 Welcome to the 19th meeting of the Welfare Reform Committee in 2015. Can everyone make sure that mobile phones and other electronic devices are silent and switched to airplane mode? The first item on our agenda today is an evidence session on employment support, which is part of the committee's inquiry into the future delivery of social security in Scotland. We are going to split the session into two parts. The first panel will be employment support providers, and then the second part of the evidence session is around table of organisations that support clients in employment projects. I would like to welcome today Tanya Gilchrist, who is head of operations in Scotland for the Shore Trust, who is a work choice contractor, Alasdair Kerr, who is the head of quality and contract compliance momentum Scotland, who is also a work choice contractor, Paul DePollet, who is the director of ingious work, Kate Still, who is the co-chair of employment support Scotland, and Nicholas Young, who is the director of working links, a work programme prime contractor. Would any of you like to make an opening contribution to the committee before we go into a question session? Yeah, if you don't mind. I'm Kate Still, I'm from Employment Support Scotland, the co-chair along with Laurie Russell. Just to give you background to that organisation, it represents the provider base in Scotland. That's the private sector, third sector, voluntary sector, public sector. It's involving a real broad church. I should also note that in my day job, I work for Rathbone, which is a youth charity. We're involved in Employment Support Scotland because we offer services in terms of skills and employment. We think that it's a great opportunity to respond to the questions of the committee and to explain what might be important to committee members thinking about the future and the opportunity that the devolution of the programmes offers to the Scotland and a Scotland solution. That's really, just from that point of view, wanted to make those points clear. Hi, just a very quick introduction to those of you that are not familiar with working links. We're a public private voluntary sector organisation that has been supporting long-term unemployed in Scotland for 15 years and done that through a range of contracts from small community-based programmes right through to the current work programme that we deliver through six key partners, two from the third sector, two local authorities and two private sector partners. We deliver the work programme across Scotland and across a number of areas in England. We've been operating in Scotland for eight years. At that time, we've helped to support 44,000 people who are on long-term unemployment benefits and health and disability benefits into work. Like working links, we deliver the work programme in partnership with a range of other organisations from the private and voluntary sectors across Scotland. Last week, I don't know if any of you were able to either read the witness contribution last week or watch it, but we heard from our witnesses last week that one of the features that they had to contend with was essentially cold calling, where people who were trying to get back into work were told that they had to contact a number of companies to determine whether there were any vacancies. Now, it did strike me at the time that if they weren't being given a list of vacancies to inquire about, then if they are phoning small companies in their area and there are other unemployed people from that area being told to do the same thing, then it actually could become real nuisance phone calls for some of the companies in the area with a whole succession of unemployed people phoning them up to inquire about non-existent vacancies because that was a requirement of what they had to do as part of the work programme. Would any of you like to comment on that? I actually had the pleasure of sitting in the evidence session last week. I didn't quite recognise the way that that was presented. I think that it was maybe Dr Jake that suggested that she was asked a cold call between nine and five. It certainly has been a feature, nor will be a feature, of how we approach employers. We have a very robust employer engagement strategy and cold calling does not play a part of that. If anyone is on the programme, they will not be asked to phone employers to ascertain or to ask if there are any vacancies. They will only be directed to where there are vacancies. Certainly not in the manner that was suggested last week. We will have a range of approaches. Speculative approaches are to be encouraged, particularly when someone has been supported to the point where they are able to speak to local employers, but it would be a very targeted approach that we would support them on, not cold speculative way that was suggested last week. Speculative calls are to be encouraged, but not cold speculative calls. What is the difference? There would be targeted areas between employers that the individual had suggested. We would work with our employer team to identify. We would work with them or get them to the point where they were engaged enough to make those calls on their own. It is a very small proportion of our employer engagement strategy. If you are unemployed at the east end of Glasgow, where there is significant unemployment, and there are not many large employers left, you have to rely on either city centre jobs or some of the small companies or else jobs in the retail park. You are effectively all chasing the same small number of vacancies. How do you then filter that out so that the time of that individual who is looking for a job is used productively and is not merely almost like a challenge or a test to them that you will have to call in order to prove that you are really looking for work? I suppose that without being entirely obvious, I think that when you are out of work and you have been out of work for a very long period of time, which is the case for everyone that is on the work programme, then the task of getting back into work and rebuilding your confidence and your skills is not an easy one. There is a wide range of different support that needs to be available to people to recognise the fact that people have different attributes and different skills. We do have some code calling as part of our service offering. We have one of our 30-odd workshops that we have available for people to choose to go on. It is to spend an hour and a half being trained on what you would do if you were going to take that up. How would you go about doing it? How would you identify employers that may be useful for that? There would then be an hour and a half practical session, but that is one of 30-odd things that we make available to people if they choose to do it. That also includes things like embracing change, interview skills, preparing for group-based assessments. It will be suitable for some people and not suitable for others, but it represents a fairly small proportion of the overall things that people do on the work programme. It also operates hand in hand with a huge range of other methods of identifying jobs. The days of jobs being advertised are sadly long gone. Less than 30 per cent of jobs that we find for our clients and that they find for themselves are advertised in any way at all. A lot of the work that we do is to work in partnership with local and national employers to encourage them and convince them that we have the ability to support them to get staff that help them to build and grow their businesses. The cold-calling aspect is not suitable for everyone. Does that mean that not everyone is asked to do cold-calling? The employers that they are calling, do you follow up to see whether the employers object to having a succession of calls in from a number of individuals, particularly if it is a medium-sized company that is already stretched in its own capacity? The feedback that we get is that, quite often, people pick up the leads through doing things like that, particularly with small to medium-sized companies that do not always have the time or the money to go and actively recruit. As I said, it does not form a big part of what we do. We would probably run one or two sessions every few weeks. The benefit of doing it is partly identifying the vacancies, but it is also someone from the committee that picked up last week when you were talking about doing cold-calling from a political perspective. When it goes well, it can feel very good. It is something that actually builds people's confidence and can empower them. That is partly what we also look to get for from that experience. However, to assure you of the 70,000 clients that have started work as a result of the work programme, a very small proportion would have done any cold-calling. That was not the question that I asked you. I asked whether you have done any follow-up with those companies that are receiving the cold-calls to see whether they are happy for that to continue. We do not do direct follow-up with those companies because, essentially, the individuals themselves would identify the companies that they were going to phone. We do not have a list of companies that suggested last week that people would bash away and phone up. However, we also have some technological solutions whereby we identify all the vacancies that are advertised on the thousands of job boards that are available, both at a local and at a national level, and use that to build a better and a more intelligent picture of what types of companies are recruiting and when. However, there are also other things that we do. If people want to work in retail, for instance—which is a reasonable number of people do—one of the best ways of getting a job in a retail environment is to pop into shops. We will have small groups of clients supported by one of our advisers, who may have tripped up and down the local high street to identify whether anyone is recruiting. Being there at the right time can sometimes be very important. That is sometimes a very good way of equalising the odds for people who might otherwise feel that they are quite far away from work. Do your staff work on the basis of targets? Yes, they do. What are those targets? Well, there are many different types of targets that operate within our business. Fundamentally, the target structure is about making sure that the service and the contract are successful. The targets can be anything from the proportion of their caseload that has a CVE, the proportion of their caseload that has a forward appointment, so that we are encouraging them to actively work with everyone and convince people to come in. It can also be about referrals to workshops and referrals to different types of interventions. It is largely about getting people into sustained work. The point of the work programme, which I think differentiates it from most of the employment programmes over the past 20 years, is to get people to a stage where they not only move into work but that they stay in a job and stay in that job for six months. That drives the behaviour, I think, of our advisers. What are your success rates in that? Our success rates are very good in some cases and improving in others. We are exceeding all of the contractual measures that are set by DWP for the work programme. The point that is worth mentioning is that the work programme is the latest in a long line of programmes going back to the new deals and the employment zones. The targets for the work programme are essentially based on the best that any other programme has delivered in the past with an additional uplift. The fact that we are exceeding those targets suggests that we are doing well. As long as there are people who are not moving into work, we need to think about how we do more and do better. Forgive my ignorance, but I do not know what very well means. Can you help me to understand what— Probably, as you would expect with any Government programme, there is external analysis and external audit of that. The National Audit Office and the Work and Pensions Select Committee at Westminster recently noted that the work programme is performing at least as well, if not better than all previous programmes that have been commissioned by the UK Government. It is doing that at a significantly reduced cost. There are nine different payment groups in the work programme. There are 24 different performance measures. Therefore, it is not easy to say that there is a single measure that the programme is measured on. It would hardly be a ring and endorsement to say that it is doing better than previous programmes. Help me to understand how successful you are, but what are your success rates? As I have said, the programme is exceeding its contractual measures. The contractual measures are based on the proportion of people from each of those nine payment groups that, at the end of the two-year period, are progressed into sustained work. Do you publish any figures on that? The figures are widely published by DWP via the National Audit Office. They are published every three months. There is a significant amount of data that goes down to the local ward level that will show everything from the number of people who are referred, the number of people who are attached, and that is those who join the programme, the number of people who achieve a job out commit six months, and then those who continue to sustain employment for an additional 12 months after that. Therefore, there is a lot of data available. I think that you have partially answered my questions from the convener. That is 70,000 who said that it had been helped into work through the programme. Is that a Scottish figure? That is the figure in Scotland between both of those organisations. Is that people who have exceeded the 12-month target or the six-month sustained employment or who have just been able to get employment? That is the total that has moved into work, entered the job. Do we have figures about how many of those 70,000 are still in a job six months? You have a delay in reporting. Essentially, the way that the programme would be measured, it would look at the number of people referred, the number of people attached, and the number of people who have achieved a job outcome at that point in time. The latest figures that were published by the National Audit Office, which were published up until the middle of this year, at that stage there were over 41,000 people who had achieved a job outcome. That means being in a job and having stayed in that job for a minimum of six months. That is something that is positively evidenced by proof from an employer and evidenced through off-benefit checks with HMRC. I do not know, Christina. Is that the same issue for you? It is on the same issue. Welcome to the committee this morning. Nice to see you again, Nicholas. I remember the visit to your organisation in Hamilton a while back now. Last week, you might have heard me quote some figures for the DWP, which I find absolutely astonishing. For an overall sum of £1.89 billion when the scheme started in 2011, the DWP figures up until March this year were that only 9 per cent of second disabled people find employment lasting three months after one year taking part in the scheme. That the overall figure was only 24 per cent of those going through the programme. Of those on ESA, those claimants, 4.3 per cent of them find a job, which is actually down since 2011, which was 7.1 per cent. Could anybody explain that to me, please? I can talk about the figures that we have had in the published figures. I am pleased to say that they are in advance of the numbers that you suggested there. Of our ESA customers in Scotland, I think that we have supported some just over two of the published figures, sorry, just over 2,000, into a job and 1,485 of those have sustained a job outcome, so the 72 per cent success rate of those that move into employment are able to remain in employment. After a year? It's after six months. Okay, so 2,000 and then you said 1,400 staying in, so it's 40. So what percentage of that is the overall figure of people that you're working with? The ESA group, the way that the contract has changed, I think it's a very important point to note in Scotland. Initially, the programme was dying for about 70 per cent. Jobseekers, 30 per cent. ESA, the way that the contract has changed in recent times is that it's almost the inverse of that now. There are more ESA customers coming through than there are jobseekers allowance customers. It's a very important point to recognise the changing characteristics and the changing needs of customers as the programme has developed. Also really important to note the sort of change in scale of work programme from when it first started from somewhere in the region of its 60,000 referreds in the first year, right down to I think we're probably expecting about 16,000 this year. So a very different change in both the nature of the individuals that require the support and the scale of them. Okay, so how can you account for the ESA figure being 4.3 per cent when in 2011 it was 7.1 per cent? That don't recognise those figures, I've only got our own figures, our own delivered figures. Those are the figures released by DWP. Okay, but they're DWP's figures. Okay, so DWP's figures are different. So how do you report to DWP then? Because obviously they must report the figures that you report to them. Figures are reported automatically through the system and I believe you're probably quoting