Official Report 333KB pdf
Item 4 is the second formal evidence-taking session in the committee's disability inquiry. I warmly welcome this morning's witnesses. As the session will not follow the usual format for taking evidence, I will remind everyone of the process. I will invite brief introductions from the participants before we discuss supported employment. The discussion will take a round-table format, in which participants will be able to make comments and seek clarification from other participants, but I remind everyone to indicate to me if they wish to speak. That way, everyone will have an opportunity to speak and exchange information. For clarity, I ask everyone to use each participant's full name when addressing other people at the table.
I am the supported employment service manager for the international disability charity Leonard Cheshire. I was a supported employment client for 11 years, until 1999, and I have delivered supported employment programmes for more than 15 years.
I am a Labour MSP for North East Scotland, and I am a member of the Justice 1 Committee as well as this committee.
I am head of employment development for Capability Scotland. I have worked in the field of supported employment for 18 years.
I am the Scottish Senior Citizens Unity Party list MSP for Central Scotland.
I am the chair of the Scottish Union of Supported Employment. I am also the Scottish representative on the council of the European Union of Supported Employment and have recently been appointed to the Disability Employment Advisory Committee.
I am a Scottish National Party MSP in Glasgow.
I am the employment service manager for Hansel Alliance, which is a voluntary organisation in Ayrshire. We enjoyed your visit earlier this year, convener.
We enjoyed the visit too. Thank you.
I am Labour MSP for Coatbridge and Chryston and the gender reporter to the Equal Opportunities Committee.
I am the group operations general manager for Remploy. I have been with the company for 12 years.
I am an MSP for the Highlands and Islands. I am also the faith and religion reporter for the Equal Opportunities Committee.
I am the social work strategy manager for North Lanarkshire Council, where I have responsibility for the supported employment service.
I am one of the directors of Reed in Partnership, which is a welfare-to-work organisation that is contracted by the Department for Work and Pensions and Jobcentre Plus. We do not do a lot of work with supported employment, but we work extensively with people who are claiming the range of incapacity benefits.
I am the Scottish Socialist Party member for the West of Scotland.
I am the Jobcentre Plus pathways to work manager for Renfrewshire, Inverclyde, Argyll and Bute and West Dunbartonshire.
I am the Labour MSP for Kirkcaldy and I am the disability reporter to the committee.
I am the manager of the employment disability unit at Dundee City Council, which works in partnership with Angus Council and Perth and Kinross Council. I have been in that job for 14 years. I am also the vice-president of the European Union of Supported Employment.
I am the Liberal Democrat MSP for Gordon. I am the deputy convener of the committee and its sexual orientation reporter.
I will go first. What barriers do disabled people face to accessing work?
There are a number of barriers, which are commented on in the various papers that were submitted to the committee. A big barrier is the general attitudes of employers and their lack of understanding of their obligations under the Disability Discrimination Act 1995 and of the benefits of employing disabled people. Providers and other bodies must get across to individuals, companies and society at large the benefits and advantages of employing disabled people. They are very good employees and do not cause the problems that employers sometimes foresee.
As has been said, several issues come up, and there is seldom one barrier. The benefits trap, as it is known, is a big issue for people coming away from the comfort and security of benefits and moving into employment. Also, programmes need to be flexible. Funding packages are often very piecemeal, with people popping in and out of various programmes. We would love to see the money going with the individual, who would be able to go through a course picking up the necessary support from the most suitable provider.
John Sutherland mentioned the benefits trap and I want to nail that myth. North Lanarkshire Council puts a great deal of store in maximising people's income. When a person is referred to the service, we first of all check to see that they receive the correct social security benefits. Often they do not. If benefits were a barrier to work, it would not be in our interests to maximise people's incomes. The council works towards the ethos of full-time work, which is a minimum of 16 hours a week. We have 106 people in employment; the average difference in income between being on social security benefits and being in work is £101 a week. People work an average of 24 hours a week. The people with whom we mainly work have learning disabilities, mental illnesses and brain injuries. Such people have certain benefits that they can take into work, such as severe disablement allowance. That acts as a passport for tax credits.
SUSE has been asked by the Scottish Executive to gather information from across Scotland. We have found that the four main areas creating barriers to employment are underinvestment in employment programmes; short-term funding, which creates its own problems; a lack of a culture of early intervention on employment; and a lack of national standards for supported employment, which means that there is no focus on core values and that practitioners are poorly trained.
I agree with what George McInally said. In Reed in Partnership's experience, the benefits trap is indeed a myth. However, I also agree with John Sutherland that the myth is a major barrier to employment because most people perceive there to be a benefits trap. Many disabled people and those claiming other benefits do not believe that they will be better off working. Organisations such as ours seek to engage with those people voluntarily. Often the initial barrier is convincing people that they will be better off working. Although many safety nets are built into the system to preserve benefits, those are sometimes too complex for people to understand. That, too, is a barrier.
