John Penrose

Conservative Party | Weston-super-Mare

Jobcentre Plus

John Penrose (Weston-super-Mare) (Con): I should like to pick up on some of the comments made by the Chairman of the Work and Pensions Committee, the hon. Member for Bradford, North (Mr. Rooney). I begin by picking up on the point that he made about whether or not information is available.

Let us consider the grip of the leadership and management on the performance of the efficiency savings programme. Significant questions remain to be answered, even after one has read the Government’s response to the Committee’s report. We asked in recommendation 16 why the figures were not available for local performance targets as opposed to a national overall target. We had spotted that there had been some severe and material local variations around the national average.

The Government said :

“Performance scores below national level are not statistically valid”

in the way they collect the information

“for any subsets of the organisation, and significant fluctuations...are expected. For other reasons connected with sample size and timing, the Contact Centre performance scores will not necessarily properly reflect performance at individual Contact Centre level.”

If that was just a problem of the nationally published, publicly available numbers, that might be all right if the Government had at their fingertips detailed information that portrayed the local variations, particularly where there was a significant local problem, with one or two contact centres falling down on the job. However, in recommendation 23 we mentioned that there had been a national failure of the customer management system on 18 January. We were surprised about something just a week later, when both the chief executive and the Minister gave evidence to the Committee. The Government’s response acknowledged:

“Neither the Minister nor the Chief Executive were aware of this incident at the time and therefore were unable to provide such detail to the Committee at the hearing”.

They rightly provided it subsequently in answer to supplementary questions. The fact that they were not aware of the incident raises significant questions about the degree of leadership and management grip on performance in the important area of the contact centres.

Mr. Boswell: Does my hon. Friend agree that if there is to be effective management, accurate reporting of information to them, whether or not it reaches the House, is essential, because there is no chance for senior management unless they have a system that tells them what is happening in their organisation?

John Penrose: I completely agree with that point. Without effective information, any management in any organisation, be it in the public or private sector, are flying blind.

It is deeply concerning if insufficient private detail is available to Ministers. The fact that they were not aware of the situation that we raised in recommendation 23 indicates that perhaps there was insufficient private detail.

To pick up on the point made by the Chairman of the Committee, in recommendation 20 we asked for current performance measurement systems to be improved. We recommended that

“the DWP should commission six-monthly reports on how Jobcentre Plus is proceeding with its efficiency savings programme as a supplement to its quarterly reports to the Office of Government Commerce.”

At that point, as the Chairman of the Committee said, the Government said, “Well, we cannot possibly reveal this, because the principle of confidentiality applies”, and they referred us to their response to recommendation 8. It contains a sentence of such Orwellian doublespeak that it is worth reading out:

“The principle of confidentiality underpinning those reports is essential to ensure absolute openness and honesty in reporting”.

That is apparently written without any hint of irony, and I did not know whether to laugh or cry when I read it. Exactly which bit of national security is threatened by publishing this information? Exactly which part of the defence of the realm will be undermined if the information is made public? We are not even asking for all the detail; we are asking for the information every six months, not every quarter, and the Government can publish a sanitised version if they like. However, the numbers should be available. Is there is an issue of commercial confidentiality? Well, no. Is there is an issue of legal privilege? Again, no.

This is hardly a commitment to open government, and I am afraid that the suspicion may be that, because they are unwilling to publish these numbers, the situation remains poor, or is not improving as fast as it should. The Chairman of the Committee has said that, had we realised exactly how bad the situation was when we began this inquiry, we would have allocated more time to it. The fact that there is a continuing dearth of publicly available information on this leads many of us to fear that the situation is not improving as fast as it should. We are sure that if the Government were improving the situation as fast as they claim, they would trumpet their success promptly and proudly. I look forward to the Minister’s explaining the situation to us and giving us lots of detail on how it has been improved. Perhaps he will commit to producing that information on a regular basis in future.

The second item that I want to raise is the problem of the customer management system, which we mentioned in recommendations 26 and 27. The Chairman of the Committee alluded to severe problems with poor staff morale in the agency. That extends over a long period, and one of the frequently mentioned reasons is problems with the CMS system. When we began our inquiry, the system had already been through two different versions: CMS1 and CMS2. CMS3 was being rolled out and was, in a few places, allegedly causing fewer problems, but the first two releases were absolutely dreadful and we heard a huge amount of evidence about the problems that they had created.

Greg Mulholland (Leeds, North-West) (LD): The hon. Gentleman mentioned the question mark about leadership in Jobcentre Plus and referred to CMS. The explanation in the Government’s response to the report was that the Minister and Chief Executive did not know that there had been a full CMS failure the week before the Committee sitting. Does that not show a lack of leadership that needs to be addressed?

John Penrose: The hon. Gentleman raises a point that I made earlier; I have already covered that. Clearly, it is an issue that needs to be brought forward and a grip must be taken on it, particularly because the Government in their response on that very question said that that was part of a pattern of failures in other parts of the country as well.

To return to my more general point about CMS, the system has cost more than £360 million to develop and install so far. We now discover that it is already due to be replaced. The Committee, logically and reasonably, asked why on earth, if it was due to be replaced and had not yet been completed satisfactorily, all that money was spent on it in the first place and whether anything would remain of the vast amount of taxpayers’ money that was sunk into the project.

In their answers to recommendations 26 and 27, the Government said that new proposals were coming forward to deal with proposals in the Green Paper on benefits reforms, and I am sure that the Committee understands that IT changes must reflect changes in policy. However, it would be useful to know how much of the latest version of CMS was expected still to be in use and how much of that £360 million-plus of taxpayers’ money would still be deriving some benefit for the nation one year, three years and five years from now, or whether the entire investment was due to be junked in short order.

In recommendation 27 we ask whether the planned new system is worth while. I presume that it will be more efficient and is being introduced because it will create some benefits. We also asked:

“will the planned new system (if it is implemented successfully) mean that significant additional efficiency savings will be available from the Department in due course?”

That does not mean efficiency savings that are currently planned under the Gershon targets. If the new system is introduced, will there be a still more efficient Department as a result? If so, that would be welcome news because presumably the Government would expect some sort of return on the additional investment of who knows how many millions that the new IT system will require. If efficiency savings are made, all of us and particularly the staff in the Department for Work and Pensions deserve to know whether their jobs will be at risk and what further reorganisations are due to take place. I echo the point made by the Chairman of the Committee that the Department has already taken on four major reorganisations and that this is the fifth. The Department fell flat on its nose doing four and if it is to undertake a major fifth reorganisation we need to have more details about it. How much will it yield, how much will it cost and when will it happen? If savings are not planned, why is the Department planning to spend yet more money on yet another new IT system, given the undistinguished record of the CMS so far?

My final point is about the Government’s employment projects. We asked a series of questions, culminating in our recommendation 55. We asked the Government to publish more details about the success of building on the new deal, general new deal funding and other suggestions, including about ambition and a reduction in the use and scale of the adviser discretion fund. When it made that recommendation, the Committee was worried that the trend in funding of the various initiatives was either sideways or downwards. They are all clearly essential to this part of the Department’s work in terms of bringing people closer to the job market, preparing them for work and getting them into work. They have been much trumpeted as essential ways of intervening and supporting and helping people who are far away from the job market to prepare them for work.