Robert Devereux
Permanent Secretary of the Department for Work and Pensions
How did you tackle the biggest challenges facing your organisation in 2014?
By supporting and motivating the thousands of staff tackling the many challenges in running and reforming the welfare system. Evidence of their growing commitment comes in the rise, for the third year in a row, in the staff engagement figures – and, of course, in the results we have delivered.
Unemployment recorded the largest annual drop in over 40 years, falling below 2m for the first time since 2008. The work of Jobcentre staff is central to this, and the Bank of England has been clear that welfare reforms are also playing a major role in employment rates beating original forecasts.
By the end of the year, Universal Credit (UC) will be available in one in eight Jobcentres, and we are accelerating expansion plans nationally in 2015. Several elements of the UC design are already in place across the country, with the Claimant Commitment already in use in every Jobcentre, staff retrained as Work Coaches, and jobseekers using the online Universal Jobmatch to find work.
Almost 5m people have been enrolled in a workplace pension, the result of integrated work across policy and communications professionals and our arm’s-length bodies. The new system of child maintenance is in place, and the programme that delivered it was commended by PAC. And the continued improvements in the way we work together have enabled us to cut annual baseline operating costs by around £2bn since 2009-10, whilst improving customer service: we now process claims for Jobseeker’s Allowance a third faster than a year ago, and 85% of these claims are made online. By completing work first time, the number of calls made to our contact centres has dropped by 15%.
What are your department’s top priorities in the last months before the general election?
Our priority is to maintain momentum. New measures, such as the Family Test, will place all of government under greater scrutiny to ensure that our work benefits society as a whole.
We are very focused on reducing the maximum waiting time for a Personal Independence Payment to 16 weeks.
I’m also keen we maintain our test and learn philosophy at the heart of UC. We’re running trials to compare different approaches to helping people into work – testing differences to local schemes to provide the strongest national results. Teams from around the world come to see the work we are doing, learning from us how to improve their own welfare systems.
What’s your favourite Christmas treat? And what makes you say: ‘Bah, humbug!’?
Surprising presents. I’d like to thank whoever ordered and sent to me the book I put on my Christmas list in last year’s article: Anthony Trollope’s Last Chronicle of Barset. Very unexpected; very kind. Thank you.
I could do without the annual last-minute dash down the high street on Christmas Eve to buy gifts; but I’m probably too old to expect to break the habit of a lifetime.