the overall UK figures there. We can only report working links in Scotland figures here. Okay, has the contract changed? You said that there was slight changes in the contract. Has that changed over the years? You're now saying there's only 16,000 people, 16,000 to many in my opinion, but 16,000 people going through the system. Yeah, the contract has changed but I was specifically speaking about the nature and scale of the contract. It's much smaller than it was when it was initially started and the characteristics of the individuals that are coming through for support has changed significantly. The different payment groups have changed quite a lot. Okay, are you getting individuals who have got more complex needs? Yes, absolutely, there's no doubt about that. Individuals that come to the work programme has probably rightly said, you know, they make up quite a small proportion of the overall cohort that become unemployed of 100 people that present at job centre plus today as being unemployed. Less than 10% will find their way onto a programme like the work programme. So they've been unemployed for quite a considerable time and as you would expect, the challenges that they come with don't sit in isolation, there are usually a range of multiple barriers. Key around those are functional maths in English, educational qualifications and a range of health conditions that all compete and usually mean that that individual is significantly far from the labour market at the point when they enter the work programme. Yeah, so going back to that, that is a group that I spoke about in my initial opening remarks and I have seen the work that working links do in Hamilton, you know, I've seen the work that goes on there. Have you changed that? Have you adapted that? Have you made it more flexible to meet the more complex needs of some of the clients that are coming through the door? Yeah, absolutely. I mean we constantly change and evolve our delivery model and approach based on the needs of the individuals that we serve. So that's an absolute given. The programme has changed and refined and continuously improved since we started. We collect a huge amount of data and information on the customers that we serve and we, I suppose what you do is you drill that down and analyse it to drive future performance. So the more that you learn about the needs of customers, the more you tailor your intervention to support those. Okay, much profit have you made this year? I don't have that figure in front of me. Roughly, I think maybe the last three years we've probably broken even, I think, if my accountant is here, he might be able to tell me that. Okay, okay. Okay, before I bring Neil Findlay, Kevin Stewart and Joan McAlpin in, are there any of the other members of the panel want to say anything at this stage about what we've been discussing? Yeah, I was just going to add in relation to your question, convener, about cold calling and in response to some of the comments made by colleagues here, in short, Scotland have supported three and a half thousand disabled people into work in the last four or five years. Although cold calling is part of our learning experience, it isn't necessarily the be all and end all to finding work, but certainly I suppose in support to some of the comments and some of the questions that are being asked. When you're supporting someone who has numerous barriers to employment to encourage them to become armed and dangerous in a sense, in the employment field, it is important to allow people to experience the hardest experiences, which include cold calling. I don't think anyone in this room would want to cold call an employer and say, have you got a job? It's an extremely difficult thing to do, but it does provide a learning experience for individuals. From what I'm hearing, this is all about the people out there who need to find work. I know we're talking about statistics and funds and so on, but certainly there seems to be an argument about a person-centred approach, offering a full range of support and delivery to the people that walk through the door, not just that one particular work stream. Kate? Just on that, I'm touching the point made by Tanya. I think that the ambition of all the providers is to provide that personalised support. Now, for some individuals, they may not have experienced that and I took that from the committee evidence last week, but I think that the ambition is to offer that to individuals, to give them the opportunity to try new things that will really help them. The characteristics have changed in terms of that ESA group. There are more complex issues that people are dealing with. They have been on programmes longer and there are some deep-rooted issues. The opportunity is to look at how we can bring in other resources now that it's going to be devolved and other resources that can provide the type of wraparound and holistic support to those individuals around health, housing and debt. While that's there within the work programme provider and work choices providers remit to work with partners, the fact that one set of programmes has been reserved and one set of programmes has been local, I think that there's now this opportunity to integrate them far better. Neil Findlay? I find that a bit odd that co-calling is deemed as a learning experience. Whacking your thumb with a hammer is very hard as a learning experience is not necessarily something that you would choose to do again. I just find that a bit of a strange justification for it. Just back to the companies providing the service, you mentioned there's a target system. Is there a bonus system when you meet those targets for individuals who are working with individuals? An adviser or whoever, do they get a target to meet and are paid part of their salary or a bonus based on meeting that target? Not in our organisation, they don't know. I've worked in employability for 20 orge years in a number of different sectors in the voluntary sector and in the private sector. The reality is that when you try to achieve a specific milestone, the natural attraction is to think about having a target-based approach. One of the really important things about creating a target-based approach is to think about what you want to incentivise and also to think about what some of the behaviours are that you don't want to incentivise. It's very important that you try to build a system that not only hits the target but hits the point of the target. If the point of the target is to be engaging with the maximum number of people possible to be connecting them to the support that they need and to be getting as many as possible to a point where they move into work, then if you build your systems around that, then you can have quite effective target systems, but we don't go down the road of paying financial bonuses for ourselves. We do have a bonus system, but it's built around three pillars of performance, which are metrics around the quality and around the compliance that we need to ensure. If I was an adviser working for your business and I was a front-line adviser working with clients and I met my target, what would that mean for me financially? It could mean a financial incentive. If it varies in different quarters of the year, I would need to combat you on that. If you could provide a committee with that, that would be helpful. At the next level in both organisations, is there the same situation? So you've got the front-line adviser who does X, Y or Z, and in your organisation, they don't get a financial reward, but something must happen if they do or don't meet that target. At the next level of management and then the next level of more senior management directors, whoever else, is there a system going up the chain where if their department, if their section, if their responsibility meets those targets, they get an award as well? Is that how the system works? That doesn't represent our organisation. So there's no one in the hierarchy of jobs that receive a bonus based on the targets being met? No. Right, okay, that's very helpful. Can I talk about the other part of the question? Yes, yes, sorry, yes. So getting people who thrive and survive in an environment where you're delivering is, as Tanya said, a really good person-centred service to people who, in many cases, and this is definitely the case for the ESA group, haven't had support from previous programmes, and that's a really important point to make. There are two substantial customer groups in this programme that just were not supported in previous programmes prior to the work programme being put in place. It's a very difficult job to do. It takes exceptional individuals to do that. We are lucky to have an incredibly good team of individuals, and we spend a lot of time and a lot of effort investing in those individuals and supporting them, giving them the skills they need to do the job, and also making sure that we have the right people in the right place at the right time. If people are struggling with particular aspects of their job, then we would have a support process that would come into play at that point in time, which would be around providing additional support to that individual to identify what it is that they might be struggling with at that point in time, whether it's prioritisation of the workload, whether it's working with particular types of individuals, and we would use the collective skills and knowledge in that broader team to help support that individual. There is a huge array of knowledge required, and it's actually quite difficult to deal with a broad group of individuals and know absolutely everything that you need to know. We have a culture of, although the adviser might not always know the answer to that question, somebody needs my will, and we encourage people to make use of that and make use of the local expert that exists in our sites. We have a range of incentive schemes to drive performance and to reward and recognise the contributions of our staff right throughout the organisation. In terms of the figures again, we are going back to that. Inclusion Scotland in their evidence has said that 5 per cent of people go through successfully through the work programme, as opposed—this is long-term sick and disabled people—as opposed to 24 per cent success rate of all referrals. Are those figures you recognise? It says that the job outcome rate for long-term sick and disabled people in the work programme is only 5 per cent, approximately one-fifth of the success rate for all referrals. That's Inclusion Scotland's figures. If I was then to ask you to replace those figures with ones that you recognise, what would they be? Not thousands, not anything other than the percentages, so that we get the same understanding. For ourselves, for our ESA customer groups, the percentage that we move into work is at this stage 13 per cent, the secure work. The contracture targets are set by DWP-based and previous programmes. In order to allow this contracture target to be measured, you need to allow the cohort the full 24 months on the programme and then a further up to 18 months in terms of being supported. The measures that they have for the main customer groups, there are three main customer groups in the work programme that represent about 75 per cent of the overall volumes that go through. The first is 18 to 24-year-olds. The minimum performance expectation for that group is that 33 per cent will achieve a job outcome, so move into a job and have stayed in that job for six months. There will obviously be some people drop out during that period. For 25 plus clients, it's 27.5 per cent, and for ESA claimants who have made a recent claim and are in the work-related activity group, that target is 18.5 per cent. For the last couple of years, the figures that DWP published are showing that all providers are exceeding those targets now. The figures that you are talking about there, that Inclusion Scotland has quoted, would be from the very early stages of the work programme. That is the individuals that have been right through the journey for those early months on the programme. I know that you have broken it down into three categories. They have not. They haven't done that. It is only for simplicity, no other reason. If we were to go and use the same methodology as they have applied, what would those two figures be? It is slightly difficult to say without misleading you, because the time periods and everything would depend quite a lot on that. What I can say to you now is that, in this year of the work programme, the last year of the work programme, and the year before that in the work programme, for all those custom groups, we are exceeding those contractual measures. The 33 per cent, the 27.5 per cent and the 18.5 per cent, that is what we are measured on here and now in a day-to-day basis. It is more than 5 per cent, and the 24.7 per cent of all referals is more than 6 per cent. I would, yes. In fairness to those figures, there is a long lag time in those figures. What you are talking about there is people who started the programme in 2011, and obviously we have moved on quite a bit since then. Kevin Stewart. Can I ask Mr De Pollet first if he watched last week's session or if he has read the official report? I did not watch the session, I read the transcript yesterday when it was published. Did the transcript give you an idea about the two folks who were previously in the work programme and what they were about? It did give me an idea of what those individuals were about. I think that there were some things that they said that were familiar and some things that they said that I did not recognise. So what was familiar and what was not familiar to you? Well, I do not want to get into talking about individual sets of circumstances, because I do not know either of those individuals and I have not had the opportunity to talk to them myself, but what I can say more broadly is that I certainly did not recognise people cold calling from 9 o'clock to 5 o'clock. That is not something I see when I walk through any of my offices and it is not something that is a feature of what we do. Customer insight is something that, as Nick has alluded to, is incredibly important, not just from the point of view of knowing whether people are happy with the experience that they are getting but also from the point of view of identifying the things that work well for certain individuals in doing more of them. By way of example, one of the things that we have changed over the time in the work programme, bearing in mind that people are with us for two years, is that we now have a delivery model where people will essentially spend less time transitioning from one individual to another. One of the features of our delivery model is that we had people going from a particular employment adviser to a different type of support stream, perhaps with a different organisation. Let me stop you there because I think that this is particularly important. All of this should be about building confidence and knocking down those multiple barriers. It seems that, in the cases that we had heard from last week and many of the cases that I have dealt with as a constituency MSP, that rather than build confidence and motivate folk, what we have seen is that folk's confidence takes a hit and their motivation is disappearing and then being completely and utterly demotivated by the experience that they have gone through. What would you say to that? Clearly, we do not want people to go through any of our programmes and not feel supported. The one thing that I would say is that, while I did not recognise what many of those individuals were saying last week, that does not reflect what we hear and see on a day-to-day basis. You will acknowledge that we have extended invites to all the committee to come and spend time in our offices and talk to our clients and staff and see first-hand what is going on. I will stop you there because we go on lots of visits and we have heard Ms McKelvie there. Often, on those visits, we do not see the true scenarios that are going on in offices on a day-to-day basis, and that always troubles me a little bit. One of the things that was quite obvious from last week and quite obvious from the evidence that I have from my neck of the woods is that sometimes that works and it is probably down to the personalities involved, including those advisers, but it seems that, in the majority of cases, it does not. We had two folk here last week. We had a number of other folk who could have come, but felt too afraid to come. Would it be the case that some of the folks who are on the work programme at this moment in time would be too afraid to complain about the level of service that they were getting from themselves or some of their competitors, because they may face sanctioning if they complain too much? No, that is not the case at all. For a few reasons, firstly, we do not sanction people on the work programme. No, you do not, but the DWP does. How much advice does the DWP take from yourself? It is not the case of taking advice. Let me be very clear. If you are an employment adviser working on the work programme, one of the most important things to have is to build trust and rapport with the people who are coming through the door, and therefore the sanction regime in some regards could be viewed as a disincentive for that, because the reality is that you want to build trust and rapport, you want to have people attending appointments. We