Interview: Darra Singh

Darra Singh (pictured above) is used to managing large chunks of the public sector: in his last job, as chief executive of Ealing council, he oversaw a 7,000-strong workforce – bigger than most Whitehall departments. But Jobcentre Plus (JCP) is a sprawling behemoth of an organisation: with about 75,000 staff, it’s one of the largest employers in government.

“We have 751 jobcentres, 80 delivery centres and 35 contact centres,” says the agency’s chief executive; having moved across from the council, Singh adds, he’s had to get used to an environment in which there’s much less “proximity between what’s decided and what’s delivered”. Bottom-up lines of communication are stretched, too: “In a local authority, you can drive to work and see what’s wrong with the streetlights or the bin collections,” he comments. “Here, we rely much more on district managers, JCP advisers and other people feeding back to us.”

Feedback rarely transmits perfectly up those long communications arteries: Singh confesses that “one of the hardest things for me is getting used to teleconferencing: there can be quite a lot of people on the other end, and you hear from some of them but not from others.” Nonetheless, JCP does operate a range of channels that enable top managers to hear the views of frontline staff: the executive team tour the regions for ‘talk direct’ events, while Singh fields monthly teleconference calls and online Q&As, works for week-long placements in various arms of the agency’s delivery operations, and spends at least one day a week visiting local offices.

In future, these feedback channels are likely to become more important still, for JCP is on a road to greater localism and collaboration; as office and district managers win more independence and seek to strengthen their connections with other local organisations, agency bosses will have to listen ever more carefully to the messages coming up from the front line. Singh certainly should have well-tuned ears: with his Bradford childhood and his career in frontline charity, housing association and council work (see box), he’s no stereotypical Whitehall mandarin.

That background has, he says, “helped JCP and the Department [for Work and Pensions] adjust our relationship with local government, I think. That was certainly the view of Leigh [Lewis, former DWP permanent secretary]”. And this adjustment will be crucial to one of the agency’s key objectives: “We want to get much more into co-location,” says Singh.

Shared spaces
“If we have JCP advisers located in a town hall, where they have housing advisers, social services, social care – and facilities to deal with council tax, council tax benefit and housing benefit queries – then instead of going to different buildings for each issue, individuals can get everything done straight away,” he explains. And there are benefits for service providers too, in terms of better collaboration and efficiency: “Some of the most powerful wins and gains come from just having people from different organisations sitting next to each other,” says Singh.

As examples, Singh cites Newham – where JCP shares an office with staff from all five Olympic host boroughs, lining up Olympics site jobs for local residents – plus central Bedfordshire, Ipswich and Birmingham, where plans for shared offices are being developed with councils. The collaboration won’t end with local authorities, he adds: work and pensions secretary Iain Duncan Smith is “very keen for us to support credit unions”, and JCP has invited these low-cost, community-led loan providers to share offices in four locations. The agency is also talking to the Citizens Advice Bureau and young people’s charity the Prince’s Trust, and Singh raises the prospect that DWP contractors, running jobseeker-support services under the forthcoming Work Programme, might be offered space in JCP offices.

“The advantage there is that you get what’s called a ‘warm handover’, because when we refer people they won’t have to get on a bus and travel ‘x’ miles to another building,” he says. “They’ll just walk down the corridor. So it’s better customer service and a more rounded public sector offer – and it’s more efficient, too.”

Asked whether Telereal Trillium – which owns and manages JCP property – will be happy to facilitate all these office moves and complex shared leases, Singh argues that the current system “is no more inflexible that what we’d have if we directly leased property” on the open market. “I haven’t come across any instances where it’s caused us issues,” he adds. “There is flexibility, but as in any business, when a district manager has a proposition he or she is going to have to make a business case, and then we’ll talk to our colleagues in the commercial department and Telereal Trillium to see what’s possible.”

