Emily Graves spoke with Ben Walker from the Centre For Social Justice

Ben Walker

Private firms and charities should be given a bigger role in providing back to work support, as Britain's faltering £1.4 billion-a-year network of job centres is letting unemployed people down, according to a major new report.

The state-run Jobcentre Plus (JCP) network should be remodelled on the lines of the market-based Australian system, which has proved a world leader in getting people back into work, the report says. Findings revealed that thousands of claimants lack an up-to-date CV despite spending months with Jobcentre staff and 40% of claimants who move off Jobseekers Allowance make another benefits claim within six months.

The report from the Centre for Social Justice (CSJ), the think tank that designed the Coalition's Universal Credit welfare reform, identifies a string of problems with the current UK system. Emily Graves spoke with researcher Ben Walker from CSJ to find out more.

Emily: Please could you tell us about the work you are involved in at CSJ?

Ben: Yes, I cover welfare and employment issues at the Centre for Social Justice and we decided to look at the job centre because we feel that's going to be one of the really important cogs for getting people back to work and making sure that welfare reform is a success.

Emily: So how is the job centre network letting the public down?

Ben: The main way that the job centre network is failing people is that it's not very good at getting people into work and more importantly keeping them in work. One of the key problems we found is that the job centre only measures itself on how quickly it closes benefit claims, rather than whether people move into work and in actual fact it doesn't know whether those people move into a job, go on to claim another benefit, or stop claiming for perhaps two or three weeks and then open up a new claim for benefit. It doesn't really know where job centre claimants are going. The other big problem that we discovered was that people keep churning round in the system; about 40% of all the people that leave Jobseeker's Allowance are back claiming benefit within six months and that rises to about 60% over two years. We're talking about quite a high level of churn in the system.

Emily: Suggestions have been made that the job centre should be remodelled on the lines of the market-based Australian system. Could you tell us about this?

Ben: The Australians may not be very good at cricket or rugby, but they're certainly very good at helping to get people back into work. Australia have been trying a number of different things since the early 1990s and one of the things they do very successfully is they've got a big array of providers to help get people back into work. They assess people from day one of their claim for benefit rather than what we do in this country where we often leave people to their own devices for three to six months. They're much better at identifying what barriers to work people are facing and then giving them that support from day one with a great array of charities and other local providers to help get people get back into work.

Emily: Why do you think this system has a chance of working in the UK?

Ben: The Australian system used to work very similar to the system that we have in the UK, so we feel that we can model ourselves on the Australian system quite quickly. The other thing, of course, is we don't need to repeat some of the mistakes that the Australian system made either. I think Australia have been very successful; it's got one of the lowest unemployment rates in the G20, so it's lower than Germany, lower than the UK, lower than the US and it's been highlighted that its system of back-to-work support has been one of the main reasons why it's had such a low unemployment rate.

Emily: What are the main concerns for the current UK system?

Ben: I think the main levels of concern are that we're not focusing our resources where they're most required. What we do is we tend to treat everyone the same, regardless of what their barriers to work are and how long they've been unemployed. What we need to do is deploy our resources more effectively, so one of the things we want to do is have people assessed from day one rather than leaving them to their own devices for perhaps three to six months when other problems can set in linked with unemployment. I think the other thing is to make sure that people get access to training and support from day one as well, because I think one of the things that's important to consider is that it's not just the cost of paying for the services; if people are unemployed they'll often be claiming Jobseeker's Allowance and Housing Benefit and all these other costs, so what we really want to do is get people into work and of course keep them in work and that's one of the things that we've really got to sort out in this country.

Emily: How much money is going into benefits each year?

Ben: Overall the country spends nearly £200 billion on benefits. About £85 billion of that goes on pensions and the rest goes on something called working-age benefit, so that's people of working age. Some of that goes towards disabled people, but there are some really expensive items that we have in the benefit bill that are really because people are either in low-paid work or they're constantly cycling in and out of unemployment as I mentioned. Housing Benefit's an obvious one; we currently spend about £23 billion on Housing Benefit alone.

Emily: So what action do you think needs to be taken next?

Ben: We've set out a number of recommendations, but we think most of them are reasonably easy to implement. One of the things we're calling for - and this is something they have in Australia - is called a Job Seeker Classification Instrument and that's a test that works out what barriers to work people face and what their issues are from day one. We think that could be implemented very quickly. We're also looking at trying to give job centres much more freedoms to innovate. We think there are lots of good people in the job centre, but advisers are often quite bogged down by certain processes and procedures and we want to give them a bit more freedom so that they can focus on the hardest-to-help and really do the job that they came into the profession to do.

Emily: If anyone wants to find out more about this, how can they find out more?

Ben: They can find out more by going on to the Centre for Social Justice website. The report is called "Up To The Job" and we've also written a blog about it on the website as well, so if people want to read that rather than the full report they can.