will mandate people to do certain things, but in the vast majority of cases, that is to attend an appointment. People are given due notice to attend an appointment. If they want to change that appointment, they are able to do that. It is not in any advisers' interest to be sitting there and waiting for a client to show up for an appointment for them, not to show up far. I think that trust and rapport would be a great thing to have, but from what we heard last week and from experiences of myself and colleagues, what we actually have is fear. Mr Young, you were in the back of the room last week listening to what was said. Does the evidence that the two ladies gave last week reflect what your knowledge of your business is? I think that it certainly reflected their experience of it. It is important to acknowledge that it was Donna that had been with herself on that. She said that one relationship with an adviser was not what she was expecting. We were disappointed at that. On the other hand, she said that the next adviser could not have been any more helpful, and she had an excellent relationship with him that helped her to progress to where she wanted to be. That is the type of relationship that characterises and reflects the experience that we have. It is certainly what comes through from our customer service surveys. Both are internal ones and the independent ones that we get, collated with six months, where levels of satisfaction are very high. Last week, it was really disappointing to hear if anyone does not have a positive experience from it, but the reality is that, from tens of thousands of different experiences, in the vast majority of cases, customers are very satisfied with the support that they are getting. Are people afraid to complain? Not that I am aware of. We do an independent survey, where 1,000 customers are spoken to by an independent organisation. We are talking about folks who often are deeply suspicious. Do you think that they think that it is an independent survey? I cannot speak on behalf of them. I am sure that it has pointed out to them quite clearly that they are an independent survey. We are unable to answer a question about profitability earlier. Can you give us an idea of how much the work programme contract that you have is worth to working links in Scotland? What is the value of that contract? Well, there is a contract value, which is what you bid for, but then there is how much it will cost is based on how you deliver that. That varies. Just tell me the contract value. I think that it is about £160 million, £167 million. So you are getting £167 million from the DWP to deliver the service? That is the total contract value. How much we realise of that will be dependent on how well we deliver it? You have already told us, so you do not know what the profitability is. In G.S., how much is the DWP contract for Scotland worth to In G.S., please, Mr Dupillett? Well, the situation will be fairly similar, because we are delivering half of the contract and working links are delivering half of the contract. That is over a nine-year period. £167 million? Over a nine-year period. You have no idea of profitability on that for your organisation. To be perfectly honest, you will need to look at the profitability at the end of that nine-year period. It is a payment-by-results programme. We get paid when we move people into work and keep them there for six months. There will be a reasonable number of individuals that we spend a lot of time and a lot of effort and a lot of money on, and we do so gladly. That we may not get paid for, but that is the nature of a payment-by-results contract. Does that payment-by-results contract often lead to situations where folk are put into employment, which you know is going to be absolutely completely and utterly unsuitable for them in order for you to realise the payment from the DWP? No, it does not at all. I think that if you look at the dynamic of actually getting someone into a job that lasts for six months, if you think about the day-to-day process of getting someone to a stage where they are ready to move into a job and to keep them there for six months, it is simply not the case that you can somehow co-ask people and put them in jobs. In fact, because of the reluctance of the committee to come and see us, we hired an independent company to do some focus groups with our clients. One of the features that came through from that was that people said that they felt that we were genuinely interested in getting them the right job for them, not just any job. Final question, convener. Obviously, vast swathes of this is to be devolved, but vast swathes is to be retained, including programmes such as access for work. The sanctions regime, of course, is also going to remain reserved. Do you think that it is wise to devolve the bulk of the work programme but leave the sanctioning element of it with the Department of Work and Pensions? We'll start with Ms Gilchrist first, please. I think that it's going to cause some confusion. I think that we're already talking here about people who are dissatisfied with current service delivery. They are making noises, obviously, from last week about what their needs might be, that they probably need support and so on, and to have a reserved and devolved rules potentially affecting the people that we're talking about could ultimately cause confusion and, again, I think, more dissatisfaction. Confusion, lack of cohesion, a bit nonsensical? In your view. I was hoping for yours. Mr Kerr. I agree with what Tanya Cymru says. I think that any performance contracts have two of elements of conditionality attached to them, but if that's to the detriment of a probably the most vulnerable across the UK, then surely that should not be a model that's adopted by the Scottish Government. Employment support Scotland and ERSA was really clear in that. We actually advocated for the devolution of Jobcentre Plus and all leavers, if you like, related to this in Scotland, because we think that it would work better. Given the fact that that's not the position of the UK Government in terms of the Smith commission response, what we want to do is to work with the Scottish Government to ensure that the impact of the sanctions regime is mitigated so that the impact on individuals is not an impact of fear and concern and distress. What we want to have is an impact that actually supports those individuals and taking the point that that. So what kind of things need to be put in place to deal with that then? Well, I think it's something, it's a discussion, it's an ongoing discussion with the provider network because we are working to the guidelines of the work programme, the guidelines set down by DWP in terms of work choices and I think going forward in the new commissioning and procurement process if we're looking at things that we can do to mitigate that. We can't obviously, sanctions, conditionality is still a reserved power but what we can do is look at how we implement that and ameliorate that so that the impact on individuals is lessened because it was distressing to read the transcript for those individuals but I do believe that that is not the case for the majority of individuals going through the programmes because the staff that I meet on a daily basis came into the industry because they actually do want to help individuals, the vast majority of the staff. But that lack of cohesion, the fact that that part, that element is being reserved, that illogicality of that actually leads to more confusion, is it not? I don't disagree, I think it was stated in the position. Thank you, Mr Yam, please. I guess I'm more interested in the powers that we have and how can we make the most of those powers that are coming across. I think it's important to put work programme, work choice and any other DWP provision in a little bit of context in Scotland overall, I think it equates to about 10% of the overall spend on employment and skills in Scotland. I'm really interested in how we get the whole system to be as integrated as possible. I think they have a fantastic opportunity with the addition of new powers. What we need to do is to take the evidence base of what's worked well, take the lessons from what could be done better and then build that into the design process and then the commissioning of future services. You could have the most amazing service ever, bells and whistles, the entire shebang, the personalisation that we all want and yet the DWP at the end of the day will decide whether somebody is to be sanctioned or not. Is that right? That's our DWP to decide, it's not for working links. Are we very happy if we do end up in a situation where we have that programme you described? Will that not cause problems for those folks who are delivering the service where you're dealing with one agency, whatever that may be in Scottish terms, and then the DWP comes along and says, well, no, that's not right, this person is going to be sanctioned. Does that not cause your organisation some difficulty as well in that regard? We'd find a way to work alongside whoever had responsibility for the various powers. As long as there was money in it. No, as long as it was providing service that we felt was valuable. Mr De Poulet. We're just picking up on a couple of those points there. Where you've got any crossover from one organisation to another or one authority to another, then there's a danger that there won't be a seamless approach. Actually, if we're really honest, that happens quite a lot with stuff that we're ready to control. We do have an opportunity to line that up better going forward, but to go back to your point around what changes could be made, one simple change that often comes up when I talk to employment advisors is that if they had the ability to give a good cause, then that would make life much easier. So what that means is that if a client is booked for a mandatory appointment, doesn't phone us in advance and phone us a couple of days after with something that's come up, we have the ability to say, okay, but at the moment we don't have that ability because what we have to do is notify DWP because someone hasn't kept up with her job-seekers agreement. Just before I bring in Joan and then John, could I ask Kate, Ter Allister or Tanya on the general discussion that other than the specific question, are there any comments you want to make on that? Tanya? I was going to get back to Mr Finlay's comment about the cold calling just to clarify so it's not taken out of context. When we are delivering cold calling to our customers, it's a training exercise, so they have an advisor with them, but not actually calling an employer. They're actually calling another member of staff who's pretending to be an employer. It's a learning experience, that's what I was trying to explain, so just so you didn't take that out of context. But I was going to say something about sanctions. Obviously, Shortrust came to avoid undue stress and financial hardship on the people that we are supporting and Shortrust advocate an early warning system in relation to sanctions, so it's about prevention, it's about communication and treating people like human beings. I think if you give people forewarning that behaviours might result in something, again, it is about a learning experience. I have another area of improvement which is about the assessment process and I think it's about joining up that assessment process and sharing information more widely because sometimes I think the feedback has been that individuals have been sanctioned where their circumstances haven't been taken into consideration, principally because information has not necessarily passed from one organisation or agency to another, for example, someone's mental health issue or someone's childcare responsibilities. The circumstances of the individual need to be taken into consideration, but it's about that information flow. Thank you very much. Just to go back to the figures from the disability charity Inclusion Scotland, they have provided us with figures on the issue of moving disabled people out of worklessness via the work programme. Up to 31 March 2014, while there were over 14,000 employment support allowance work programme job outcomes, there were 41,721 ESA work-related activity sanctions during that period. Thus, a disabled person on the work programme was three times as likely to be sanctioned as they were to find a job. That's absolutely shameful, isn't it? I think that sanctions are the responsibility of DWP, so maybe better. I'm actually struggling to see how you can unlink these two things, Mr Young. Disabled people in the work programme, a person in the work programme, is three times as likely to be sanctioned as to find a job. That's a terrible reflection on the work programme. I think that a responsibility in the work programme is to move them into what we'd have no responsibility over the sanctioned regime. Mr De Pellet, do you agree with that? Well, we are responsible for, as Nick says, providing employment support for individuals. We will mandate people to attend appointments on occasion. It doesn't happen all the time, but it happens for a significant number of individuals when they are referred through. We want people to attend. If people don't attend, we are required. We have no choice, but to notify DWP who will then commence the process of identifying whether someone had a good cause for not attending. It's not on our interests for people not to attend appointments. It's absolutely not on our interests. Just for the sake of the public, they don't know these things. People on the ESA tend to have some barrier to employment, disability or illness, so those people are vulnerable. Yet they are three times more likely to be sanctioned as they are to be found a job on your programmes. That suggests that your programmes are not working at all. Those who are found a job are found a job or find a job under this terrible threat. We have taken a lot of evidence, as a committee, on the effect that sanctions and the threat of sanctions have on people. People's mental health as well, because a lot of these people have mental health issues. You seem completely unmoved, if you don't mind my saying so. Absolutely not unmoved at all. The plight and the personal circumstances of our customers is incredibly important to us. As Paul mentioned, I reiterate our responsibilities to move someone into work in order to try to help them to have a better life. We are not responsible for issuing sanctions, so I reiterate that again. It's a responsibility that lies elsewhere. You are unmoved by that in terms of what the disability charity said. If I could move on to what one parent family Scotland has said about the work programme, many single parent experiences of the work programme are very negative, both in terms of how well the scheme supports them to find sustainable work that fits in with their caring responsibilities. In relation to the attitudes of staff, often staff appear to completely disregard the fact that parents have responsibilities for children and make completely unreasonable demands of them. Are you moved by that at all, Mr Young? I'm always moved when we receive feedback of that sort. Particularly myself, as someone who has worked across the loan payment sector for quite a considerable amount of time, I used to run our loan payment contracts for working links, and I'm very aware of the success that we've had with loan payments and the very positive impact that it has on their lives and their children's lives. I'd be very interested to speak to one parent family Scotland who has been one of our partners throughout our journey with loan parents and get some further details on that feedback. Do you support sanctions? Do you support the principle of sanctions? Yes. I support the principle of conditionality. To what extent do you support sanctions on loan payment families? I didn't say that I support sanctions on loan payment families. I said that I support the principle of conditionality. That's sure that we're talking about semantics here. Sanctions are conditionality. It's just what degree you're talking about. Do you support the withdrawal of income from single-parent families? That's not a decision for me. We support the principle of conditionality as a way of encouraging active participation. Does that include single-parent? Single-parent have long had conditionality attached to their benefits regime. Do you support that? I think it's had a really positive impact over the number of years that it's been conditioned. You do support it, right? Do you support it for disabled people? Again, some disabled people will have conditionality attached to their benefits regime. Some will be participating in programmes as a role of volunteer. I support the role of conditionality relief that it has. Okay, thanks very much. Tanya, in and out. Hi, I was just going to comment on your questions as it reads some thoughts. It certainly flags up the importance that there needs to be a specialist disability programme aimed and targeted at individuals who need specialised support and, certainly from short trust perspective, we certainly endorse. It needs to be a needs-alised assessment at the benefit stage, identifying those barriers, whether it's childcare, debt management or housing, and actually focus that support on those particular issues. Possibly mainstream delivery doesn't always address that. Okay, thank you. John, is there anything