Examination of witnesses (Questions 142
- 159)
WEDNESDAY 21 JUNE 2000
MR CHRIS
BANKS, MS
AMELIA FAWCETT,
MS STEPHANIE
MONK, CBE and MS
RUTH THOMPSON
Chairman
142. Ladies and gentlemen, thank you very much
indeed for first of all the submissions which you have already
made to us and then also for agreeing to come this afternoon.
We have embarked upon this quite interesting investigation on
how we get more unemployed people into the vacancies which exist
and we will be going to the States in two or three weeks' time
to see some examples over there of intermediary work and so those
are the kinds of issues which we are interested in. I do not know
whether you all want to make a preliminary statement or whether
you are comfortable with just making your statements in answer
to the questions as they arise. Does anyone particularly want
to get something on the record to begin with?
(Ms Monk) We are happy to do it through questions.
143. If I can begin by asking what are the most
important recruitment and workforce development issues that all
of your companies are having to deal with and how are the issues
changing?
(Ms Fawcett) As you know, I come from a large financial
services firm of about 4,100 people in Canary Wharf, very much
in the East End of London. We have 73 nationalities who speak
63 languages which is a fraction of the 250 languages in the East
End. What is critical for us, as with other large financial services
firms—if I said what the three top issues are, they are
people, people, people. There is intense competition for talent
at every level of our firm not only in our own industry but also
from venture capital firms, technology firms, start-ups, SMEs,
and everyone in senior management is clearly focused on how do
we attract, maintain and motivate the very best people. Given
the speed with which our industry is moving and the rate at which
products are changing, we need to find people who can pretty much
hit the ground running, whether it is a senior banker or an IT
programmer or a word processing clerk. We have not got time to
spend with people who cannot do that. The confluence of those
two areas—one, the competition for talent and, two, the
need for talent who are work-ready—means that we face a
challenge in terms of how we find creative and innovative ways
of searching for people which is why I am chairing the financial
services sector initiative sponsored by the London Employers'
Coalition and New Deal Task Force to see if we can find ways of
getting intermediaries for the financial services sector, which
is not a traditional area for unemployed workers to find work
as you know, to help us unlock a new pool of talent which has
not previously been open to us because they do not come, as you
know, "job ready". I can at another time later in the
day give you some examples of what our experience in New York
is but if I recap, competition for jobs, finding people quickly,
and then people who will stay and are loyal and are committed
to the firm for the long term. And we think there is promise with
the help of intermediaries, but only with the help of intermediaries,
to solve not only some issues for the unemployed but also our
own staffing issues.
144. I missed the emphasis—with the help
of intermediaries but only with the help of them?
(Ms Fawcett) Yes. To give you a small example, we
tried to do something in our local community of Newham with a
community-based organisation which is an intermediary on the basis
that if you think about the financial services industry we have
pretty much out-sourced many of our core services, entry level
jobs, so the HR support, training, support for childcare has pretty
much been out-sourced as well and therefore we needed someone
who could provide that in terms of getting young people into jobs.
It took 100 per cent of people's time even with an intermediary.
If we are going to do this—and we do think there is an immense
amount of talent in Newham and Tower Hamlets—we are going
to need someone who can deal with the training and the after care.
When someone is in the job, we found in New York, they still need
help with transport, childcare and social issues. That can only
be done, at least we think in our industry, with intermediaries.
145. Who would like to follow on?
(Ms Monk) I would be very happy to follow on because
I can report very similar messages but from a completely different
sector. I have been a member of the Task Force from the outset.
One of the reasons for being very enthusiastic to participate
is that I am Human Resources Director of Granada and we employ
80,000 employees, the majority of them in this country and the
majority of them in hospitality although about 3,000 of them are
media, so we are a large employer of young people, which for me
was the very initial attraction of involvement in New Deal. Hospitality
would seem to be a very fertile area for New Deal. There is ease
of access for young people joining, it has traditionally been
an area where a lot of people got their first experience of work.
Hospitality is growing—one in ten new jobs in future will
be in the hospitality sector—and they are a significant
recruiter because of growth but also because of high levels of
turnover. One of the opportunities that New Deal potentially offered
and can offer still is to halt some of the rather wasteful levels
of turnover that go on in this industry. Hospitality embraces
many small companies which again is a very fertile ground for
one or two good job placements for New Dealers. The key theme
from an employer's perspective in that sector is again the difficulty
of finding the right talent, whether it is people coming for a
first job or coming back as mature entrants because I believe
there are New Deal opportunities for groups other than the 18
to 25s, for women returners and maturer people in hospitality.
One of the difficulties has been, I think, getting across the
message that hospitality can be an attractive place for a long-term
career. One of the others has been the real disappointment of
finding people who are job ready. To try and address this we undertook
an initiative, a hospitality sector initiative, which I chaired,
and we called it First Choice: Working with New Deal. It
was a structured sector approach to try to increase the number
of young people coming into hospitality which we piloted in five
areas: Birmingham, Glasgow, London, Manchester and Newcastle.
