Examination of witnesses (Questions 20
- 39)
WEDNESDAY 24 MAY 2000
MR JOHN
ATKINSON, MR
NIGEL MEAGER
and MR CHRIS
HASLUCK
20. If it is equal opportunities, you must surely
be aware.
(Mr Hasluck) I hope so. I think it illustrates the
point which is that if you are an employer and you are looking
for a person to fill a job which has a certain minimum specification,
that is fine, that is your prerogative to determine what that
minimum specification is, but then to start looking at those applicants
that come to you and saying, "Well, I will then rule out
people who could perfectly adequately do this job simply because
they fall short of what a lot of the other applicants have got",
which are really often irrelevant characteristics for that job,
I think perhaps is unfortunate.
21. But is that right? I do not know and I suspect
that is what the recruitment procedures of burger bars are, but
I would imagine that when you are working in McDonald's or somewhere
like that, you may well have to be able to work a cash till and
understand that, you may well need actually to be able to read
on paper, "We're running out of commodity X and we had better
re-order commodity X". I know you will have only meant it
as a sort of reductio ad absurdum, but I doubt for those
menial jobs that in the end all they are getting left with are
those who have a poor degree in physics.
(Mr Hasluck) I am sure that my comment about McDonald's
in this particular instance is incorrect and, as a large organisation,
I am sure they have got really very firm standards about their
recruitment, but I am sure that if you go not very far from the
walls of this place, you will find lots of places where people
are employed who are not going to be recruited at the high standards
where very basic minimum requirements are required for the job
and formal written applications are just completely inappropriate.
22. Interestingly, I was in my constituency
recently and I was seeing a scheme, a government scheme and the
acronym escapes me, where parents are actually taught in the school
alongside their children and the way in which it might be presented
is that they are being equipped to help their children with their
own studies and of course a spin-off of that is that the parents
who may themselves have had difficulties in school a few years
ago find that their skills are upgraded. I was meeting parents
who told me that they found that virtually any job for which they
ever presented themselves, yes, they might have difficulty getting
through the formal written procedures, but that once they got
into that job, they simply would not be able to function otherwise.
The only point I make, and I do not want to labour it, but I think
it probably is quite important is that I wonder these days whether
there really are so many basic jobs around that one really does
not need even the sort of skills to put in a pretty basic application.
In a sense should we even be encouraging that anyway? It seems
that governments of both political complexions have actually in
recent years had a good record of saying that it is simply unacceptable
that anybody of remotely average intelligence can get through
the school system and not be able to read and write and add and
subtract to a reasonable level, and it seems to me that that is
the thrust we should be going in on rather than saying that there
are some sorts of jobs where it does not matter if he is sub-literate
anyway.
(Mr Meager) Pursuing that point, and governments may
have a good record despite it, but it is also the case that if
you look at what happens to the unemployed, large numbers of them
spend the first period of unemployment, and it can be quite a
long period for certain age groups, up to two years, when the
main activity on their behalf from the Employment Service has
been to encourage job-search, irrespective of their basic skills.
So they have spent perhaps up to two years being prodded by the
Employment Service to go and apply for the job which they are
not going to get in a month of Sundays because they have not got
the basic skills that you describe and then at some time threshold,
the programme kicks in, whether it be the New Deal or its predecessors,
and then these deficiencies that you talk about come to light
and start to be addressed. So if your argument is correct, I think
one of its implications might be that we ought to be perhaps looking
at more sophisticated ways of identifying those deficiencies at
a much earlier point in people's unemployment.
23. Do we still have job clubs or have they
been renamed?
(Mr Meager) We still have them, but the content of
them is mainly encouraging people to apply for jobs.
24. Yes, I know, but the reason I ask that question
is that when I was an Employment Minister, I found two things
about job clubs. One is that they were surprisingly effective,
and I say that even though I was a Minister fronting up the scheme,
but the deficiency within them was that they only kicked in after
six months, whereas in fact the sort of techniques that were being
taught in the better sort of job clubs were taking exactly the
point you make, that they were picking up on the reasons once
that person had not gone anywhere in the previous 26 weeks, and
it seemed to me that then the argument is it could be done at
that sifting process to begin with, and the point is that you
did not actually wear out the local employer by unfortunate people
going round applying for jobs they just had no hope of coming
at and presumably that ought to be the thrust, sifting right away
and finding out what skills people have.
(Mr Atkinson) I am sure you are right. I think that
is not quite what the job clubs do. What the job clubs tend to
do is find somebody who can write and get them to fill in the
applications for them. They find some way of circumventing the
problem of a badly filled-in form. I think the more appropriate
intervention is for pre-vocational preparation, and I am sure
you have come across it. Here individuals are identified as having
mostly either basic skills or behavioural or attitudinal difficulties
in being ready for working life and these are addressed explicitly
through training. So rather than getting someone to fill the form
in, they are actually taught how to write, so those address the
difficulties more directly and more fundamentally.