else? That's fine, thanks. Okay, John and then Claire. Thank you, convener, and good morning to the panel. My first question is just to pick up on something that Kate Still said earlier from Employment Support Scotland in relation to, and you mentioned this in your submission as well, about how information is shared, particularly with Job Centre Plus. You referenced that it's not particularly good just now, could you expand on that a little bit? I think that part of the issue and part of the sanctioning of lone parents and the disabled and young people disproportionately is sometimes related to the fact that information about individual circumstances is not necessarily passed on in a timely manner to the provider, so there can be lengthy gaps in some of that information being processed or that information being provided. I think that ERSA is calling for better initial assessment of individuals' circumstances, skills, attributes, their ambitions and that working around that you can then put in place. Earlier, a more supportive package, sometimes some of the issues do not get revealed to the providers of the first line staff until after several weeks, so sometimes there's a difficulty in getting that holistic package in place. It can be shared but it's just being delayed, or is the issue that the permission of the jobseeker is required in some cases? The permission would obviously be required but I think that if we worked towards a system where there was information which the individual owned and agreed to share with providers, then we could design a much better system. If people know that their information is being shared so that the right package of support can be put in place, I think that they would be supportive of that. Do the providers have a view on the sharing of information? Yes, I think that it's a broader issue than just around the issue of conditionality and sanctions. Before people come to the work programme, they will have been unemployed for at least a year. During that period, they will have been supported by Jobs and to Plus, they may well have been supported by Skills Development Scotland and by local authorities and third sector organisations. Within that whole process, they may well have to answer the same question on a number of different occasions. I think that there's a tendency sometimes to conflate the need to protect personal information with the effective delivery of services to individuals. One of the people who hear evidence from shortly did some work for the Scottish Government on employability and skills. One of the key findings from that was that we spend quite a lot of money on employment and skills in Scotland but it's not always easy to determine what we get for it. That's partly down to having multiple different agencies all essentially running different systems and not in a position where they either feel comfortable or confident sharing that for the betterment of individuals. My next question is about employment support relative to people pursuing a self-employment route, which was an issue that came up last week. In Employment Support Scotland's submission, there was some reference to a disincentive between people using self-employment as a possible option towards employment. Can you expand a bit on that in terms of what you said in Employment Support Scotland's submission in terms of looking at self-employment as an option more so than it is now relative to the support that you get through the employment support scheme? I think that it's just to reiterate that we think that self-employment should be a valid option and it's not always easy for the individual to get that level of support. Again, it's about that joined-up nature of support so that self-employment becomes a realistic option for individuals. What are the barriers? Can you expand a bit more on those? I just think that sometimes in the submission, I don't think that I know too much of the detail of it. One of the challenges that we have, and it did come up last week, with one of the participants that was giving evidence, was this issue of being able to access support at certain times and then not others. Being on a particular programme and essentially being perhaps too long-term unemployed to access skills provision or not being able to access something that meets the needs of an individual at a particular point in time. While there is a significant evidence base around what works, we need to bear in mind that, going forward, we won't always exactly be able to map that out and we need to bear in mind that we shouldn't put in place disincentives that basically stop people from getting something that they need just because they happen to be in the wrong benefit at that point in time or because they've gone beyond the point where they're eligible for that. That's not about providing the right support for individuals. That's really it in terms of eligibility conditions. Sometimes we've had that with different programmes, as Paul has said, where you can access it at a particular time but you've got it tied up in terms of the eligibility rules, how long you've got to be unemployed and what type of business you want to do. Good morning. I've been listening to the discussion this morning and the use of the customer has been used quite a lot. In reality, is your customer not the DWP as service providers? We're DWP's customer and the individuals that access our services, we view them as our customers. That's the terminology that we would use. But they're not customers in two sense of the word and that your responsibility lies to the DWP in what you're doing? A responsibility to DWP is for the performance of the contract and the contractual compliance of the contract but for our front line staff and for our managers on a day-to-day basis, the people that come through the door of the customers. You mentioned that you have surveys that you do of the clients but one of the things that came through in the evidence session last week was people feeling that they had no ability to complain, to make their voice heard in the process. I can ask you what the percentage return is for customers, we'll use that word, for your own surveys and for the independent survey that you mentioned? Each organisation will do different things and we've done a number of different things over the piece. I suppose firstly on feedback and complaints is a day-to-day thing so over and above doing a quarterly and annual survey. We have complaints policies very clearly positioned in our offices. People get a copy of the complaints policy during their induction and there is an independence to the complaints policy be that if they're not satisfied with what we say, they go to an independent complaints examiner who's external to our organisation. Over and above that we also look for a value and use the feedback that we get so in every office we'll have a UC we did board where people can say things like could you get this newspaper in to look for vacancies, could we have more workshops in this particular area available and it's just common sense to listen to what people want and try and make sure that we deliver more of that. In terms of the surveys, the surveys would be done in a number of different ways so some of those surveys would be for clients who are in the offices searching for work and they can log on and complete those surveys. Sometimes it would be telephone-based surveys that we'd get an independent company to do and we also have office managers that regularly run focus groups to try and get a little bit more qualitative information rather than just do you like this or do you like that or would you like more of to try and dig beneath that a little bit? The return rates are pretty reasonable, they're pretty high, I don't have them in front of me unfortunately. In terms of the, you said the current targets, but 33% of the DWP for success is that right? The targets, yes. One of the targets. In terms of the 77% of people that haven't been successful or don't or obviously there'll be a bit of variation in that because you're exceeding the target but what follow-up is done with those people to get the feedback as to why the work programme wasn't effective for them? For every client that goes through the work programme and doesn't achieve a job then there's a process that happens at the end where an exit report is completed for that individual before they're referred back to Job Center Plus for whatever help and support they're going to get at that stage via the next stage of the Job Center regime. Job Center Plus would also conduct initial appointments with individuals during that period and when we do some of our focus groups in some of our surveys we would look at different cohorts of individuals so one of the things we would often look at because you know we need to look at the kind of the counter factual as well is people who are not engaging with our service, people who've got infrequent attendance try to find out why, try to get underneath you know because it's you know it's fantastic if you get good feedback but actually sometimes getting feedback that's this a bit more balanced tells you what you're doing well and what you're not doing well and you can try and improve upon that. I think you mentioned a variation of options about 30 options are available to people for different types of training. Are each of those 30 options individually assessed and monitored and feedback taken on those to see what's successful, what isn't? There are 30 workshops where people can volunteer and be referred to go along, they're all voluntary and those are mainstream workshops in the broad area of employment support and those are delivered by our group facilitators. In addition we have a health and well-being team where we've got physiotherapists and psychologists who deliver an additional suite of 12 workshops again all voluntary and at the end of all of those interventions we would complete end-of-course surveys where we would get people to talk about what they liked and what they didn't like and what they would do to improve it. Does the data that you collect from the surveys of your complaints process bear any relation with the contract that you have with the DWT? Are they part of your success metrics looking at the number of complaints etc? The final stage of the complaints process is actually with the independent complaints examiner which is an agency of DWP so one of the metrics they would report on is the number of complaints that are received and the resolution of those complaints within the timelines of the complaints policy. Over and above that they would also do as part of their audit regime, they would also come out and talk to clients that are on the programme. One of the things that was mentioned by Jake last week that I think she found most difficult but it was the lack of privacy in the whole process. Is that something that you have taken cognisance on? It's something that it's slightly disappointed to hear that. I think again in all of our offices we have at the front door on the way in we have a clear sign saying that if you require a private room for an appointment please ask. We also remind people of that during their initial appointments with advisers. We know that people don't always feel comfortable asking for these things so it is something that we often ask advisers to re-prompt people on. It has come up selectively in complaints and before where people have said that perhaps the sign wasn't obvious enough and we've taken feedback around making sure that those are more obvious. But when I'm in our offices as I am most days I do see advisers sitting with clients on a one-to-one basis in private rooms so I know it does happen. It's a bit continued to make sure that people feel comfortable asking for that. OK. If I can just ask a final question about in the area of sanctions that were discussed I think somebody mentioned that we had good cause to go back to the DWP if something happened later on. In the universal credit visits that we've done it's become apparent that there's no flexibility for a holiday or a family event for people to take time off from their conditionality regime in that term. We've all had examples of people being sanctioned for attending family funerals etc, last minute emergencies and things like that. It was also mentioned that people needed to be treated like human beings. Do you think that's treating people like human beings not to give them any flexibility to be able to go to a family wedding or do something like that in the system? Will that cause you further problems in terms of the good cause argument? For our advisers, as I said earlier, having someone not show up for an appointment is not a productive use of their time and it's something that they find demotivating. We would certainly, as long as we know about things in advance, then we are able to, within the current rules that we operate within, be able to rearrange appointments and we do that regularly. We probably find that in any given day it will probably be the case that an average of one appointment per adviser is changed for reasons that are valid and things like people who have last minute emergencies and we would rebook that person in for another appointment. So it's a bit consistency of service, but we do have to operate within the guidelines that are set as part of our contractual requirements, as for any organisation delivering employment support services. Mary, comment on that. I would come back on that and just reiterate a point that's common across our industry. I think that when you're able to give your front-line advisers as much autonomy as they need to do their job, then they invariably are able to do it to the best of their effects. If I go back just slightly to some of your points around the training, yes, every training that we offer, we do an evaluation afterwards. The training scores are incredibly high, very pleased with that. Our trainers are a very, very dedicated and professional team. Overall, complaints are, I think, quite low on the work programme. It's significantly lower than 1 per cent of complaints that we have right across our 60,000-odd people that have joined. It's still too much, but it's less than 1 per cent, significantly less than 1 per cent. If less than 1 per cent of people are complaining, but the success rate is only marginally over 33 per cent of whatever the target is at the moment, is that not going to give you—do you understand where the bulk of the people that are through the programme why they are not successful in it, then? We do have a huge amount of data on the challenges that individuals face and how likely they are to progress into work, those that are not likely to progress into work, given the timeframes and given the restrictions on some of the services that they need. I know that Neil and Christina wanted to come in, but this is going to eat into the session with the next panel. The assumption in the system is that the problem of not gaining a job lies with the individual. Therefore, if we can only raise their confidence, if we can only get them a new suit or polish their shoes or something like that, then that's what will get them a job. That's the wrong assumption, as the problem is not that there's been a reason people can't access a job is that there are structural problems within our economy and that means that there's a lack of jobs in the first place. However, don't you think that we have to rethink this whole thing? For us, when we look at the individuals on the work programme, the challenge is that, although confidence is incredibly important and it's a key feature of what we deliver, when you look at the functional skills and functional skills levels, maths and English levels, if you look at the health concerns that individuals have, those play a significant factor in determining whether or not someone will move into work. Ultimately, programmes do not give someone a job. That's the privilege of businesses. We certainly believe that there are a lot of vacancies. We're filling a lot of those vacancies with our customers, but, obviously, a more buoyant economy would be better. Was it your view that, even if there was an excess of jobs in the economy, we would still require your services? I think that our services are always being required, yes. People will always need support to bridge from where they are to the world of work. The National Audit Office report dated July 2014, page 8, paragraph 17, has got this in a—I'll just read it—on average, prime contractors have reduced what they plan to spend on the hardest to help group. The support for work programmes, harder to help participants, is lower than those with better employment prospects. Providers own estimates show that they plan to spend 54 per cent less on each participant in the harder to help groups. I've got a young constituent who is in that harder to help group, who is being bumped from work programme to work programme in retail outlets, which, in my opinion, used her labour and then chewed her out at the end of the six weeks or whatever. I've seen an advert on a billboard and a fonder, and I said that this company is looking for staff. I gave her some advice. I should declare an interest. I was one of the founding members of the Scottish Union of Supportive Employment, so I gave her some advice, and she secured that job. How much of a price tag is that individual? How much do you get for that individual if they stay in a job? I'm