Posted: March 18, 2005

DSP Pilot - more work needed

On March 11, the Minister for Workforce Participation, Peter Dutton, put out a media release titled More Disability Support Pensioners explore workforce opportunities. The release referred to the final evaluation of the ‘Job Network Disability Support Pension (DSP) Pilot’ and the outcomes achieved seemed stunningly good. I was keen to determine whether this was a genuine success story or the spin of a Minister who has form when it comes to fudging numbers (see my blog of January 10). But one week on, the report is yet to appear on the Department of Employment and Workplace Relations (DEWR) website. After reading the Interim Report of October 2004, I suspect that the Murdoch journalists who reported Dutton’s release verbatim did not read the final report before they filed. The numbers deserve a much closer look.

The DSP Pilot was conducted between December 2003 and June 2004 to look at ways of facilitating access to Job Network (JN) services in order to help people with DSP find work. Twelve JN providers specialising in service delivery for job seekers with a disability were involved. Importantly, the Interim Report acknowledges that the DSP recipients who signed up were not a representative sample. The Pilot was not open to those participating in another form of Commonwealth assistance or to job seekers with “high-level, significant and ongoing workplace support needs”.

Dutton’s release stated:

Initial findings of the pilot found that 1 in 3 of the 671 participants who commenced the customised intensive employment assistance pilot had been placed in employment or education. As at 18 February 2005, this figure had increased to almost 50%. (Dutton's emphasis).

Let’s start by interrogating the denominator…

By 30 June 2004, 1130 job seekers had talked to a provider about being part of the study. Of these, 201 were ruled ineligible or unsuitable and 141 (12.5%) declined to be involved for reasons not explained in the Interim Report. Of the 788 who ‘engaged’, 74 (9.4 per cent) exited before commencing assistance and another 43 (5.4%) had their commencement ‘pending’ at the end of the Pilot period. So, you can use the 671 commencements as your denominator (the argument goes that you are testing the impact of Pilot services) but 788 is the more appropriate reference point as the study should be concerned with those who exit after they have engaged to participate and those who have been unable to commence before the Pilot is over. A good research report would have investigated if the latter was due to poor performance by the JN provider or the health or other problems of the participant.

So for the moment, let’s accept DEWR’s 671 commencements as our denominator. Another 88 individuals (13 per cent) exited after commencing, 239 (36 per cent) were placed in work or education, and 344 (51 per cent) remain in assistance. What types of employment outcomes were attained? Well, of the 220 people placed, 53 gained full-time jobs, 75 part-time jobs and 93 casual jobs. An employment ‘outcome’ requires that the job is for a minimum of 13 weeks.

In determining the success of the pilot, the final report (currently in hiding) needs to answer the following questions:

1. Were employment outcomes sustained over time? Note that job seekers were only going to be tracked until September 2004 i.e. for a period of between 3 and 10 months.

2. What employment outcomes were attained by category of disability? Good public policy to assist people with disabilities requires that we understand the heterogeneous and varying needs of this group.

3. Were employment outcomes sustained in instances where the JN providers used funds from the Job Seeker’s Account to provide wage subsidies and no-obligation work trials?

4. Did employment outcomes match the needs and preferences of job seekers? This is particularly important for people with disability who may have restricted work capacity, and for people with psychological or psychiatric conditions (the largest group in the Pilot) who are more likely to find casual or precarious forms of work stressful and/or harmful. Indeed the Interim Report notes that Pilot participants saw “short term, contract or temporary jobs” (which dominated the employment outcomes) as particularly risky.

5. The report notes that some participants only needed access to “common workplace arrangements such as flexible working hours, shift work, limited contact with the public, working from home or access to sick leave” but doesn’t say whether the implied ‘flexibility’ was designed to meet the needs of the employer or employee? What was the experience of the 93 people placed in casual work who receive a pay loading in lieu of entitlements to paid leave (including sick leave)?

6. What case can be made for the likelihood of these results being replicated in a non-pilot context (even if the pilot leads to improved services for DSP recipients from the JN)? It is critical to note that JN providers participating in the pilot were disability specialists contracted to “develop and promote innovation in the provision of employment services for DSP recipients and build organisational expertise in these areas”. There was a contract to focus on a particular (and small) group of individuals. This is not a typical JN setting where providers have to make decisions about which of the (many) individuals 'on their books' are most likely to achieve a paid outcome. If the pilot has developed means by which providers are more likely to achieve paid outcomes for people with disability (who don’t require on-going support), which group or groups will take their place at the back of the queue?

The Interim Report makes for interesting (read depressing) reading because of the way the problem is constructed and the concerns it raises about the Government’s proposed changes to DSP.

On the first issue the problem is constructed exclusively on the supply side (as it was under the Hawke and Keating Labor governments). Apparently, getting people with disability into jobs just requires us to get JN providers instituting best practice in work placement and providing better information to DSP recipients to encourage them to register with the Job Network. The report doesn’t mention the greatest barrier to employment – the lack of secure and suitable jobs that can accommodate the support needs of people with disability.

On the second issue, the Interim Report contradicts a lot of claims made about DSP recipients over the years. It is at pains to point out the “strong desire” of people on DSP to “participate in work, education and training”. And here I was thinking that the massive growth in DSP outlays was due to unemployed people with ‘bad backs’ taking refuge in a system that does not impose activity tests and pays higher benefits. You learn something new every day.

More importantly, the Report shows that the Government is not ready to institute the major changes to DSP eligibility criteria that are set to be passed by Parliament post-July 1. My blog on Systems failure and mental illness sets out the proposed changes and the risks they pose to the large numbers of people who will now be assessed as eligible for Newstart Allowance (NSA) as opposed to DSP.

For example, activity testing (and breaching for non-compliance) creates particular challenges (and risks) for people with disability. Ironically, the Interim Report on the pilot study found that voluntary participation did “not appear to affect the capacity of Pilot Providers to work effectively with participants”!! The report also reveals how poorly specialist JN providers are coping with understanding, assessing and supporting people with psychological and psychiatric conditions (and other disabilities that are episodic in nature). People with mental health conditions comprise one quarter of the DSP pool and if the specialist providers are lost then one can only imagine how ill-prepared general providers are for dealing with people who have a mental illness and are assessed for Newstart.

The lessons to the Minister are simple:

1. You only make changes once you have your systems sorted out and grounds on which to presume they will achieve positive employment outcomes;

2. You shouldn't experiment with our most disadvantaged citizens and get excited by the results of an employment pilot that has a very high exit rate and generates largely casual work placements that are particularly ill-suited to one of the largest disability groups; and

3. While you may have worked out some better ways to help one group of JN ‘clients’ via the Pilot, you have once again dodged the main issue. In the absence of concomitant measures to create secure jobs, which accommodate the needs of people with disability, you will continue to ‘park and churn’ the most disadvantaged. The time for JN tinkering is gone. The time for introducing CofFEE’s Job Guarantee and re-casting the role of the Network has arrived.

In closing, it is a supreme irony that the Employment Pilot focused on the Job Network and stressed the need to get DSP recipients back to work in order to address Australia’s supposed ‘skill shortage’. Given that the role of the Network is to make people ‘job ready’ then the existence of a ‘skill shortage’ indicates institutional failure on a grand scale.

Blog entry posted by Sally