I will pick up on the points that have been made about benefits, as we do a lot of work on tax credits. The key issue is the perception of a benefits trap. We call for greater clarity about and understanding of the different programmes, support and benefits that are available, because disabled persons who want to apply for support need to understand clearly where to go for help.
I will pick up on points that John Sutherland, Tom Millar and Peter Harper made. I agree that the perception exists of a benefits trap. One service that is available is in-work benefit calculations, although we perhaps need to promote that more. On a recent "Frontline Scotland" programme, an individual said that they needed £600 to work, when that was clearly not the case. The issue is how organisations such as mine get information on their services to individuals so that the perception disappears.
A considerable number of barriers to people with disabilities exist at various levels in the system. Richard Wilkinson commented on the employer situation but, in my 14 years of working with the business community in Tayside, we have rarely come across discrimination from employers. One way to overcome that barrier in individual areas is to give more information to employers. This is not very politically correct, but it is commonly said that people with disabilities make better workers than non-disabled people. However, employers do not believe that and we must ask ourselves whether we believe it. I would say that people with disabilities are the same as everybody else—some are better workers and some are not.
Is the funding for supported employment adequate—Michael Evans obviously thinks that it is—and are the current resources appropriately distributed?
That is hard to answer, because the money comes from so many different places. If the money came from a single pot, we could say clearly what we got or did not get for it, but because it comes from many different angles, we do not know what we get for it. Plenty of money comes into the system, but the inconsistency of services lets down a lot of people with disabilities. Because there are no standards or framework, generally speaking, we have many projects doing what they want, when, how and if they want to do it.
That is a hard problem to crack.
I have a question for Michael Evans. Given your 14 years of experience in the field, if you were in charge and you could do one thing to help to solve the problem, what would it be?
I would draw up a national system. I would examine all the funding that is available and see what could be top sliced or ring fenced to create some consistency. For example, European structural fund objective 3 money could easily be ring fenced and used. About 50 per cent of the projects in Scotland that get European objective 3 funding are disability projects.
What do people think about the idea of a single body in Scotland providing a national service?
In response to Michael Evans's point on the lack of funding, I agree that funding is available but that it does not seem to be distributed in an accountable way because there is no quality standard.
One of the difficulties is that different people have different perceptions and understandings of what supported employment means. Some people say that organised part-time work is supported employment. Some say that voluntary training for work, work in voluntary schemes and work under the earnings disregard or work for permitted earnings are supported employment. Last year, the Executive published its report "‘Go for it!': Supporting People with Learning Disabilities and/or Autistic Spectrum Disorders in Employment", which contains a particularly worthwhile definition. It states:
It all boils down to the direct services that each person receives. That includes the employers. We need to give information to employers, to individuals who are seeking work and to those who support them, such as families and social workers.
I believe that there has to be a controlling body. However, we are liable to end up with one organisation that takes a one-cap-fits-all approach, which would not work. There must be regional organisations that use local knowledge in each area. Partnerships are the way forward.
As an organisation that manages a number of supported employment programmes, Capability Scotland feels that it is well funded. The question is how we manage those funds and approach the design and implementation of our services. I agree with George McInally that although there are many organisations and providers that offer supported employment—some good and some bad—there seems to be no overarching organisation that can consider issues such as standards, milestones and whether an organisation is good or bad. That is certainly needed.
Within the national framework, there would be local area networks. I would use the analogy of the system of clinically managed networks that the national health service has adopted. The same principle would be involved.
We have heard quite a lot about timescale, about output, and about a person-centred approach or the lack of it. I would like to follow on from that. Nora Radcliffe has a comment about timescale and support.
Tanya Gilchrist highlighted that the timeframe of the funding is rigid. From what people round the table are saying, that is one of the inherent weaknesses in the current system that we should think more about.
My background is in further and higher education. I worked for 18 years with students who were subjected to output-related funding so I have first-hand experience of it.
I made a comment earlier about outcome-related funding, which often puts a lot of pressure on the provider to select service users who will meet the criteria for their outcomes, rather than individuals whom they can support. That does not take away from the fact that, as providers, we must achieve milestones for each person. We already have actions to achieve; it is simply that the outcomes are often standardised and inflexible and that restricts certain individuals.
I would like the journey that an individual travels to employment to be measured. That is what is important for the individual, not some target-driven outcome. I do not know whether that answers—
I do not think that we have the answers, Marilyn; we have experts here to give us the answers.
I am asking Tanya Gilchrist whether she agrees.
I absolutely agree with your point, which takes us back to the standards and measures that could be set for providers. Providers could be required to establish a map or personal plan for an individual and meet the objectives in that plan. Setting such standards could be part of the design and structure of an organisation.
