemployment register and therefore I think this programme is an investment in tackling the problems of workless households and we will see fewer lone mothers on Income Support and more of them in work and I want there to be as much focus on the Income Support figures when they are published quarterly as there has been on the unemployment figures. We should be looking at those with the interest that we have traditionally reserved for the unemployment figures.

  Chairman: Thank you very much. You have all been extremely patient and if I may say so, the Secretary of State is used to being questioned, but your two colleagues have been extremely good. Thank you very much indeed for giving such good evidence.