not sure what customer group that individual is in. Again, are there subcategories within that? Hard to reach person. I wouldn't be getting paid when she got into a job. It would only be if she'd achieved success and remained in that job for a certain period of time, and then there's a payment trigger at that point? Let's just say that she does. What's that payment trigger and how much is it? The payment trigger, or the published EDP payment trigger, I'll just go through them here, but bear in mind that they're different categories for if there are nine different customer groups. It's 23 years of age that she falls within that 19 to 24-year-old age range. Again, for ESA groups there are different tariffs, if you want to do that. There's no payment when an individual moves into work. It's only when an individual remains in work for a particular set period, and then there are sustained payments thereafter. Now DWP, I've got their published stats. We get a different amount of that because we have a commercial arrangement with DWP, but DWP have got their published stats. So that person stays in work. What's the payment you get? It depends on the customer group. I don't know the specifics of the customer group. It varies wildly, so if we could catch up and you could let me know the customer group, then I'd be happy to provide that information. Is it about £1,100? For the individual when they move in, when they remain in work for a set period, it varies from £1,200 up to £3,500. If you are the XIB, what related group? So, if I support that young person that's staying in that job, do you think that DWP will pay me £3,500 for finding her a job? That's the question that's probably best asked of DWP. Well, I might just ask them, because then I'll donate it to my local food bank. Thank you. Can I thank the panel? We've got a panel who have been sitting patiently waiting to come in, and we really need to give them the respect of the time. Can I thank you very much for your contribution? I think there are one or two things where people may want to follow up, and if you can provide some of the information asked for, then that would be very helpful. Thank you very much, and we'll now suspend the meeting to allow the next panel. If we could reconvene and welcome our next panel, Stephen Boyd, STUC, Bill Scott from Inclusion Scotland. I'm struggling to see where everybody is. I'll mix that up here. Andy Hearst, Cambridge Policy Consultants, John Downey from SCVO, Pamela Smith from SLAED, Anna Ritchie-Allan from Close the Gap, Satwa Rehman from One Parent Family Scotland and Dr Jim McCormick from the Joseph Rowntree Foundation. Do any of our new panel want to make an open contribution to anything that they've either heard this morning or previously heard? Pamela? I'm representing the Scottish Local Government sector, and I think it was interesting this morning. I'd like to say that our interest in employability is mainly because of the relationship with the wellbeing of our citizens, and we know that the level of the quality of life prosperity will be heavily influenced by the quality of employment. We also see employment as a main route out of poverty in equality and disadvantage, and we have witnessed a lot of our most vulnerable job seekers actually being sidelined. It was interesting to hear the discussion and the outcomes in relation to the work programme because, in our experience, there isn't personalised provision, there isn't integrated assessment, and I think because of the parachuting in, there is a one-size-fits-all approach, and certainly local government. We welcome the consultation by the Scottish Government and we welcome the devolution of further powers. However, we also are concerned about the jagged edges around the powers that will remain reserved and to what degree we will have the freedom and flexibility to truly design person-centred approaches, given that conditionality in sanctions will still be reserved. We are interested in this whole debate in terms of how we can adopt a more preventative approach and how we can target the most vulnerable job seekers and give them a weighted intervention, instead of creaming the most job-ready in an outcome payment by results model. From Sammy Hitch's point of view, we are very keen that there remains a specialist disability employment programme because the main barrier for people who have a mental health condition or another ESA claimant is their actual condition, so there needs to be a health-based response rather than a generic employability-based response. I think that there needs to be an evidence-based approach going forward. The experience of the past five years demonstrates what works and what doesn't work. We know internationally that individual placement and support works very well for people with mental health problems, and we would also like an audit of the current spending so that we don't follow good money after bad as well. We are all aware of the limitations of what is being proposed, but that shouldn't get in the way of seeing the opportunity here. The opportunity, in part, is to reframe the purpose or the goal of those employment programmes and to be more ambitious than we have seen in the UK so far and to go beyond sustained work as the objective to look at earnings progression and the reduction of inward poverty as our objective. If we change the overarching incentives in the system, we change culture and behaviour, and I think that there is a big opportunity for Scotland to be amongst the best in the OECD, at least for this particular type of provision. John Denney? For us, the key proposition that resonates with our members in our discussions over the summer around employability and welfare is what we might call a participation and contribution strategy. I think that Jim talked about the opportunity, but it is not, as Jim said, just about getting people into paid employment, because people contribute to society in many different ways. We have carers, volunteers, learners and activists. For us, and Pamela mentioned personalisation, we need to expand the self-directedness at the heart of what we are doing in terms of welfare and employability. We need to start thinking about how we can give people much more choice over their own lives and what is based on their needs and their demands, not with a black box work programme type approach, which does not work for anyone in the end. We need to be much more personalised and think about the self-directedness, and certainly for us, we have to ensure that it is all embedded and connected to drugs and alcohol policies, social care and justice. There is a whole range of areas at the moment where the linkages are not as strong as they should be. I think that it should be about increasing disabled people's participation in society. That could be employment, it could also be volunteering, it could also be involvement in community groups and politics, et cetera. Basically, if you increase the social inclusion of disabled people, you will improve their health and wellbeing, and that will have knock-on benefits in the health system, in the social care system, et cetera. However, just as a one-size-fits-all approach that everybody can go into work does not work for all disabled people, there will be some disabled people who will never be able to work, but they should not be abandoned and just left to one side. There are many other things, many other ways they could contribute if they were supported to do so. There is another group of disabled people who could work, possibly only part-time, et cetera, but they should be supported to do that rather than expecting everybody to get full-time jobs. We think that there is a huge opportunity here as well in bringing into alignment health and social care with employability and trying to use the integration of those services to deliver a new programme that supports every citizen to achieve their full self-worth. We agree and see that this is an opportunity for a meaningful change in terms of women's experience of entering paid employment. We urge the committee to take a gendered approach and its findings in recognition of the fact that current employment services contribute to the concentration of women in low-paid, undervalued occupations, which contribute to women and children's higher levels of poverty and affects their pay and progression over their lifetimes, which, in turn, entrenties occupational segregation and widens the gender pay gap, which has an implication for Scotland's economy as well as individual women. We would like to see something that is person-led and not programme-based, which is what the current experience is of many of the single parents that we work with. The sort of generic scattergun programmes do not work for many claimants with complex needs or those who require a more tailored response or have other caring responsibilities. Talking to the parents we work with, they would like to see further integration of skills, employability, employment support, further education at a local level, but linked to other key supports, for example childcare, that is one of the biggest issues that many of the families that we work with talk about, and welfare rights and money advice. They are getting a holistic package of support that is going to enable them to enter or re-enter employment in a way that is going to be meaningful to them. We would ask it not to be payment by results that works against many of us who are in the charity sector or smaller community organisations and does not always allow the time that it takes to engage and support many of the parents that we are working with to get them to the point where they can engage meaningfully with training and further education and that it should not be prescriptive but building the package around the person, with the person, and taking that sort of asset-based approach. There are examples of that already in Scotland. There is a making it work programme that is currently being run in five local authority areas for single parents, supporting single parents into work, and that takes a very personalised asset-based approach and the interim evaluation of that, that the big lottery have commissioned, showing that it is getting the employment outcomes and significant employment outcomes. Just before we bring Steven in, you said that you did not support payment by results. Do you support those large providers being paid irrespective of how effective they are? How good a job they do? How caring they are about the service that they provide to the people that they are working with? Do you think that they should just be paid anyway? I think that it is more about looking to see how you get the partnership and the providers around the table who are going to be able to build that journey for the family and for some of us who would be part of that. We would not be able to sustain the support that we would like to give to families if there was a payment by results module. For example, a lot of the work that we do might be at the very beginning stage around engagement, which is very time consuming and resource intensive, but is not going to give you an outcome that comes further along the pathway for a year, two years or something like that. If you are wanting to develop that sort of model, there are going to be likes of us who would not be able to do that on a payment by results basis. In terms of your question about whether we should be handing money over without there being any outcomes of accountability, the answer is no, I do not think that. I would like to build on a comment that has been made by Jim. I think that he is stressing the scale of the opportunity that is before us as those powers are devolved. I think that we should recognise that active labour market programmes are not an area that Scotland or the UK has traditionally excelled in. I think that we should recognise that we have traditionally spent very little money on those programmes, although they are commonly understood to be expensive. If you look at what the UK spends compared to other European nations, it is a tiny proportion, and then Mark comes close to outspending us in cash terms, never mind his percentage of GDP. We also have a very low participation rate in terms of job seekers who are engaged in active labour market programmes, again one of the lowest in the European Union. We have to understand that we have to learn from good practice elsewhere. We have to learn also that good active labour market programmes tend to be rooted in economic circumstances and institutions in the culture of the country. It is particularly important that what we try to do in Scotland in terms of design is intimately linked to the current Scottish Government activity on economic development and particularly fair work. As we seek to move away, hopefully, from the work-first approach that has dominated recent UK approaches to a model that invests much more in the individual for the longer term, aligning active labour market policy with the Scottish Government's fair work agenda is going to be particularly important. Can I stick with the theme that both Jim and yourself mentioned, Stephen, about opportunity? We want to look at what future delivery would look like once additional powers are devolved. The Scottish Government and the Scottish Parliament have responsibility for setting up its own framework of welfare benefits. One of the things that we heard from the research that we did at Sheffield Hallam University is that the single biggest influence in getting people into work was the availability of jobs in economic upturn. Some of you will be dealing with sections of the population, and we have heard from others, dealing with sections of the population that are always on the margins and find it most difficult to get into work when employment is readily available. That becomes even more of a challenge when employment or when jobs are not available. We have also heard, and some of our members have talked about the pillars that should underpin a new system about dignity and respect. In terms of opportunities to refashion a social security system in a different way, what would be the values and the principles that you think we should be examining? If you look at the paper that the Scottish Government published a few weeks ago, creating a further social security system where it has got to at the moment, in pages 10, 11 and 12, we had a number of our members, including Bill, who was one of them. We had about 45 grass-root small members who were at the front line of dealing with people who have complex needs within the social security and employability system, and we had a day with officials who were all there. I think that the reason I am reproduced is that, if you look at the principles of the social security system that we are talking about here, it is based on dignity, respect, rights-based, person-centred, simple but complex. There is a complex, flexible, responsive sense. Actually, the principles are all there, and I think that that equally applies to employability. If we get the principles of how we want to operate, and I think that personalisation, self-directing this, is at the key of that. I think that, in terms of the job market, some people will need a light touch support to get into work. Others, the more complex needs, will need more support, but it needs to be flexible. If you look at the moment, we have been a big focus on youth unemployment, which, because the labour market is changing and because of investment that both national and local government have made in trying to reduce that, that situation is easing. It is not solved by any means, but the problem is that, at the moment, 25 to 42-year-olds are virtually getting no support within the current system. The Scottish Government has extended their support to 29, so we need to be able to be flexible in a system in which we can look at people's needs but we can also make investment choices at different times within budgets, because that is important for both national and local government to have the flexibility change in terms of local labour markets. All of that for me does not quite answer your question, but I think that the principle is here for us or key. A couple of principles I would suggest. One is about trust. Trust among programme participants is at the heart of this, so dignity and respect and how people are treated. However, there is a quite important issue about public trust, the wider populations trust in the system because we all contribute to paying for those programmes, so we need to have a degree of confidence that what we invest in in the future is effective. An employer trust in programmes is also critical. The last thing employers want are lots of people who are poorly matched for the vacancies that they are advertising or conscripts who are just turning up because they have been forced to. That is a pretty important element at the heart of that. The evidence from well-designed programmes internationally and the evidence is good, bad and ugly, but the well-designed programmes show us that you can get substantially better outcomes and you can make savings in the long term. If you focus on getting a good match between the jobseeker and the vacancies that are out there, if we, as Stephen was saying, pursue a labour force attachment model where we are chucking people at the wall until they stick, it is a very inefficient model, it costs a lot of money and it has lousy outcomes. If we