Mr Twigg
25. Moving on to a different area, the Government
puts a lot of emphasis on using new technology in assisting recruitment
with the plans for the Learning and Work Bank. Can you just say
a little bit about that and its impact on what we are talking
about? Does it provide wider opportunities or could it actually
have a damaging side-effect of actually increasing social exclusion
because of a lack of access to those sorts of skills amongst some
of the long-term unemployed?
(Mr Atkinson) I am not aware of any decent research
that has been done on this topic, so I think any of us will be
talking off the top of our heads, so let me talk off the top of
mine first of all!
26. It does not hold any of us back normally!
(Mr Atkinson) I think in terms of getting more vacancies
registered with job centres, then the technology can be extremely
helpful because it can make the collation of vacancies and their
easy accessibility within the job centre much quicker, so in terms
of pulling vacancies together and making them accessible, I think
that is a positive. However, I cannot for the life of me see that
such a procedure can advantage the unemployed. They are certainly
no more likely to have IT skills and access to IT equipment than
anybody else and they are probably much less likely to frankly.
I think the second part of your argument about it improving access
for individuals to those vacancies rather falls down unless there
is some kind of IT-literate intermediary which can bring the two
together. I think just leaving it to Internet-based job searches
and so forth really is not going to help the unemployed to any
degree at all, but my colleagues may know different.
(Mr Hasluck) I would agree with that answer.
Mr Brady
27. The amount of part-time and casual work
increased quite dramatically in the 1980s and is probably still
increasing quite dramatically at the moment or has been to date.
What implications does this have for the recruitment of the unemployed?
(Mr Hasluck) As a matter of fact, of course part-time
employment is actually decreasing, relatively speaking.
28. When did it turn?
(Mr Hasluck) I could not be absolutely precise about
that, but I think we are talking about a couple of years ago.
(Mr Meager) Proportionately, casual work has not increased
as dramatically as some popular commentary on it would suggest.
You are asking whether this is likely to provide a new bridge,
if you like, and I think the answer is that we do not know. It
is not clear the extent to which those kinds of jobs provide an
effective stepping stone into secure or viable careers for anybody
actually, not just the unemployed. There is some evidence that
once you are in that type of job, that in itself can give negative
signals as well as positive signals and it depends very much on
the kinds of job and the kind of experience that you have within
the job, and I do not think it is possible to say globally that
the growth in those kinds of jobs must mean a new transitional
route into secure employment for the unemployed because if you
think about when part-time work, for example, was growing at its
fastest, there was not any clear match between the growth in part-time
work and the level of unemployment or long-term unemployment.
In fact, a very high proportion of the part-time work went to
either new entrants to the labour market, young people, or female
re-entrants to the labour market, not to the core of long-term
unemployed.
29. If unemployed people who get part-time or
casual jobs are not necessarily likely to move on from that position,
is the same not true for people in subsidised New Deal jobs? Is
that perhaps one of the reasons why there is relatively poor sustained
employment coming out of New Deal?
(Mr Meager) There is the job and employer, is there
not? A temporary job with a large, mainstream employer may be
rather different from a job picking up the deckchairs on Brighton
beach, so again I do not think it is to do necessarily with the
short-termism of the job, but it is what you get during that period,
what it adds to your CV, so the New Deal in places like Marks
& Spencer's and Sainsbury's or somebody is probably, I would
guess, an enhancement of someone's subsequent job prospects, but
I do not think it is to do with the short-termism of the job because
I think it is to do with the nature of the experience that they
get. I think there is a lot of evidence that the closer work experience
is to real jobs—that is to say, the further away it is from,
if you like, "make work" schemes and the closer it is
to a real day-to-day working environment with work disciplines,
a real wage, the risk of losing your job if you do not turn up
at eight o'clock in the morning—the more likely it is to
add something both to the individual's self-confidence and motivation
but also to their notional CV when they come to present themselves
to subsequent employers.
(Mr Hasluck) I think we have to be a little careful
when we talk about New Deal jobs, because if we are talking about
the employment option where there is a subsidy, then there is
the expectation at the outset that the employer will probably
retain that person at the end of the subsidised employment period.
In the majority of cases that actually happens. If we are looking
at the other options—the voluntary sector option and the
Employment Task Force—there is no expectation that these
work experience placements will lead to a long-term employment
relationship, but that is known to all the parties at the outset.
I think those options have a different function. So I think that
if we make some generalisation about New Deal jobs being temporary,
that is not true, because in the employment option the intention
is, and the reality is, that they are much more sustainable.
30. I think the figure which we have been given—and
you may wish to comment on the figure—was that of the people
going into employment from New Deal, 40 per cent of those jobs
lasted no longer than 13 weeks.
(Mr Hasluck) Again, when you say "going into
employment from New Deal", you are talking about unsubsidised
jobs?
