Observer: Minister in welfare 'cover-up' row
Something of a follow-up to McNulty's information on contracts and performance that was mentioned in the last newsletter. I heard that people were getting in touch with the MPs who asked the question to let them know just how bad the response was. Lo and behold, an article in the Observer:
'A report marked "restricted" revealed how the private companies placed just 6% of incapacity benefit claimants on their books into work, rather than the 26% they had claimed would be possible when they bid for contracts. This compared to 14% achieved by state job centres during the same period. The report described the performance of the private contractors as "not satisfactory".
However, when asked in parliamentary questions at the end of last month, tabled by Labour MPs Lynne Jones and John McDonnell, to provide evidence of how the private firms were doing, McNulty replied that "job entry information" was only available up to the end of March last year.'
What do you make of this? My own view is that there isn't much new information in the article despite the leaked JCP document, making it a retread of the Pathways performance story that was on here and in the FT at the start of the year. The anti-reform bias is amusingly obvious, but there's a very serious point behind it.
The DWP is using Pathways to Work to provide evidence of comparative performance between the public, private and voluntary sectors. If it falls over or limps along, will people say 'this provision doesn't work' or will they say 'private contracting doesn't work'?
A performance rate of 6% - who are we to say that the current method of private contracting does work?! However, having been on the receiving end of public sector provision, I can safely say that it doesn't work either - sounds like a Verve song in the making!
Pathways always suffered from an overwhelming sense of self-importance. What happened to the interim findings that Pathways areas were 8% up in outcome terms? How did we get from this to a situation where apparently 94% of participants don't get outcomes at all? Likely because the providers just got to work on those nearest to the job market first, but things got sticky when they actually had to address the ones for whom Pathways was really designed, where they are miles from the job market and have been for years. I'm not at all surprised to see it failing when there is evidence that much Pathways provision amounted to a job advisor sitting in a GPs office once a week waiting in vain for someone to be referred to him.
The success of Pathways was actually always likely to be the re-engagement of people by way of giving them hope that something may change in their circumstance rather than just leaving them at home to watch Jeremy Kyle for ten years. It was always going to take much longer than a couple of years for this to really filter down to any significant level of conversion from IB to jobs. However as per normal the Govt have chickened out on any sense of long-term reform in favour of trying to garner short-term headlines, and in the absence of those they now seem set to give up on the whole thing.
I totally agree - the whole program is doomed to failure because of a focus on outputs rather than outcomes. The aim of Pathways should have been to create the basis for attitudinal change amongst employers and individuals, rather than forcing private sector providers in a situation of cherry picking the most 'job ready' and the most willing to take on any old mcjob.
Having worked on a couple of Pathways bids a while back, I remember a glaring issue was that the payments per person were absolutely miniscule. Provider-led Pathways is a deeply, deeply low value provision compared to New Deal, EZs or pretty much anything else, including the Jobcentre Plus-led Pathways delivery. This seems counterintuitive given that close to £300m of contract value was being awarded, but the numbers being put through the programme were absolutely huge.
Other than that, there are posts all over the forums that people have made about Pathways. Number of referrals, quality of candidates, people being referred then yanked off onto another benefit, both medical reports and referrals being sent to the wrong places or not sent at all, people getting a job but not counting as outcomes due to outcomes bureaucracy, manifestly incapable people getting referred while job-ready ones were moved onto the inactive stream, the list goes on.