take longer, as Sava was saying, it may take longer to improve basic skills, get good quality childcare in place, reduce barriers around confidence, transport or digital skills. If we take a little bit longer with some people, you get much better outcomes often. I am not against paying by results, I am just in favour of measuring results over a much longer cycle than we tend to do at the moment. Stephen? I think that last point that I made is really crucial. I have got before my recent Eurostat survey of what works in active labour market policies. I have just showed you the first sense. It says that the primary goal of active labour market policies is to increase employment opportunities for jobseekers and to improve matching between jobs and workers. I think that this is something that in the UK we have routinely overlooked in the way that programmes in other countries are designed. That matching element is every bit as crucial as the first component of that. I will go back to the point that you made in your remarks about the Sheffield-Allam research, which is fundamental to all of that and which is very often overlooked. I think that there is a tendency now that we badge as employability issues that are fundamentally about economic development. I have sat in seminars over the past few years at the Scotland office a couple of times at the height of the recession when we were discussing employability. What is the point, really, of discussing employability, as the labour market is tanking all around you? The debate is about how to be generate sufficient demand to improve employment opportunities for everybody. We have this very important discussion today. We have to understand the demarcation lines around what employability programmes are ever going to achieve and what is the role of wider economic development policy? I have just raised the issue in the last session about the assumption within the system that the problems were the individual, not with structural problems within the economy. I think that Jim's paper has a telling point, and it is a point that I have made repeatedly since coming on this committee. He sums it up well. It says that evidence suggests that evolution may carry risks as well as rewards, especially when local delivery diverges from policy goals. There is no automatic relationship between decentralisation and employment and skills services and more effective integrated delivery or improved experience. Achieving those gains depends on managerial, fiscal and delivery capacity of lower tiers of government and lower delivery partnerships. We have a situation in which we devolve the work programme. Let's say that we have devolved it to local authorities or to partners down the line, and yet local authorities are being star-defunds. Then it doesn't follow necessarily that just because we devolve it, it's going to be better. We have to have that in mind when we think about how we're going to design any system and also the principles that apply and the values that are behind that system. Bill, you are saying about how employability is affected by the economic cycle. In the long boom between 1998 and 2008, the rate of employment among disabled people in Scotland rose from 39 per cent to 49 per cent. That's steady progress. It's not fantastic because it should have been higher and it shouldn't have been starting from so low a base, but there was steady progress throughout that long boom. Since the recession, employment among disabled people fell to as low as 41 per cent in Scotland, and it's only now recovering to about 43 per cent to 44 per cent, but it's still well below what it was before the start of the recession, and yet the employment rate of non-disabled people has recovered. There's more part-time work and more self-employment. I agree, Stephen, but about 80 per cent are in some form the employment of the non-disabled population. The non-disabled population have largely got back into jobs, lower paid part-time etc, but the disabled part of the population have largely been excluded from the return to work that's happened. There is a need for services that are tailored and match people to the jobs because what we found in what Glasgow Centre for Inclusive Living, SAMH, everybody that's been involved in working with disabled people to get them into jobs is that if we work with the disabled person to identify the barriers and we work with the employer to overcome those barriers, we can succeed at a very very high level of success. It's more expensive to do it, but it results in long-term benefits for the individual and for the employers, and it builds up that relationship you trust that's absolutely essential to make it work because going back to it, if you get the wrong employee, none of the barriers addressed, they'll fail. The employer won't take another referral from you, and that's the end of that chance. That firm, that small employer, medium-sized employer being opened up to other disabled people coming in later. I think it's very, very important that the support's tailored and that there's matching goes on, that really genuinely identifies barriers, as they say, for both the potential employer and for the employer and what's we both of them to overcome them. My apologies, Rachel. I didn't welcome you at the start of the session. You were originally listed to come in the other panel, and you're now in this one. Welcome to Rachel Stewart from Salmage. Kevin, and I know a number of others who want to come in. Thank you, convener. We talked in the previous panel about the fact that the sanctions scenario is not being devolved and will still be retained by the DWP. One parent family Scotland said in their evidence that, as it stands, the Scotland Bill will devolve responsibility for the work programme to the Scottish Government, whilst maintaining the current sanctioning regime that underpins both the referrals to and the policing of the work programme by the DWP. That would seriously restrict Parliament's opportunities to develop effective employability services. I wonder if Satwak could comment some more on that, and I wonder if we could hear from others if they think that it is illogical to devolve the work programme but not let us deal with the sanctioning regime here and let the DWP come in, as it wishes, in that regard. Ideally, during the Smith commission process, we argued and our submission was based on that what we would want would be coherence across the system in terms of policy and delivery, so we would want to see the policy as well as the work programme being devolved. That is not what has happened, as we know. We are left with this disconnect between the policy and the practice. It does concern us. We have significant numbers of cases of parents who are with work programme providers or subcontractors who are being referred for sanctions on the basis of not being able to do something. I had two cases emailed to me last night where the parents involved had explained why they were unable to undertake a certain activity as part of their work programme and then found themselves sanctioned. There had also been no communication between the provider and the job centre for the reasons that were given, so the job centre was not informed of the reasons why they said that they could not do it. I am not going to go into details on name names, but this is what we see an opportunity to try to improve. Yes, the sanctions regime is still with us, yes, conditionality is still with us. Ideally, we would like it not to be, but what we are hoping is that we can develop a more coherent programme, link it more closely to support and try to minimise the referrals that would be coming from the work programme providers or whatever we call it when it is devolved and we are responsible for it, minimise the referrals for the sanctions. We could set up the most coherent programme with all of the linkages that John talked about earlier in terms of housing and justice and all of the rest of it, but at the end of the day we still will not have a say on whether somebody faces a sanction or not. In that level of incoherence, illogicality seems to me to be plain daft and the fact that we are getting yet again incomplete powers just does not make any sense to me. Do you feel the same way? That is what we argued for, we argued for there to be coherence, we argued in our submission for the conditionality and sanctions regime also to be devolved so the policy and job centre plus, so we could actually have control and create that coherence, but what we are hearing very strongly from the families we are working with or the question that we are being asked is, it is not as we spoke to you about and we wanted, but what can you do to make it the best that it can be for us and that really is the starting point that we are now having to move forward from. How can we make the best of what we've got? I do not know if you had the chance to hear the earlier session where I quoted from your excellent briefing paper, but in terms of sanctions and these big companies that are delivering these employability services, when I questioned them about your paper and the suffering of single parent families, they basically told me that the sanctions were nothing to do with them, that it was a completely separate thing. Is that your experience of these companies? Can I just get my phone to quote these two case studies, if you don't mind, just because they came through last night? I don't want to get the wordings wrong of them because I do think it's important because actually in both cases it was the provider who threatened the sanction, it wasn't a referral made and then a sanction, it was the provider who threatened the sanction. I'm not naming names, but we have a client who said he couldn't attend a training group because he felt unwell and would be going to his GP. He was then informed by the DWP, he was sanctioned as he did not attend a work-focused activity and did not inform the trainer. It turned out that the training provider didn't tell the DWP that he'd phoned them. Can I ask you what the training provider was? Who the training provider was? I would want to go back and verify it but I'm very happy to write to you with that information. Was the sanction issued by the DWP because the provider didn't supply the information or was the sanction determined by the provider? It seems that the provider would have made the referral to say this person didn't attend this course but they hadn't explained or the DWP claimed it wasn't aware of the reason. The sanction was levied by the DWP. The sanction is levied by the DWP, that's right. The failure is in the provider not supplying the proper information to the DWP. The second one is a client who was threatened with a sanction if she didn't attend a computer course even though she'd informed them. She could only sit for 30 minutes due to arthritis and the computer course was for two hours. She was informed if she didn't attend she would be sanctioned. The feeling amongst the case workers, the staff that work with One Parent Family Scotland is that the providers appear to be acting as if they have the right to give out sanctions. There's a concern about the information that they give to the DWP who then enforce a sanction without taking into account the client's view of the situation. It's that communication that I think we can improve. There are things we can hopefully do to improve that situation. It's maybe not just the communication, it's the lack of separation between the provider and the DWP. The provider thinks that whatever they say will be agreed by the DWP. The DWP issue the sanction, so what there needs to be is a greater degree of separation in the decision making process and also clearly better information going to the DWP because I think from what you're saying is that the provider themselves can't sanction but they seem to have assumed that whatever they say DWP will just rubber stamp and clearly that's wrong. Anna, you want to come in then Christina? Yeah, my point was actually, well in terms of sanctions, my point was actually before that question so just to, I don't know if it's kind of going back a bit, but I did want to agree with the points on matching and also linking an employability policy with economic development which Stephen had mentioned because we know that women are being funneled into low paid female dominated occupations and because of their propensity to be carers for whether for children or for sick people, older people, disabled people, we know that a lack of flexible employment means that many many women are working below their skill level and that under utilisation of women's skills has a significant impact on the economy. So until we address the fact that women are in the wrong jobs for their skills and experience then that needs to be reflected in the design of new employability support. Okay, Christina. Thank you very much, convener. In the earlier session I was asking some questions about the success and John you might have recognised some of the stuff that you had written for third force news because I quoted it and some it was around about you know success and it ties into what Bill was saying about the difference between people with disabilities and complex needs getting into employment now and maybe then. So I use some of the figures that now ESA claimants about 4.3% of them are finding a job but in 2011 it was 7.1 and pre-2011 and I do have to declare an interest here because I did manage a project that was of employability for people who learned disabilities mental health issues so I was also a founding member of the Scottish Union of Spotted Employment so a wee bit you know a background there as well. What I did see was some of the work programmes that are being delivered now were being delivered at that time by not-for-profit organisations or third sector organisations who seem to do some of that more holistic approach who then seem to have a better success rate and certainly the project that I managed in one really good year we had a 71% success rate which was something the whole team were proud of. My question essentially is pre-2011 to 2011 till now what's the difference because I believe that many of you will now be subcontracted by the two private companies who are making a profit on this to do some of this and I know that a lot of the wise group workers that I worked with are now working for some of these companies that's why they've got some very very good staff in my opinion and some of these private companies it was really to get a feeling from some of the the organisations around the table on the difference between pre-2011 and post-2011 and on the back of that in the national audit committees report suggests that providers are spending 54% less on the hardest to employ groups of the people with multiple disabilities and more challenges and whether that's something you recognise as part of your everyday work. When the discounts cut into the contracts all contracts had first two years at full price and then every provider negotiated a discount on their prices is on a declining scale so there's less money around in the last three years. Okay, John. If we look at the performance of the work programme post-2011 and I'll contrast that with Community Jobs Scotland which obviously SCBL runs and that's a consortium of 585 third sector organisations. Stephen made the point earlier on about the amount we invest. Community Jobs Scotland costs more than the work programme but actually our positive outcomes in the last evaluation by Glasgow University was 66%, 54% in it. Jobs, others higher for their education. The work programme is currently sitting although I'm sure that the primes present it slightly differently around 24%. So the work programme is patently not working and I think Andy's made a good point that the discounting, the discounting can't be allowed to influence whatever we do with the money in the next thing because actually the financial settlement has actually been skewed because of the land discounts by the primes and I guess that Stephen's point about investing in people but they have been cherry picking for the last few years those who can easily get into jobs and actually leaving off but I think in general there's not that many third sector organisations compared to the number who work in employability and all the wraparound services advice for people who are actually working with the primes in Scotland because most people took the decision not to work with them because of their approach. Rachel, you wanted to come in on something else so just come in on this and I'll come back to you. I'll come in on this. I was going to suggest following on from the cherry picking remark from John in terms of the change following the incapacity benefit reassessments much more people with long-term conditions would have been pushed through post 2011 so the demographic within the work programme would have changed it would have been far more people with long-term conditions so as the generalist approached to those people with conditions that they weren't able to support into work their success rates that could be one of the reasons why it fell. Is 34% cut as well in the investment in those people would be unadded? Well absolutely. Pamela, you wanted to come in? I'll pick up on what John said. A lot of the poorer results has been the failure of the providers of work programme to connect locally and to align with local services and I know