The district manager’s role here is a key one: co-location of frontline services is, by definition, best driven by local rather than national managers. Asked whether the agency’s London HQ will have to relax regulations and control systems in order to give local managers more freedom of manoeuvre, Singh suggests that the challenge is one of encouraging local enterprise rather than removing red tape. “Unfortunately, we get stuck in structures – where the money is coming from, for example – rather than driving out some of the practical things that local managers can get on and do. You don’t need to change the funding system or structures to co-locate services,” he argues. Managers didn’t need any “special permission” to set up the Newham project, he notes: “The district managers just got on and did it. My job is to give district managers a bit more permission to do it, and to be clear about the expectations.”

Loosen up
In other fields of JCP’s work, however, Singh accepts that the centre has been too controlling in the past. “When I go out and about, one of the bits of feedback I constantly get from personal advisers, jobcentre managers and district managers is that we’ve got quite a rigid system where we’re measuring, monitoring and recording lots of activity,” he says. “There isn’t the ability locally to say: ‘Actually, our objective is to get as many people into work as possible, and if we did something slightly differently, we could achieve that rather than having to spend ‘x’ amount of time with a particular customer.” In future there will be, he adds, “more flexibility for personal advisers locally to help craft the offer within a national framework”.

This commitment to lighten up central controls sounds like good news for the JCP call centre workers who last month staged a 48-hour strike in protest at what they said were unreasonable targets and excessive monitoring – but Singh emphasises that he wants to allow managers to set local priorities, not free client-facing staff to manage their own time. Call centres operate under “normal management techniques, but no way is it draconian”, he argues, adding that JCP takes 58m calls a year, and “to do that we’ve got to ensure that staff adhere to certain working patterns”.

Instead, Singh intends to dismantle the systems by which the centre monitors local jobcentres’ activities, and instead focus them on a much smaller basket of outcome measures. “There are certain core elements of the service that everyone will get everywhere: the fortnightly signing; the initial diagnostic interview,” he says. “But we won’t prescribe from here decisions on, for example, how often an individual comes in for face-to-face sessions with a personal adviser. What we will say is that we have some headline outcomes we want to achieve. The first big one will be the number of people we’re getting off benefit and into work; the second will be about tackling fraud and error; and then we’ll have some underpinning measures.”

Office romances
In part, this local flexibility is designed to give managers enough autonomy to build relationships with other public, private and voluntary sector organisations, developing new services that draw in outside partners. Alongside the Work Programme, JCP is introducing a set of skills and employment programmes providing, for example, opportunities to volunteer, get work experience, join ‘work clubs’, and access small business support – and it will be the job of local JCP operations to identify suitable partners and get these schemes up and running.

“It’ll be up to district and jobcentre managers to work with the voluntary and community sector and other organisations, to facilitate the development of these work clubs as opposed to providing it all directly, and to signpost our customers to them,” Singh explains. So JCP offices will collaborate with, for example, local chambers of commerce to “set up sessions for our customers who are interested in establishing their own businesses; they can explain what the pitfalls are, give them advice and so on”.

This is a very new approach for JCP: doesn’t the organisation have a reputation, at a local level, for being highly centralised, rather micromanaged and very reluctant to collaborate in, for example, Local Strategic Partnerships? “Is that a fair perception of what we used to be like?” Singh asks himself. “I think in some areas it probably is, actually. My own experience at Ealing was that JCP did have representation and were active in the LSP, but when I was at Luton [council] I don’t think they were; I can’t recall a JCP presence. So [local collaboration] did vary. But I think that perception has changed.” And even where perceptions haven’t changed, he argues, the reality has: he cites the experience of Hammersmith and Fulham council, which he says was “surprised” to learn about the Newham co-location project – and is now undertaking a similar co-location scheme in West London.

Anyway, says Singh, the drive for closer local collaboration has “a strong ministerial lead” and receives a very warm welcome among local JCP staff. “We launched four delegated flexibility pilots in different districts, and I remember going to Rusholme in Manchester and being bowled over by how engaged the staff in that jobcentre were,” he says. “And obviously staff engagement is a big issue, a big challenge for all organisations including the civil service. There, people were really buzzing.”

