Employment Service (Hansard, 20 February 1997)

§ Mr. Forth

Responsibility for the subject of the question has been delegated to the Employment Service agency under its chief executive. I have asked him to arrange for a reply to be given.

Letter from Leigh Lewis to Mr. Stephen Byers, dated 20 February 1997: The Secretary of State has asked me to reply to your question on whether a copy of the Ernst and Young study of the Employment Service Headquarters will be placed in the Library of the House. This is something which falls within the responsibilities delegated to me as Chief Executive of the Agency. You may find it helpful if I give you some background to the work. The Employment Service (ES) commissioned the consultants Ernst and Young to help the ES Board think through issues concerning the future role of our Headquarters (Head Office and Regional Offices) and to develop an overview of the type of Headquarters the Agency would need. We accomplished this through a series of workshops of ES Board members and senior managers, facilitated by the consultants, who provided advice and fact-finding based on their work in organisations elsewhere. Our aim is now to draw on that work to inform more detailed change projects over the next three years. Because of the way in which the consultants worked with the ES Board there is no formal consultants' report from the Headquarters Review project, but my predecessor, Mike Fogden, wrote to all staff in Headquarters on 31 October last year summarising the ES Board's main conclusions. I set out the key strands of our thinking and proposals for further work from that communication below. 666W ES's field operations have previously been subject to rigorous examination of need, effectiveness and cost. The Agency has become smaller as unemployment has fallen and it is now appropriate to apply a similar approach to our Headquarters functions. Our examination concluded that the ES could be managed better and more cost effectively by eliminating duplication of functions between Head and Regional Offices which lead to reworking and loss of economies of scale; improving our Headquarter business processes; and contracting out some support functions. This has led us to develop a blueprint for ES Headquarters of a small directing and enabling Head Office and a regional management tier focusing on the delivery of services to our clients. To realise this, we have commissioned more detailed work to reduce HQ activities in areas not directly related to delivery of services to our clients; rebrigade (possibly to single sites) a number of support functions, and actively explore the scope for contracting out a number of support functions. I think it worth adding that this is essentially a management issue rather than a policy one and the changes we are proposing will not affect our services to jobseekers and employers through Jobcentres - indeed we aim by focussing our Headquarters more directly on the core business of the ES to improve the services we provide through our Jobcentre network. I hope this is helpful in giving more information on what we are seeking to achieve.