I return to Marilyn Livingstone's point about the distance that people travel, which might not be all the way into open employment.
Marilyn Livingstone mentioned local networks. The lifelong learning networks that have been set up throughout Scotland are a perfect example of those and have been very successful. There should be an holistic view of supported employment. If there is earlier intervention with people in the education system and person-centred planning, people can dip in and out of supported employment as and when required.
I take a different view from previous speakers. A balance should be struck between a distance-travelled model and an output-related funding model. A distance-travelled model is helpful and good for individuals who are at the extremity of disability. However, if we are to get a return on public money, it is important that the majority of funding should go towards output-related activity. We want disabled people to be integrated fully into the workplace over time. Without output-related funding, there is a real danger that the experience becomes an end in itself, rather than a means to an end. That has been seen with much other expenditure on training provision using the distance-travelled model. I am a great fan of output-related funding. In our organisation, we see people's lives being changed every day, partly through support and intervention that we can provide and partly because we challenge people about their ability and capabilities and encourage them to take the leap that for them is the difference between just travelling a distance and becoming integrated into mainstream employment.
Catherine Graham talked about lifelong learning and people dipping in and out. I want to share with the committee the approach that we have adopted in North Lanarkshire. Our service was developed in response to people in day centres for people with learning disabilities saying that they wanted to have the opportunity to work. It came about as a result of a community care plan consultation some years ago.
I want to respond on the issue of outcome-related funding. There is definitely a need for providers to have milestones or targets to meet. However, those cannot be set according to funding. I know of providers that will select individuals for provision who will achieve results from the outset. I know that because Capability Scotland usually receives referrals from Jobcentre Plus and social work departments of individuals who have been refused support elsewhere. Capability Scotland subsidises all its services from voluntary funds, because we tend to have people on our books for much longer than is usual. They have been distance travelled. It may take us two or three years to get a person into employment, but there is an expectation that it should take us only 12 weeks to do so. We will continue to support a person until we achieve a result—and we achieve results. If we based our selection on outcome-related funding, we would probably not back two thirds of the service users who are currently on our books.
I want to pick up on a few things. I do not know how a national framework would work. I think that the approach would need to be much more localised, although there would have to be some form of national guidelines. George McInally talked about the benefits system. People tell us that the benefits trap prevents them from getting into work, but you are saying that that is not the case. Surely one of the national guidelines would be that each person should be assessed to see how they would benefit from getting back into work. I would expect that to be the first thing to happen.
That is a good point. You mentioned the new deal for disabled people and the new futures initiative. We could rattle off another half dozen initiatives that have not worked because they have not reached the people whom they were meant to reach. The new deal for disabled people was meant to address that. I assume that it has not worked, because we have not had any statistics—that is always a good sign that something has not worked. We have come up with another project called pathways to work, which might or might not work. Whether something works depends on where one is coming from. If someone is getting funding for doing something, it has to work.
I disagree with Michael Evans about the new futures initiative. I think that the initiative worked—its results fed into the Scottish Executive's work on the employability framework. The new futures fund has shown that there is a lot of money out there. That money comes in three parts. The first involves preparing people for work. We cover the centre part. A lot of money is being poured into developing CVs and doing job interviews, but only a small amount goes into the retention side. New futures showed that the money has to be spent on preparing people for work, with less spent on developing CVs. How many people who have been involved in supported employment have had somebody referred to them with a fantastic CV but no job experience? We have to retain people in work. It has been proven that people with a disability, particularly a mental health problem, can go a fair distance of time without requiring support and then suddenly need support again. That goes back to my idea of people dipping in and out of supported employment as and when they require it.
Sandra White talked about guidelines on the benefits trap. Available to every customer of Jobcentre Plus and any of the providers that deal with contracts is an in-work benefit calculation that would address the situation that she highlighted. An assessment process is available.
Given the discussion about how supported employment might work, how we might deliver it and whether it should be regional or national, is there strategic leadership for it in Scotland? I would also be interested to know how employers are engaging with supported employment and how we get them to engage. I am looking at the very helpful list of employers that George McInally submitted. It is quite a mix of individual shops, big organisations and public bodies. How do we get employers to engage with supported employment?
Like Michael Evans, we have great relationships with employers in the private sector. I sometimes think that the public sector needs to look at itself in the mirror in that regard. In North Lanarkshire, the ratio of supported employment jobs in the private sector compared with the public sector is almost three to one. The private sector does not employ people because it is the right thing to do; it employs them because they contribute to the profitability of the business. Sometimes, the public sector takes a far too rigid approach to recruitment and selection. For example, somebody with a learning disability is highly unlikely to have any standard grades, but applicants for jobs in the public sector usually require a minimum of three standard grades. We have found that private sector employers are often willing to carve jobs. For example, someone engaged in an office may not have the keyboard skills that would make them attractive for a job in word processing, but they might be able to do filing and photocopying and to deliver mail and answer telephones.