Reforms and new forms
The shift to greater local autonomy will, Singh acknowledges, be “quite a cultural change for JCP”. The agency will have to get used to “not being able to count everything”, and to local variation in services: there will be job clubs in every area, for example, “but we won’t be setting down how many there should be. It will be locally determined, based on what they need in that district to assist their customers to get into work.”

Still, he adds, the agency has seen bigger changes in the past: “It wasn’t so long ago that the vast bulk of people were paid benefits by giro, and now well over 90 per cent of Jobseekers Allowance [JSA] payments go direct into bank accounts.” Indeed, JCP is currently taking more of its services into the digital environment: “Sixteen per cent of all new JSA claims are made online – and that’s without any marketing or promotion,” says Singh, pointing out that the introduction of the universal credit provides an opportunity for JCP to shift far more benefits processes into digital channels.

Meanwhile, Singh says JCP is “moving to a position where every customer has an email account populated with their CV and their skills, and we’ll be able to automatically email them if a job comes up”. This will provide a better service for the customer, he says – but he’s frank in explaining that it will also enable JCP to keep a closer eye on people’s efforts to find work: “An adviser would be able to say: ‘Did you apply for that job?’ And if you say ‘Yes’, they could take a look in your account and say: ‘Actually, I’ve looked and there’s no CV going there at all’.”

Eventually, Singh would like to replace the job points found in jobcentres – which only enable users to search JCP’s own database – with computers on which customers can manage their benefits claims, search the web for jobs, conduct research and manage their emails. Partner organisations may also be able to provide access to the internet and digital services, he adds: “We need to look at how we can work creatively with the Post Office network – for example, around national insurance and identity verification.”

Digital doormen
Singh warns, though, that users will need hands-on help to shift to digital access. Jobcentres already employ ‘digital champions’ to encourage use of online services and the internet, and this role will become still more important. He cites the automated check-in machines at Heathrow’s Terminal 5, and the DIY checkout scanners in many supermarkets; people give these machines a wide berth unless there’s a staff member on hand to help out, he points out.

The JCP chief is also wary of suggestions that traditional channels could be closed down to push people to make the leap: “We need to test and test our digital offer to make sure it’s attractive before we do anything like switching things off,” he says, emphasising the importance of “customer insight: understanding what helps to incentivise and drive customer behaviour. And we need to be convinced that we’ve got accurate data about the usage of and access to computers and the internet.”

So the future for JCP is one in which this traditionally hierarchical, centrally-controlled organisation becomes a flatter, more open agency; links with partners will grow in importance, while vertical lines of command weaken. If the ministers and Darra Singh are able to put their plans into action, soon JCP will be creating shared support schemes with outside agencies, rather than running its own jobseeker projects; basing its staff with those of other local bodies, rather than operating in glorious solitude; allowing its district managers to tailor their operations to local communities, rather than imposing a universal, one-size-fits-all system; focusing on how its work affects people’s lives, rather than on exactly how its staff go about their work.

In short, an organisation that’s spent many years looking inwards will start to engage a little more closely with the realities and possibilities of life outside its walls. “The ministerial vision for JCP and our priorities are very much that co-location, that co-design, that collaboration,” says Singh; “Harnessing all the resources that we’ve got in a particular area to meet the challenge of getting as many people into work as possible.”

CV Highlights
1960    Born in Bradford
1984    Works as volunteer and housing case worker, Tyneside
1987    Becomes a campaign worker, CHAR housing charity
1989    Made a senior policy officer, London Housing Unit
1992    Joins Asra Greater London Housing Association as chief executive
2000    Moves to Audit Commission as northern region director
2001    Chosen as chief executive by Luton Borough Council
2005    Appointed chief executive at Ealing council
2006    Made chair of the Commission on Integration & Cohesion
2009    Joins the civil service as chief executive, Jobcentre Plus