most of local government does not interact or deliver on the work programme therefore we haven't managed to get a whole person approach because a lot of those in receipt of the work programme will also be received another local government support social rented housing and being engaged with social work community justice service etc so there is an opportunity lost there and to some degree the work programme has been delivered in a silo locally and those participants are being disadvantaged from the other local support infrastructure and again it was a principled decision certainly within my own authority in Falkirk that we were not going to shore up the profits of private providers by delivering their outcomes for things they were then paid to deliver and I think that that has been to the disadvantage of the more vulnerable job seekers unfortunately. Okay now Rachel you wanted to come in as something else? It was in regard to the sanctions and about how important the relationship is between the employability advisor and the client and if you have one person if you're trying to get that individual back to work and you're applying sanctions to them the relationship is going to break down and that's going to just set back any attempts to get that person into work as a subcontractor and work choice obviously participation is voluntary so sanctions don't get applied which is why we said in our submission that we felt that individuals with disabilities or long-term conditions in short-term conditions if they're in receipt of ESA should be put through a voluntary programme to remove the threat of sanctions on the basis of their condition but also just to it's been much more successful in placing those individuals in work you do have better relationships between advisors and clients. Okay Jim. Just briefly on the sanctions point then a wider point of I may I think anywhere you look at this I mean we can have different views on what should be devolved or decentralised and when and how but this is a you know incoherence at the heart of the settlement it's probably unsustainable too which doesn't give us any comfort in the short term I think it's unsustainable because of the divided accountabilities that providers will face let alone the disruption to relationships at the front line that Rachel has talked about so I think it's unsustainable. The other point about conditionality is in the UK we have defined conditionality in a really weird way compared to other countries we have defined it only in terms of the penalties that apply if someone is perceived to have not met their responsibilities for example under the claimant commitment in other countries notably Scandinavia but Netherlands, Germany, Austria to conditionality seen more positively it's about it's about the incentives and the carrots if you like that we are willing to invest in you if you meet the condition so it's about childcare guarantees it's about training guarantees it's about if you lose your job here's the investment to get the next job so we shouldn't run away from conditionality and limit its definition to sanctions because that would be stepping outside the internationally understood way of going about active labour market policy and a final kind of forward looking point I think we should probably spend more of our time in the coming months and years you know trying to spot what does best look like what does what works look like what's the opportunity for Scotland Scottish Government is developing for the first time in a long time a labour market strategy for Scotland amen it's long overdue but what we do in this space has to fit with what's happening especially at the bottom end of the jobs market in Scotland in work poverty casualisation the revolving door of people being in and out of work frequently we need to have something in this space that isn't just for unemployed people but it's about people who are in very insecure positions in the jobs market being able to progress and I think we should have a programme that's good enough that invites people in on a voluntary basis not just helps people who have no choice about being there or not that's a kind of forward looking point Bill luckily I asked just about to make that point about the disconnect the worry that we have is that the Scottish Government and you know the other stakeholder partners in Scotland the local authorities health service et cetera could adopt a programme much more like work choice than the work programme which is a voluntary based programme where people put themselves forward for the help and then get tailored support but the problem is that the job centres will be driving people into that programme and making it non voluntary which could destroy the the trust basis that you need and if you look again at the sanctions I know I've not got the figures in front of me but as far as I believe there are about 60 odd percent of sanctions are overturned you know the referrals either at review or appeal and that means a lot of the initial decisions are just plain wrong and based on inadequate information which is going back to some of the examples that that's provided that decisions are being made which penalise people potentially for very long periods based on completely inadequate information and you know if we we need to move away from trying to drive people into work to a much more carrot focused approach where we actually say here's the help that we can provide and if you take those steps we will reward you for taking those steps and you know that will will result in much better outcomes particularly for those people that face immense barriers getting into the job market not because they are willingness to work but because the employers unwillingness to employ them. I was invited here for presumably because I did the work last year on mapping the employability investment in Scotland but I am also a trustee of an organisation down south called Papath Trust and we deliver the work programme under contract to a prime so there are two things I want to bring into this discussion first and foremost at the end of the process of the research we undertook I'm convinced Scotland needs to take a step around identifying income as the basis of the objective of welfare to work not jobs jobs have never been more meaningless you know 25 years ago when I first started doing this someone got a job it meant something and you could reliably assume that they would move from that job to a better job I don't think you can do that anymore we know nothing about how well people stick work after six months it's not a very long period would that make a difference on a cv to an employer in the next employment I'm not sure it would these days so progression in the labour market is a real challenge and it goes alongside a lack of jobs in the first place that said the other thing I learned from the review was that we don't know anything like as much as we think we know about programme performance we cannot draw a blueprint for a programme what should the ratio be between advisors and clients we don't know evidence doesn't tell us that there's nothing in the research about that we've done work on that but it never got published dwp said it was the kind of thing you shouldn't look at but it's what you will find if you go to the front line of any project or programme it's about the amount of time an advisor can spend with an individual all the evidence I've ever looked at over 25 years I can find you a very good whatever design you come up with I can find you a very good supportive evaluation and I can find you a very bad destructive evaluation for the very same design it's not what you do it's the way you do it subculture and understanding and working with clients is essential but we don't evaluate that it's not in the research I visited our local office it happens to be Cambridge Cambridge has a lot of jobs but as an organisation Papeth Trust we achieve double the ESESA rate for flow clients 13 percent outcomes that sustain jobs twice the national rate and that's from the start of the contractor today the first two years of the contract I don't mind sharing with you our trust lost money we now earn a surplus we don't do as well with x with the long term ESESA clients because there isn't sufficient money and time in the work programme we need more time we have things like an allotment in one centre cultural and an arts based activities and other the real issue is not necessarily training people but giving them activities that socialise them and bring them up to standard the one thing I know from talking to frontline workers in our own no organisation about sanctions is most of the clients they work with would get sanctioned if they were under the orbit of DWP on a day job centre plus on a daily basis it's not in our interests to do that we try bend over backwards but they would not want to lose the ability to have someone sanctioned if they did not feel they were pulling their weight I don't know how many of you were able to see the discussion earlier on but I find it a bit strange that the way the contracts are organised that they talk about people in the work programme as customers and Jim used another word earlier on conscripts and I just want to know do you feel do the people you represent feel like customers or conscripts? Conscripts? That's how to say to the people you think of the work programme unfortunately it's a very very few positive outcomes there's certainly more support for work choice and again I would support what you said though it depends who's providing it and how they're doing it are really important issues. I was just going to say many of the parents we work with would probably see themselves as conscripts however when I've been going around the country speaking to groups of parents there's a very mixed experience and so much of it seems to boil down to who it is you see and it goes back to the point that you were making just earlier on you know I was in Dundee speaking to some parents and I was asking them about the experience with the job centre and one of them said I've got a really good advisor they understand me they understand my issues they know what my own health issues are they know what my concerns for my daughter are they'll look at something and say no I don't think that's right for you talking to the other parent who sees another advisor in the same job centre totally different experience and I think that does go back to the issue of culture I think there's um you know there's an issue around training there's an issue about the advisors themselves understanding what the regulations are what's in guidance what flexibility is they can and can't apply and there's a fact that the system the sort of um the culture of the organisation doesn't allow them to do that necessarily in the way that they would want it was a conversation we were having earlier if the culture of the organisation is such that actually this is a default position we want to see the number of people you're sanctioning that works against them being able to provide the more supportive service that we spoke about that you spoke about at PAPA's trust or that I mean we ourselves do some work with working links running a marks and starts programme but we ensure all the parents who come on there are there voluntarily and we're able to provide them with the support and the understanding and actually many of them report a very positive experience and sustained employment outcomes so even within the current system there are those tiny pockets of good practice but their pockets what we want is coherence and what we want is something where that's the standard that everyone would expect wherever they are okay and we certainly have that last week that the quality of the individual advisor or the attitude of the individual advisor was was was critical um kneeling in john just very briefly to you i think i'm glad we've got into the culture thing because we seem to have created a horrible culture around all of this where it's where there is no trust or trust seems very limited and disrespect seems to be a word that keeps cropping up and i think actually if we're honest with each other we saw that this morning and our questioning some of the members of the previous panel because i think all of us distrusted in some way what we were being told that there's certainly the impression that i got from the question of the panel and i certainly was one of them so that we seem to have created a whole atmosphere around this whole thing that revolves around distrust and a lack of respect and i don't know how we're going to overcome that but it has to be fundamental to how we change the system that we have one that's based on some kind of mutual respect for people who are claimants within the system i despise using the word customer and crucially the folk who are in the front line and having to deliver the services because it must be bloody miserable for them at times as well okay john yeah it's a different point actually it's about how we deliver the services once we've got these powers and we have touched on the pros and cons of localism which was in jim's paper and that was touched on early and has been touched on in other discussions what i want to talk about is that in our briefings one of the things that comes across about employability services is that they're incredibly complex the way that they're delivered and there's lots of different people delivering them and it has also been said that because of that you know like the actual amount of money how much of the money that's put into employability services actually gets to the people that need it to deliver these quality services so what i'm interested in your views on is how do we design services that meet the needs and the very varied individual needs of people but we get rid of that complexity also so that more of the money actually gets to the people that need it is there a is there a way through that can we design a more streamlined system in scotland or do we need to keep it complex the local government has submitted a position statement to scotch government on that that very point and we're looking at local by default national by agreement we recognize we need that a national framework we need national standards but we would very much want to exploit the community empowerment bill and look at how we get local planning in place and local resourcing and taking the services much closer to the job seekers and the vulnerable clients but i think more than that we have to look at a much more joined up approach and we need to look at an all government approach at scotch government level and local government level because there will be less money in the system and the money that we currently have i think we have to make work better for us so in terms of the people in receipt of housing tenancy support social work support and community development supporting etc we need to look at how we can better align that locally and i think it has to be tailored to individual circumstances i think we definitely have to move away from the one size fits all but we have to look at some national principles and some national performance so there is some cohesion but i think as importantly we want to look at how we deliver on our social policy so we are looking at community benefits and procurement reserve contracts supporting businesses supporting employment how do we join all that up in a more coherent fashion including economic development and the scotch business pledge all that plays into the one picture but currently they are all operating in silos so it might not necessarily mean more money but it means how how we actually approach it and how more effective we can be in decluttering a lot of the bureaucracy and a lot of the landscape because you're absolutely right there are too many structures too many programmes and it is very complex and confusing and i think we have to look at dismantling that and simplifying the whole process and approach okay john and then Jim i think if you start with the premise we're putting people at the heart of this system then the key thing from the start there is actually high quality early assessment of people their needs and what they're capable of their capabilities as well but some young people are young graduate doesn't need that much support or help some way much more complex needs and i think we can i mean to give you a panel we need a system that's got a national approach but can actually work within local areas i mean i'll refer back to community jobs scotland we run that as a national we allocate jobs in every local authority area at the same time the number of jobs we have for each year the target we have a number allocated to young care leavers so we work with who cares scotland to support those young people we work with inclusion scotland in our disability in terms programme and actually we niche it within that because some people will be on it for six months others young disabled people we might have maybe longer term conditions will be on it for 12 months so we can build up the kind of personalised approach and support that if people need longer they can work on but i think for us putting people at the heart of it our submission to the scottish government in terms employability said you know focusing the whole thing on tackling inequality but i think andy's point about income gets to the wider point that steven and jim were making about actually where are