I agree with George McInally. I have found that employers engage with people with disabilities because they are a labour resource. After all, employers are generally in business to make a profit and to satisfy shareholders. If an unemployed person fits the bill, they will be employed no matter whether they have a disability or not.
As far as John Reid's comment about permitted work and the question on strategic leadership are concerned, some individuals in Capability Scotland were on the permitted work scheme and therefore decided to work so many hours and earn so much money a week. However, when the national minimum wage was increased, we had to reduce the number of hours that they worked to ensure that they did not go over the amount that they were permitted to earn. Of course, that brings us back to the question of strategic leadership. We must be a bit smarter and have more joined-up thinking about how changing one thing will impact on another.
I endorse George McInally's good point about the engagement of public sector employers. He took a North Lanarkshire perspective on the matter; from my experience in Glasgow, which is not a completely different patch, the situation is exactly the same. Getting the public sector to engage with people with health-related issues is much more difficult than getting the private sector involved. That poses a real strategic challenge because, although public sector employers advocate, proclaim and publish their equal opportunities policies and procedures, those same policies and procedures prevent clients from getting into work.
Those comments about the difference between the public and private sectors were interesting. What do witnesses think about their current engagement with employers? Are they seen as important partners in getting disabled people into employment?
I am sorry—do you mean employers in general?
Yes.
There is a skills shortage in Glasgow—there is no lack of vacancies for people to fill. Organisations such as ours therefore find it incredibly easy to engage with the small and medium-sized enterprise community, in particular. We offer them free recruitment services and they are attracted by that model. Equally, it is easy for us to engage with large blue-chip organisations, not on the basis of social responsibility—although we do that sometimes—but almost always on the basis that we provide candidates for vacancies that the organisations cannot fill in the open market. Those candidates are often from a health-barrier background, but we equip them to compete for jobs on an equal footing with anyone else in the labour market. We do not label people as disabled or as having a health barrier; we enable people to compete on a level playing field. Employers are extremely open to that. As George McInally said, private sector employers employ the client groups that we work with, who can do the job every bit as well as other candidates.
I will briefly go back to the benefits situation. Just about all organisations that provide supported employment perform a benefit check as standard. One of the difficulties is that people who provide supported employment do not publicise their work well enough—they do not stand up and take praise. Throughout Scotland, we have a huge number of successful organisations that deliver supported employment.
My question follows on from Sandra White's question about employers. I recently hosted a reception at the Parliament building on behalf of the National Autistic Society, at which the convener gave a speech. The National Autistic Society has a supported employment project. Tom Millar said that there is a high demand for employees in Glasgow, but, across the UK, only 6 per cent of people with autistic spectrum disorder are in full-time employment. That does not seem to tie up with the high demand for employees. We are discussing barriers today. What are the barriers? Why are employers not employing people with ASD?
A good project would use both formal and informal methods of engaging with employers. The formal methods would be CVs, application forms and letters; an informal method might be a support worker cold calling, chapping on doors, making telephone calls or—as George McInally mentioned—job carving.
Michael Evans has listed a range of problems relating to getting disabled people back into work. The most uplifting thing that I read in all the documents was George McInally's list of employers for disabled people. I had the notion that disabled people worked in the public sector, but he has blown that idea right out of the water. Running down the list of varied North Lanarkshire companies, I do not know how you manage to achieve it. I have worked in that area for most of my working life, and the mindset is against employing disabled people. As Michael Evans said, there is a fear of employing people with disabilities, but North Lanarkshire Council has done a tremendous job in introducing disabled people into all those firms. Perhaps North Lanarkshire Council is doing something that other local authorities are not doing but which should be rolled out.
Thanks very much for your compliments, but the people who are really responsible are my staff, who work at the coal face, who plod on day in, day out and who have established well-deserved reputations with employers. In case anyone thinks that I was criticising my local authority, I should say that when I was talking about the split between the public sector and the private sector, I meant the public sector in its widest sense. Of the 33 jobs in the public sector in North Lanarkshire, 25 are in the council itself and eight are in other public sector organisations, so the public sector is an important employer.
Employers are busy people who need simple and straightforward information on the support that they can get. As George McInally rightly said, when employers make a decision, it should be based on the talents of the individual applicant and not on sympathy for their situation. I made that point at the beginning of the session.
Most of the issues that I wanted to cover have been raised in the time since I indicated that I wanted to speak.
I am sorry about that.
That is okay. I fully endorse Mike Evans's point on the barriers that employers face, which is a Scotland-wide issue no matter whether the employer is city-based or in a rural area. Most of my work is in the Highlands and Islands, where one can go 60 or 70 miles between employers never mind between cities. The public sector is the biggest employer in the area and it is difficult to get a public sector employer to take on a new employee with a support need. However, if an existing employee of a public sector employer becomes disabled through illness or accident, the employer is at our door straight away saying, "You are the experts. You have all the information. Give us the support now." We need to work on that.
