Lone Parent Employment

: All the new deals involve private and voluntary sector participation, because often the services that we need to provide for individuals are most appropriately provided by private and voluntary sector partners. As we have said, as we roll out the next phase of pathways to work services throughout the country, we will probably focus mainly on private and voluntary sector providers to deliver many of those services. I tend to feel that the hon. Gentleman's remarks contained an ideological preference for the private and voluntary sectors. I do not share that. I believe that we need to use the agency that works best in a particular instance. Perhaps he has not thought of this, but as we move forward, in some instances sanctioning people's benefit if they fail to participate in particular work-related activities, it is difficult to say that private and voluntary agencies working on our behalf should do that, rather than the state and its agencies. He might hold a different view from me on that, but it is one of the rather difficult issues that we have to think through. With the Australian experience, there has been great emphasis on private and voluntary sector providers. They provide the services while the state agency does the sanctioning, yet when the private and voluntary sectors refer to the state, a different decision is taken by the state from that taken by the front-line provider working with the individual. This certainly is not an easy ideological debate from my standpoint; I hope it does not become one from the hon. Gentleman's standpoint or that of his party. We recognise that employment zones have been successful, and much of the greatest success comes from flexibility. We are trying to learn from that as we move forward. The hon. Gentleman is, again, right to say that we do not measure whether people maintain their jobs for more than 26 weeks. The difficulty with that is collecting data and keeping track of people who move into employment, but we hope that the movement-to-job outcome target, which will start in April and for which we will use Treasury data rather than our own, will significantly improve our ability to measure retention. I hope he will support our work on that. I shall come back to the hon. Gentleman about the cost per interview, but my recollection—from figures that I looked at in preparation for the publication of the Green Paper—is that it is less than £10. All our evidence shows that work-focused interviews are a successful way of engaging lone parents and supporting their transition into work. The figures that I have been given show that one lone parent in five moves from the initial new deal for lone parents interview into a six-monthly review, and then about half—45 per cent.—go on into employment. The hon. Gentleman talked about sanctions; I have figures here that will help him. Since we started to develop work-focused interviews as a condition of benefits, we have had to sanction only 58,400 people up to August 2005. Relative to the number of interviews that we must have done since they first became compulsory in 2000, that is a small number. Of those people, 65 per cent. subsequently participated in the work-focused interviews, so the sanctions on them were lifted; 11 per cent. did not pursue their claims; 10 per cent. left the benefit; and only 14 per cent. stayed on income support—at a reduced rate. One way in which sanctions work effectively is that their very existence encourages people to participate in the various activities there are to bring them closer to the labour market. It is not necessarily the implementation of sanctions and the associated poverty that lead us forward. This has been a consensual and interesting debate. The problems are complex—I agree with the hon. Gentleman on that—but that is why we need to learn from ““what works””, and why we will keep trying to innovate through either the policy levers that we put forward or the innovation that is much easier to take forward with private and voluntary sector providers. We will also subject everything that we do to rigorous evaluation. I hope that all hon. Members accept that all such labour market interventions are constantly rigorously evaluated—sometimes using too many of the always limited resources that I have available, but nevertheless ensuring that we properly test everything we do. This issue is an incredibly important part of our welfare-to-work programme and vital for attacking child poverty and ensuring social inclusion. It is a bit sad that, because it is a Thursday afternoon and there is snow around the country, there are not more Members here to engage in the debate, but I hope that some people read the report of this afternoon's proceedings in this Chamber and that that ensures that there is engagement with this part of the welfare reform Green Paper and our proposals within it. It is exciting and difficult, but I am glad that we are embarking on this journey. Question put and agreed to.