Jim Knight has the answers...

Since Jim Knight replaced Tony McNulty, there's been a veritable flood of written answers to Parliamentary questions. Here's a selection of some of the more interesting ones:

Contracts

Spending on Programme Centres over the last ten years - not what it used to be

And this year's Programme Centre budget - back up again

JCP Support Contracts will replace Programme Centre support for newly unemployed, but not the support for newly unemployed professionals contracted through REC

Just how big is the Jobcentre Plus Support Contracts budget? £8m this year, £24m in 2010-11, £12m in 2011-12, according to figures set before the 2009 Budget

A straightforward, if brief, explanation of the transition arrangements between New Deal / Employment Zones and FND

And some more detail on transition arrangements - all JSA claimants beyond 6 months should go through Job Seekers Regime (JSR) from July-October, giving them something to do between New Deal shutdown and FND start. Totally avoided the actual question though

A possible answer to how much extra money is going to FND. Maybe

Budgets to 2011 for employment programmes, broken down by type of programme (NOT the exact programme title). Going up from £2bn this year to £3.1bn in 2010-11

Future Jobs Fund spending will pretty much all be counted as DWP Employment Programme spending

DWP will publish monthly welfare to work provider performance reports on their website from 'later in 2009' - They've also put traffic light reports up to Feb 09 in the Commons library site. See the separate story on this.

JCP operational issues

673 DWP staff earn less than the London Living Wage

Work trials getting more popular

Breakdown of employment tribunal claims against the DWP

All you wanted to know about how JCP are coping in Plymouth!

How's Jobcentre Plus coping with the increase in claimants?

National insurance number registrations issued to adult overseas nationals entering the UK in the past five years

The revenge of Commercial Sensitivity! Future Workload Estimates for Jobcentre Plus can't be published because they inform FND discussions

Jobcentre Plus planned recruitment. There's a rumour that only 600 extra personal advisers are in place so far, but that's not covered here

For a complete list of Jim Knight's written answers, take a look here.

Word of the week: Durchfall. Literally, through-fall. German compound nouns are a thing of beauty.