I return to the approach that providers take. John Sutherland and others have described what employers want. Our view is that they want providers to be professional. North Lanarkshire Council has an excellent reputation in its area for its approach to employers.
I want to endorse a few of the things that have been said. Obviously, one of the key aspects of Remploy's work is engaging with employers, and our businesses bring in employers to see physically what people can do. Experiencing something for real is a major tool in breaking down people's barriers and perceptions. A key aspect of early intervention is understanding what being job ready means to an employer. What are employers really looking for from a new start? What do they want that person to be able to do from day one? Much of that is about attitude and motivation as opposed to specific hands-on skills. It is far easier to train someone who is job ready, so it is fundamental to focus on developing that and on preparing people for the interview process, getting them into the job and supporting them early on in the process. Somebody commented that everybody has a great CV, so people should spend less time on that and more time up front. Matching what the employer wants to people's capabilities is a fundamental tool. If we can start that process, we engage employers far more quickly and responsively. It is like any other business—whatever someone's product or service is, they have to sell it. It is about developing the relationships over time.
It has been a while since Elaine Smith asked her question, but I would like to have a stab at answering it. She asked why, if there is so much demand on the employer side, the level of participation in the labour market by disabled people is still so low and disproportionate to other groups. It is a good question, and it is fundamental to what we do. Not only from my experience but from listening to comments around the table, it appears that the answer to that question may not be focused principally on the demand side. It may be not so much an employer issue as a supply-side issue. It comes back to the very point we started from, which is that lots of disabled clients believe that they will not be better off working, so they never entertain the prospect. That is a big issue and a real obstacle to increasing disabled people's participation in the labour market. If that is to happen, we must do something.
Will John Reid address some of the implications for the support of disabled people when Jobcentre Plus restructures away from local offices? We are quite concerned about that.
Do you mean as far as Jobcentre Plus and the role of local offices is concerned?
Yes.
To go back to Elaine Smith's question, and to link in with what Tom Millar said about the issue being more on the supply side, there was no serious engagement by my organisation, the component parts that made up the previous organisations or many of the organisations that are represented today in considering the number of people on incapacity benefit. Employer engagement is vital—I have reached seven using the five-bar gate for employer engagement—but my concern is about how much of it is done in partnership.
The committee's disability inquiry is intended to inform policy. I am confused. We have heard evidence that does not gel with some of the stuff that we are hearing. We heard from the usual suspects the other week and some of their evidence did not gel, either. RNIB Scotland says that 90 per cent of people whom it works with who are blind or partially sighted have no job. We have been told that 6 per cent of people who are autistic or have an autistic spectrum disorder have a job. Are the people who are referred to George McInally and Michael Evans different from the other people who want jobs and work with other organisations?
I asked that because you have developed a response to people who are already service users in day care. A step change is bound to occur—that is another reason why we are having the inquiry—if 30,000 people who are on incapacity benefit are to be targeted to return to work. There seems to be a philosophical disagreement about whether the approach is, in fact, person centred and aims to assist people with disabilities into work. Who is driving the agenda? What services will be involved in it?
We have been up and down the country and have heard lots of disabled people say that they would like to get into work but that it is very hard because they lack the support that they need. That is the basis of our inquiry. Frances Curran is right about the confusion, because some of what we have heard before is not what we are hearing today.
I said that our service was driven by consumer demand—by people in day centres saying that they want to work. Since we developed our strategy six or seven years ago, no one goes into day centres. That has stopped. We do not just have a supported employment strategy in North Lanarkshire; we have person-centred planning, and we deliver services to people within their own communities if they want to do particular things. Supported employment is part of that. We also have supported living, which supports people in their own homes.
George McInally works in the field of learning disability, and I agree that because of "The same as you?" a lot of money has poured into the field to move people into employment. However, we are now finding that people with mental health problems require support. In addition, people are being diagnosed with attention deficit syndrome at an earlier age and are being fitted into categories of people with dyspraxia, autism and Asperger's syndrome, many of whom were previously classified as having behavioural problems. We are now discovering that they have a disability and need support. The problem is that there needs to be more flexibility in supported employment and more funding needs to be made available.
We have heard about examples of good practice throughout the meeting and before it. What is the current situation with partnership working? There are many organisations, and it is important that they work together. How do Government agencies, local authorities, further and higher education establishments, the national health service and voluntary organisations work with families and disabled people?
