Employment Service (Hansard, 14 November 1996)

§ 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.

341W

Letter from Derek Grover to Mr. David Blunkett, dated 14 November 1996: As the Employment Service is an Executive Agency, the Secretary of State for Education and Employment has asked me, in the absence of the Chief Executive, to reply to your question on whether a copy of the Ernst and Young material associated with the Review of the Employment Service Headquarters will be placed in the Library of the House. You may find it helpful to have some background on the work. The Chief Executive commissioned the consultants Ernst and Young to help the Employment Service (ES) Board think through issues concerning the future role of our Headquarters (Head Office and nine 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 to now draw on that work to inform more detailed change projects over the next three years. The consultants did not submit a formal report to the Board. However, I set out the key strands of our thinking and proposals for further work below. 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 HQ 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 had 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, the Chief Executive has commissioned more detailed work to reduce Headquarters 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 hope this is helpful in giving more information on what we are seeking to achieve.