we going with the the economy so i think i think that that's a really interesting point if you have lots of niche programmes you can argue that they're meeting people's needs that they're complex different needs but if you have lots of different programmes that's lots of different people administering those programmes which takes money away from the people that you're trying to benefit in the first place is that a price worth paying is there any way around that well i think it depends on the connection i mean for example community jobs scotland we've got a memorandum of understanding the local authorities we actually work quite close with the dwp we've got a dwp to condi in to help it make it easier to get people into jobs through the job centres we've actually got the dwp to agree that actually with their advisors that we can start working with young people in prison who are going to be coming out so what we've got is you have a national framework programme where actually in the majority of young people go through the national programme and actually it's a what it is they get the same kind of service they get a job and an opportunity but i think the other thing that we see is what your objectives what the outcomes you want community jobs scotland does two things one that gives young people an opportunity a job also builds capacity in the third sector so for the money that we're getting we're getting a double hit on that so i think you need to be very clear on what you want and but you are going to have a lot of different niche programmes because we've got a lot of different people with complex needs within the system bill i think john's question gets to the heart of this actually and it depends who we're talking about because john's right there are there are participants in the system who could get by with less being spent on them and others who absolutely need more time money expertise spent on them so if we're talking about people who are stuck in low pay have poor qualifications are going to have very poor prospects over the next decade um the i think the international evidence is made without wanting to do violence to the evidence but certainly from some of the best examples we do need more specialism and more diversity of provision that doesn't mean that every local authority has to run its own programme but it does mean that for people with particular predictable barriers they will sink in mainstream standard programmes and they will keep cycling round and round so we have to get the balance right between national standards and frameworks a sufficient degree of localism a sufficient degree of specialisation and because this is new territory of in many ways for us we need to be testing learning and adapting and i would favour the thing we really need to understand here is about commissioning skills commissioning capacity where does that best sit geographically in terms of sectors we may not know all the answers so we should be testing and evaluating a final point i would just make about um really about rights and responsibilities and power in this system i mean John's right about self-directedness i mean the evidence here is kind of promising rather than proven but there are good examples from Australia and the Netherlands and elsewhere of um you know job seekers with certain characteristics has been given a pot of money with guidance and support to navigate what is often a complex landscape but to find the best type of provision that suits their needs and sometimes you have to spend quite a bit more than we do at the moment on those participants but we're much more likely to get good outcomes and therefore to make savings which is quite important to make this financially viable we're more likely to do that if we take that proportionate approach to people's needs in in the system okay um bill andy and insult work i think one of the problems is going to be that the complexity is going to increase because there are still going to be dwp deliver programmes and there are also going to be the scottish programme whatever whatever it is and therefore the potential for disconnect is is will increase and that's bad for people looking for work and it's also bad for sometimes for the people who are helping them look for work because they need to know about all of those individual niche programmes that we've been talking about and i think there is still a place for niche provision but we need to do better on the big programmes as well um it's not acceptable i don't think that for example gender uh you know women are being pushed into low paid jobs rather than the higher paid higher skilled jobs that they could be going into and there's been a concentration on numbers rather than overcoming inequality and that particularly disadvantages disabled people because they tend to be left to one side that's why you know when i was saying earlier employment rate non-disabled people not the employment rate generally the employment rate non-disabled people is returned more or less to the same level but because more disabled people are unemployed the employment rate hasn't recovered completely so you know if we did concentrate on overcoming those inequalities within the mainstream programmes so that they were judged not only on numbers but on what are the gender outcomes what are the outcomes for disabled people what are the outcomes for young people within those programmes in terms of reducing long-term unemployment amongst that age group then i think you begin to see programmes that are more fit for purpose so that that it's not really just design but it's actually about what outcomes do you want to achieve through this and that and that then takes you back to how do we design the programme to achieve those outcomes okay and a couple of points following up from what Jim was saying one of the reasons we don't know how cost-effective programmes are is that the work programme and many others rely on free services and we don't include those in the calculations i know that from our own delivery of papas trust we go after everything that's free and then pay for what we can afford thereafter that is not included and yet it's vital so how do we manage that and deal with the overhead problem or the fragmentation issue not many programmes have addressed that very well one i remember 2003 2004 human resource commission in new york contracted providers in 24 boroughs with a mix of primes and voluntary agencies but paid centrally for drug and alcohol support, mental health support, housing and other advisory services because they are paid for services they work with volume not with you know one-off contracts are very expensive if that's the only client you're going to get from the work programme contract for the next three months you can't afford to sustain a service so that's one way of looking at this of where you know collectively you can use your purchasing power to buy big on services that on a per head basis could be small if they were if they have scale um i don't know whether it ultimately worked in new york i wasn't allowed to go back there by dwp so unfortunately the other point following on from what dim was saying about the investment in individuals the dutch have a system now where they ask 29 questions at the start of a claim and on the basis of those 29 questions they can predict with 70 accuracy who will not get a job for 12 months because they're not just about characteristics about attitudes and i think that is the basis for a needs assessment for understanding who it is you really need to invest in earlier and who it is you can save money on because if you don't do that this is going to be too expensive okay um is that what steven and then kevin thank you i think one of the reasons why we have such a sort of complex landscape when it comes to employability is because what was said earlier a lot of the sort of mainstream programmes weren't meeting the needs of groups who had additional needs or particular groups and many of us myself included went out and got bits of money to put together training programmes either for bme communities for women for people with disabilities and so you've ended up with this really diverse landscape some of which is delivering very well other bits of it which aren't and i think it also recognises the the complexity of people's lives and there's something about actually how do we make it so that people feel comfortable going and being able to ask for support from the system that we're providing as opposed to going to the local community group where they've got relationships and they know people and then they think about how they're going to put on some sort of employment training for them which is how many of these things have grown up in that sort of developmental way but i think at the heart of anything that we design have to be something around the quality of the experience for the individual who's coming into it and equality in terms of access in terms of experience and trying to achieve equality of outcomes and that's where the need for the tailored and the specialist programmes comes in because that's something recognising everybody's not starting at the same point and we have to level that playing field i also think there's something around how we get the balance right between rights and responsibilities i mean i feel at the moment with the families that we're working with they'll come to one of our programmes because they'll because there's an agreement there's a trust there's a culture that's been spoken about earlier where they will give time they will attend but they get something back that's a value to them and that means something to them and that they can see is going to help them and is assisting them whereas within the mainstream programmes through the work programme what we're seeing is all the responsibilities are on the individual to do lots of things through the claimant commitment but that their rights have been constantly eroded so whatever we try to design i feel we have to see how we can get that balance back and that mutual respect and that understanding and i think one of the ways we can look to see how we can save some money in the system is to see how we can integrate with other support services like for example many of us will probably have pots of money attached to our programmes to support with childcare and with other things and yet what we're wanting to do is look to see how we develop a childcare infrastructure that supports the child has the best outcomes for the child provides continuity of care and experience for the child and enables the parent to be able to go into training feeling confident that the child is not going to be suffering and hasn't just been parked somewhere so there's a way of how we can look to bring together the sort of support services and the various bits of funding there are for that to create greater coherence in the system. I just want to make a very general point about complexity in costs and one thing that's always intrigued and frustrated me is that active labour market programmes always seem to be judged on a different scale to other public policy interventions when it comes to admin costs in particular in deadweight costs i.e. those costs accrued in achieving outcomes that would have been achieved anyway. Now whenever we propose a new active labour market intervention to government at any level we immediately get potential deadweight costs flung back in our face now it's reasonable there should be a discussion round about the extent of deadweight in any programme but you'll look across the gamut of public policy and there are programmes being run at various levels of government with the deadweight costs about 100% the classic current example would be the patent box now why is deadweight always the first thing that we discuss in active labour market policy where it's ignored in big other strands of public policy making and I think if you know if we're ready to make the very general point about what we spend in the UK in active labour market interventions compared to other countries and it's been very low and I think we just have to love for the fact that any effective programme is going to have an element of deadweight costs and that admin costs will increase every time we try to provide the very necessary support to particular client groups now we just have to live with that I think and if we always tangle ourselves in knots about the potential costs and all of this then people will go without the very vital assistance they need and I think your one point leading on from that is if you're reading your research yesterday that seems to suggest that ITE is extremely limited and what it can deliver is part of the employability process you know there's been a number of programmes in various countries that try to introduce a much more online element to this kind of thing the outcomes do not appear to be very good now that is the one perhaps obvious way some people might think that the cost will be reduced well I suspect that will not be the case so again we have to understand that as long as people are at the centre of delivering decent services then the costs will be reduced and those costs will be very limited community we've been talking about complexities but in evidence that we've taken previously sometimes the most simplistic thing is the easiest way to get somebody into work and bill and others have talked about access to work we heard it in evidence last week from the support worker of the last who didn't feel that she could come in front of the committee some have said that it's almost a hidden programme in some regards and yet it has results simple and delivers and yet it's one of the areas that's not being devolved either and again you know there seems to be an inconsistency in this and maybe there are lessons from programmes and I'm sure there are others that are being delivered whether that be locally or nationally which have probably been formulated because for once government has listened to people and that I think should be one of our first things that we do audit and see what works because we'll often find I think that the simplistic thing works much better than some of the more complex okay thank you I'm aware of the time pressing on is there anything that our panel any members of our panel would wish to say in conclusion before we draw the session to a close I think I think Sam Yitch is very keen for a much more early intervention and inter-basid approach going forward whether that's referral pathways into employment from GPs or having a much more tailored approach through community mental health teams with individual placements and support we know one size doesn't fit all so we want to ensure that the 50% of individuals who receive employment and support alliance who have a mental health problem get the best opportunity going forward to getting into work or progressing towards work thank you Jim sorry Jim and then Bill did you want again I'll go off the just just a very brief point I very much echo what Rachel said we think that the lack of flexibility in terms of you know the 12 months before you can get into the programme is a real hindrance because there are a lot in disabled people who are being assessed out of being classed as a disabled person and placed on job seekers alliance that will need earlier intervention and also we're concerned about labour market churning where people remain in low paid work in and out of all their lives and again you'll know one point where you can intervene to address those issues increase their skills and maybe give them a chance to hire paid work rather than the low paid work that they're used to and that again particularly impacts on disabled people because they're likely to earn less in the first place just on putting ourselves in a position where we can actually work out what is effective for Scotland so the importance of data sharing protocols between Scottish Government DWP, HMRC so we can link properly the programmes interventions we designed in scotland with not just job outcomes but as we're seeing earlier you know wage levels and progression to be able to have more information about that will be really important and a final point would be about accountability and transparency. Whoever ends up delivering support in Scotland in future in whichever sector we need to make sure that there are clear scrutiny accountability guidelines that providers have the same requirement to share information, the same audit responsibilities and that ultimately participants have rights to switch provider, rights to appeal and so forth. We need to make sure that all that is taken care of or whatever to drive a system forward. Thank you very much for a fascinating session. There's been some hugely interesting and challenging suggestions made and I think to be honest the one thing, the main thing that I've taken from it notwithstanding some of the very specific and technical suggestions that have been made are actually the comments at the beginning that while there are challenges, while there are problems what we have ahead of us actually affords us an opportunity and the question is how we seize that opportunity and I've got no doubt that people like yourselves and the organisations that you represent are going to be critical in making sure that that opportunity is delivered to its full potential. So thank you very much and with that we'll draw the public session to a close. Thank you.