The first thing that we did in developing our strategy was form a local partnership. We approached the Employment Service and the Benefits Agency—as they were then—the local enterprise company, Lanarkshire NHS Board and council departments, because although the programme that we run comes under the auspices of social work, we recognised that we could not do it on our own and that we needed partners. We have a partnership agreement with those various organisations. We have received a lot of support from them, but I stress that the social work department invests a lot of time in driving that partnership. If we did not do that, the partnership would not work; we see the advantages of ensuring that the partnership works.
In delivering our service in Tayside, we get 400 referrals a year, which is an awful lot of people for 15 staff to deal with. As I said earlier, about two thirds of the people who are referred are on incapacity benefit. We have managed to achieve such a high level of referrals because we have been working in partnership—albeit that we have probably done so much less formally than George McInally has described—with virtually all the hospitals, colleges, social work departments and care managers in Tayside, as well as with Jobcentre Plus. We are in the middle, with all those other guys on the outskirts referring people to us. It is a good partnership in cases where, for example, we have a problem regarding a person on medication or a person with a housing problem, because we can approach the people at the referring source and ask whether they can help us.
I will address partnership from the perspective of our small department, which works mainly in the Highlands and Islands. We are part of the Highland Blindcraft workstep consortium, which comprises six organisations that have come together to deliver the workstep programme in the Highlands and Islands. I had my reservations when I first came into the partnership, to be honest. I was concerned that I might come up against personalities who would have their own agendas and that conditions would be competitive. I am absolutely delighted to say that my experience with the partnership has been excellent.
I agree with Mike Evans's description of partnership. In a direct sense, it refers to links between one's own organisation and others. "Partnership" is an in word at the moment and much can be gained from partnerships, but they must be meaningful, otherwise they become mere talking shops. We at Hansel have links with the local authorities in our area, with the NHS and especially with Jobcentre Plus. I am a bit concerned, however, about the development by Jobcentre Plus of new schemes to take over from others that are currently being run. That is leading to a lot of talk about partnership, perhaps because the schemes are to be put out to tender on a grander scale than has been the case in the past. There is a danger that some of the smaller providers could be precluded from taking part unless they form partnerships, which might become unwieldy. I have some concerns about that development, but we will have to wait and see the nature of the new schemes.
We have heard repeatedly from throughout the country—certainly from people in Inverness and the Highlands and Islands—that people sometimes feel as if they are trapped on a conveyor belt. They get into skills and learning but go on one course after another and find it difficult to get off that conveyor belt and into the job market. John Sutherland gave us a good example of partnership working, but can your partnerships solve the problem?
I agree with Michael Evans that partnership working can be the way forward but that it can also be a recipe for disaster. Often, competing agendas get in the way of partnership working. We have been successfully working in partnership in various areas, but perhaps there would not be 2.7 million people on incapacity benefit in the UK if we were all as successful as we would like. Perhaps partnerships need to be more focused on what we are trying to achieve with a group of customers, albeit that the work becomes person-centred.
One example of partnership working in Dumfries and Galloway involves earlier intervention in the transition from education to employment, which involves helping secondary schools to work with students before they go on to college. There is the example of the young man who was on the autism spectrum and who wanted to go to college but was not sure what he could do. He had a great affinity with music and we gave him a job taster in a local shop. With the college, we then put together a package whereby he spent two days per week at school, one day on a work placement and the other two days at college. He went on to attend a programme at the college and continued with his work placement. The principal said that she thought that that was a much better route than he might otherwise have been offered. If he had gone straight from school to college, he would have spent two years on a life-skills course before the college decided what he could do and he would have entered the revolving-door situation.
We know from your submission that SUSE is holding workshops throughout the country to speak to service providers. What is your impression when you speak to service users as opposed to service providers? The committee has heard different opinions from service users and service providers.
How do you mean?
Service providers, such as those who are here today, tell us what is available. Sometimes, service users tell us that it is difficult for them to find out what is available. You gave an example of someone who could have gone to college for two years to do a course that would have led nowhere.
One of the biggest difficulties that service providers face is a lack of flexibility: a system is set and, in the example that I mentioned, the person would naturally go on to college under the system.
I realise that. However, I am interested in consultation or workshops that you intend to have with service users.
We have run a consultation with service providers on behalf of the Scottish Executive and we are now working through the networks. The Scottish Union of Supported Employment has a network in every council area except two, which are Lanarkshire and Dunbartonshire, although discussions are taking place on setting up networks there. On 6 February, we will have a meeting with the chair and secretary of each network. We are looking to approach employers and service providers in each area through them. We will collect information through the networks in each region.
Will you collect information from service users?
Yes—that is what I am saying. The networks will arrange matters so that SUSE can talk to service users, but we will do that through the network in each region. The networks were set up so that we could collect information from service users.
Who are the service users?
A service provider provides a service. A service user accesses the service.
So they are employers and employees.
Yes, although somebody might be a prospective employee. They may wish to work, but may not yet be an employee.