31. Yes, going into jobs unsubsidised.
(Mr Hasluck) I cannot recollect the figure offhand.
That seems rather low to me, but I need to check that out, to
be frank. The point about unsubsidised jobs is that those are
jobs secured in the way that employers normally secure jobs, without
the period of a kind of getting-to-know-you six months through
the programme. The only difference is that the employer has actually
come to the New Deal programme, or in some cases has simply posted
up vacancies in the normal way, and a person has, through their
jobsearch, encountered those vacancies and taken them. So intrinsically
there is no difference between some of those jobs and the ordinary
process of recruitment, but in other cases, particularly where
there has been subsidisation, I think that is quite a different
exercise, and I think that there the outcome is much more positive.
32. Nigel Meager was suggesting that people
going into part-time or casual work may be quite likely to stay
in the same relatively low grade of work. Intuitively, one would
think that regardless of that, it is more likely that somebody
who is unemployed, and perhaps long-term unemployed, might find
their way into part-time or casual work, rather than into full-time
permanent work. Is that borne out by the facts?
(Mr Atkinson) No, it is not borne out by the facts.
Long-term unemployed people do not take part-time jobs, because
they lose out on their benefits.
33. What about casual jobs?
(Mr Atkinson) They do not take casual jobs, because
the risk of not getting back onto benefit when that casual job
disappears is a huge one. On the whole, the reason they do not
go down that route is that it is not an attractive route for them,
and therefore the question of whether there might be a kind of
second stage when you go on from that job to something a bit better
does not ever really arise in most of their thinking, I guess.
34. That is interesting. The Employment Service
has used a range of different measures over the years to place
unemployed people into jobs. Which have been the most successful
and why, looking at the job clubs and all of the other activities?
What works?
(Mr Atkinson) The ones which work the best—it
is a bit of a fake really—are the one which work for people
who have virtually got a job already, and therefore all the Employment
Service is doing is paying their travel to interview expenditure
or something of that sort, or providing them with some tools or
something like that. Those kinds of last-minute interventions
are extremely effective, they work extremely well and they are
entirely cost-effective, but the audiences for them are individuals
who have virtually got a job anyway, therefore you would expect
them to work very effectively. So that is a bit of a cheat. The
next best and most effective types of programme are really the
Work Trial types of programme, I think. Those are the types of
programme that bring individuals into a real working environment,
with a real employer, on a kind of trial basis, a no-risk basis
on either side; the individual can go back to benefits without
losing their position on benefits, the employer can say, "I
don't like this chap, I don't want to take it any further."
Those seem to be really quite effective, and they are very cheap
to run.
35. How long do they have to be effective?
(Mr Atkinson) They do not run for very long at the
moment—I think it is just a matter of a few weeks at the
moment, and I think it is six[17].
That seems to me to be probably not quite long enough. A little
longer would be better, I think. Then again, one has the difficulty
of the individuals who, in essence, are working for nothing and
who are just getting their benefit during that time, yet they
are having to work. So I think some kind of programme with a slightly
longer period spent close to employment with an employer, and
some kind of benefit top-up, would be the arrangement which would
be ideal under those circumstances. Those kinds of programme seem
to me to work extremely effectively. Then there are the New Deal
kinds of solutions which I think are quite expensive, but which
I think do work, certainly better than the previous generation
of programmes of their type. Then the types of programme that
really do not work well, I think, are the training programmes
outside of the working environment, where individuals are just
taken off and trained and then brought back and left to fend for
themselves. They are expensive and they do not work.
36. I wonder whether you would have a stab at
what you think the cost of New Deal is? You say it is relatively
expensive.
(Mr Atkinson) I meant in terms of by comparison with
the previous generation of programmes of that kind.
37. Clearly you have some sort of comparison?
(Mr Atkinson) The levels of subsidy are much greater.
38. So when you say it is expensive, you mean
in terms of the actual fee, clearly?
(Mr Atkinson) In terms of the subsidy, yes.
39. Is there evidence, and what is the evidence,
that New Deal has changed the attitudes of employers towards the
long-term unemployed?
(Mr Atkinson) I do not know if Chris can help here.
(Mr Hasluck) I think there is qualitative information.
It is not particularly easy to measure through the large quantitative
surveys currently being analysed, but qualitative research has
been carried out, and that obviously involves face-to-face interviews
with relatively small numbers of employers. So we have to be cautious
about how we interpret that, but that does seem to be relatively
positive, in that employers have found in the main that the programme
has provided them with somebody who is a valuable recruit, and
often after some period of initial scepticism about how it is
going to work out, they have actually found that things have worked
quite well. Of course, what is much more difficult to know about
is the employers who actually dropped out at the beginning, or
did not even consider it. We do not know why that is the case,
or indeed who they are in many cases. So where employers have
been involved and their opinions have been listed, I think that
on balance they are probably fairly positive.
17 Note that the witness has since corrected this to
three weeks. Back
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