Perhaps others will want to chip in with an answer to the question that I am about to ask. We have talked about employers and potential employees, but co-workers can sometimes be a barrier. Does anybody want to comment on work that they do with co-workers? Employers might see people offending their existing workforce as a barrier. I do not know whether people think about that.
One issue that we would like to consider is education in the workplace. I do not think that anybody around the table would disagree that a barrier would be created if a human resources department were approached and somebody at the top agreed to take on a person with a disability without consulting the people with whom that person would work. It is a matter of education.
That is why we are considering disability awareness training.
Perhaps members of the panel want to answer Nora Radcliffe's question first.
That would be helpful. Okay.
Nora Radcliffe asked about co-workers. We do not go in for a job-ready model. We do a vocational profile, we identify what the person would like to do and we identify the job that they are capable of doing. A job coach is then put in to learn the job. The person will then start to work alongside the job coach until they and the employer are happy. However, we have been amazed at how often the natural supports in the workplace quickly take over. Some people might be concerned about a person who has a learning disability or a mental health problem coming to work with them, but once they have been exposed to that individual, they see them as an individual human being and are happy to take on tasks. We continuously monitor every person in a placement in North Lanarkshire even when they are settled in the job so that we can ensure that there is no breakdown in the placement. We have a very high sustainability rate in employment placements.
We do something similar. George McInally referred to job coaches—we call such people support workers. I guess that job coaches and support workers are the same thing. We go into the workplace if we need to, but most employers say, "Leave it with us. If there's a problem, we'll get back to you."
Hansel's approach is that the employment development adviser who places an individual in a company remains on call and available, more so at the beginning then less so as the individual gains confidence in their new job and the company absorbs the person into its profile. Job coaches—we have yet to talk about them—should have a role. Two or three years ago, we employed a couple of job coaches through a modernisation fund that Jobcentre Plus offered but, unfortunately, that fund came to an end in 2004 so, as a voluntary organisation, we could not continue to employ those individuals. If a new national framework emerges or if national funding is provided, funds for job coaching would be advantageous as an adjunct to other programmes for placing disabled people.
John Swinburne has a question on that, although we may have covered it.
Did you have any joy in getting funding for coaching job coaches? How did you train them?
For the two years that we had job coaches, we trained them on site. In Ayrshire, a partnership worked to employ job coaches, but it had mixed results. The best type of job coach is one who is employed in that role permanently rather than being in the job as some form of temporary employment provision. One feature of the scheme in Ayrshire was that it involved people who had come out of the job market who were employed as job coaches for about nine months to a year but were thereafter expected to move on—again, the funding mechanisms got in the way. Funding should be available to provide careers as job coaches so that people can become expert in the role. I do not suggest that we should develop a hierarchy, but we need continuity and certainty of funding to allow individuals to build up expertise and knowledge of the local job market.
I want to go back to where we started, which was the benefits trap. Most people seemed to say that it is not an issue, because when we work things out, people are better off in employment. I want to discuss that further and to pick up on what Tom Millar said about supply and demand. We heard about the pathways to work programme and the agenda of getting people off incapacity benefit. Frances Curran asked whose agenda that was, to which John Reid's response was that the Government obviously wants to get people off incapacity benefit, which is a driver. Does it, in that case, become a matter of trust and about addressing the media hype?
The benefits trap is an issue—I do not think that others said that it is not, but we are saying that it can be overcome by better communication on services such as in-work benefits calculations which, as George McInally pointed out, are not really delivered universally. I make no apologies for saying that the Government drives the pathways to work agenda. However, the driver is not necessarily financial. On average, people are on incapacity benefit for nine years and, once they get past three years, they die or retire on it. That is more of a social and a demographic issue than a financial one.
A few weeks ago, I attended a presentation by Jobcentre Plus and Scottish Enterprise about the pathways to work programme. John Reid might be able to educate me, but as far as I am aware there is not a 101 per cent guarantee that if a disabled person's work fails, they can go straight back on to benefits. Elaine Smith alluded to the fact that that is a significant barrier for people with disabilities. Such a guarantee is vital.
I took some time to find out service users' views before coming along to today's meeting. They feel that the benefits system is a barrier. We do not, because we know who, where and what to ask. Michael Evans made a point about partnership working, knowledge and communication. As providers, we do a great deal of additional, unfunded work in providing support for the individuals who utilise our services—the partnership working side of things is not funded. Funders do not require us to form effective partnerships or ensure that we support an individual effectively through person-centred planning, although they often impose requirements on us to fill in a particular form within five days, to interview someone within 20 days or to place them in a job within 30 days. No requirement is imposed to ensure that we have done things well and that we have found an effective placement for the person whom we are supporting.
I should have said at the beginning that my background is in welfare rights—although please do not ask me to do a benefits calculation now, because I am too far away from that work. I want to try to focus the discussion, because again we are in danger of merging two agendas. There is the back-to-work agenda for people who are on incapacity benefit, but the majority of the people with whom my service would deal are not on incapacity benefit because they have never worked and have therefore never established a contribution record that would entitle them to incapacity benefit. In that respect, they do not have a benefits barrier to overcome because they have severe disablement allowance that they can carry with them into work. However, there are many people who are on incapacity benefit who are not disabled to the same extent, but who, rather, are incapacitated. There is a big difference. That is where confusion arises on what is supported employment and what are employment initiatives. The sooner we start to separate those two things out, the sooner we will be able to make progress.
The simplest way to see the benefits trap is as a perceived barrier: if the individual thinks that it exists, it exists. It is up to us to build trust, have the right knowledge and remove that barrier but, until someone with the right knowledge does that, the perceived benefits trap is a barrier for the individual.
I am aware of time. We need to wind up quite quickly, although committee members still have a couple of questions to ask.
If we are exploring the creation of one mainstream system for supported employment—George McInally mentioned a national service, for example—is anyone aware of any model system anywhere else in the world that we should examine?
In Europe, there are probably three countries with mainstream supported employment services. One is the Republic of Ireland, which started its system a couple of years ago and funds it to the tune of €4 million. The second is Norway, which started a mainstream supported employment service in 1995, having piloted it from 1992. The third such service that I am aware of is in Sweden, which started a mainstream supported employment service in the late 1990s.
I have a question for Michael Evans. One of my colleagues attended the workshop on supported employment in Norway at the EUSE conference in Barcelona. It is interesting, Michael, that at the workshop it arose that the Norwegians were having difficulty in running their supported employment contract. I believe that they brought you in as a consultant on how to help them to cope with the problems that they were having, because you spoke at that workshop as a consultant. Would you like to comment on that?
The comment that I was brought in as a consultant because the Norwegian system was having problems is completely untrue. The Norwegians did a critical evaluation of their service. That is what I liked about them. Instead of producing a glossy, goody-goody report, they asked themselves what they were not doing right. One thing that they were unhappy with was their outcomes, which were at about 25 per cent or 30 per cent. They were beating themselves up about that and saying that the figures were low. My question to them as an outsider was: "Low in comparison with what?" They said that it was low in comparison with, for example, the UK's workstep programme, but I told them that they were not comparing the same things.
It is difficult for me to sit around this table and have three countries put forward as examples of good practice. If people would take the time to look in Scotland, they would find that we have excellent examples of good practice. There is a great deal out there. Supported employment is being delivered on the ground right now by the enthusiasm and dedication of the service providers who are delivering it. I would like more examples to be brought to the table.
I want to respond to Catherine Graham. It is common sense for us to look for good-quality providers in Scotland—there are some. However, there are also some really awful providers. As a member of SUSE, I have been involved in networks and have received feedback. The system is not yet sufficiently joined up; no national strategy is coming from that angle. We should use our providers as examples of good practice, but we should not assume that we are all good at the moment, because we are not.
Jamie McGrigor asked me to give him examples of countries that deliver mainstream supported employment. I answered by naming three countries that do so. I did not say that they were better than Scotland; I just answered the question.
I will leave it there.
We appreciate your taking the time to appear before the committee. We will definitely discuss the issue for several months, if not longer. Do you want briefly to add anything that we have not covered and should take on board?
You will say that there are 100 things that we did not ask you about.
I do not speak on behalf of any of the other witnesses but, along with the staff and clients with whom I work, I am very grateful that the committee has bothered to examine this issue. In 14 years, no one has even thought of looking into it—people have just gone ahead and rolled out solutions without finding out what the problems are. The Scottish Executive's employability framework, which is due to be rolled out next month, has been mentioned. I am just a guy from Dundee, but I wonder how someone can be rolling out such a programme when the committee is still gathering information. At least you have listened—I really appreciate that.
The Scottish Executive asked the Scottish Union of Supported Employment to produce the blueprint for its strategy, but we are also considering quality standards and training needs analysis. Some good work should come out of that.
I want to finish with a point of clarification. There is no aspirational 10 per cent incapacity benefit target for the pathways to work programme. I make that point on the record. I will ask Michael Evans who gave him the information in a minute.
I, too, thank the committee for inviting us here today. I ask you in your deliberations to remember the value of diversity in provision, especially at local level. That provision is best made by voluntary organisations and other professional bodies. The country gains more from richness and diversity than it would from a centralised system.
I echo the sentiments that have been expressed by the other people who have given evidence today. I make one final plea—please try to separate the issue of supported employment from the political football that incapacity benefit has become.
That is a good point. I thank everyone for their participation this morning. Your evidence has been very helpful. I hope that you do not feel frustrated and have enjoyed the experience.
Meeting closed at 12:44.
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