We took those because they were areas where we knew there was
a lot of employment opportunity but also potentially a lot of
New Deal candidates, so we were starting with something approaching
ideal conditions. What we really wanted to test was whether by
putting the Employment Service and the employers closely together
with the right tools we could increase our success rate in recruiting
New Dealers. I am delighted to say an initial goal of 500 in the
first six months we have now got 713 on board. This is encouraging,
but hospitality employs a huge number of people and it is a very
small drop in the bucket. I think the key step that is missing
is the piece that I know we will come on to talk about which is
the contribution of intermediaries. The difficulty for a loose
coalition of employers working together is how you really help
to bridge the gap between the quality of candidates you find and
the needs of employers.
146. Thank you. Chris?
(Mr Banks) Thank you very much. I work for Coca-Cola
Great Britain and I again look at things through a completely
different set of eyes. I am predominantly here representing the
views of the London employers and the London Employers' Coalition
of which I am their Chair. There are some really consistent themes
here. Job readiness is a really critical one and that is generally
and specific, so general employability as well as specifically
to individual opportunities. One of the things we have identified
is that there is a real need to match the expectations of particularly
the young people with the opportunities and the jobs that are
available. So as well as skills and job readiness it is a question
of matching expectations and then matching readiness with expectations,
so it is a slightly different perspective. The way we have gone
about that more recently, because this really does require a very,
very deep understanding of the motivations of young people, has
been to put together a joint initiative with the Employment Service
and the Coca Cola people to run a research project in Wembley
co-funded and co-managed, if you like but using the expertise
of both the private sector and the Employment Service to get right
down to the structures underneath to what is driving the motivations
behind the young people's expectations in particular. It seems
to us that if you can match those expectations from the young
people and from the employers as well as building skills, that
is a very important additional point.
147. Thank you. Ruth?
(Ms Thompson) I would like to deal with the question
by first of all dealing with our recruitment needs and then where
I see the role of New Deal within that. Transco, the gas supply
company, is my employer and we have been part of a significant
and massive restructuring of the gas industry. What we are seeing
now are severe skill shortages. This is not uncommon in engineering
dominated industries. What we are sitting on is a demographic
time bomb, again not unlike other engineering industries, in that
in a big study we have done we have forecast that we will have
a shortage of 30,000 jobs in 2004 as people leave the gas industry
itself. Given that the gas industry has restructured in such a
way, responsibility for matching and meeting those skill shortages
in the future fall across the gas industry as a whole. Transco
has had a limited ability to recruit in recent years, the pressures
have been such that recruitment opportunities have been few. Therefore,
we have been looking at how we can, if not directly employ, influence
employment elsewhere. New Deal certainly comes into the picture,
that scenario, because we believe it can be an alternative form
of recruitment particularly for young people who perhaps employers
within our supply chain, for example, have not considered. I am
actually Chairman of Tyneside Employers' Coalition and I have
championed New Deal within Transco since its inception in 1998.
What we did in 1998 was develop and trial what we called the Shared
Employment Option which was a partnering of ourselves, the large
organisation, with a small company or a number of small companies
within our supply chain. Those companies expected to expand but,
of course, as small companies have the risk of their investment
being wasted or not having sufficient time or having sufficient
resources to train or give the work experience themselves, we
were prepared as a large organisation to take that risk for them
in order to allow them to expand and to take a job ready individual
at the end of that individual's work experience with ourselves.
I would echo the comments of my fellow questionees in saying that
job readiness and willingness to work and willingness to be trained
are the things that we are looking for, and motivation.
148. Thank you. Since you have raised the question
of the Shared Employment Option, has this been replicated in other
areas? Have other areas taken up this innovative scheme of yours
with the supply chain?
(Ms Thompson) We have been explaining it to other
employers. I believe that within our coalition if they have not
copied the model direct from its inception, what they have attempted
to do where they have taken New Dealers is to take a partner so
that they can put them into a job after their period of time with
them. The concept of partnering within the supply chain has certainly
been developed, if not a direct copy of the model that I have
described to you.
(Ms Fawcett) Could I just add something that might
be helpful. In financial services I have mentioned out-sourcing
and we have more than 20 suppliers who provide 750 jobs at Morgan
Stanley. We are partnering with them to see if they will join
the NewTec programmes that we are now doing through this intermediary
programme. Already the printing and word processing firm that
we use we will be using, so again we are trying to influence our
suppliers in a different way. We do not have the training skills
but we are setting up this programme with an intermediary which
we hope will put a little more persuasion on our employers to
join us. We already have two who are going to pick us up on that.
(Ms Thompson) The emphasis on the Shared Employment
Option which we were trying in the North East was on the small
company. The reason for that was that in Tyneside 94 per cent
of the companies, as I understand the statistics, have less than
50 employees. Within Tyneside if it was not going to be inward
investment that created economic regeneration, it was going to
be indigenous growth. Therefore it was an attempt to tap into
small companies who were looking to expand and that we thought
the real jobs would come from that prompted the trial.
Judy Mallaber
149. As you have been talking about it I wonder
if we could explore the question of intermediaries. The Government
is keen on this and it has set up a fund to pursue it. How important
do you think it is that labour market intermediaries see the employers
as their main customers rather than the other way around?
(Ms Fawcett) I actually do not think it is a "zero
sum" game. If what you are doing is preparing through training
and aftercare support, for want of a better word, someone to get
a job, to get a well paying job, to keep a job and to progress
in a job, it seems to me you are providing the candidate with
the skills he or she needs to move into employment and you are
providing the employer with the talent they need to fill their
current employment needs. So I do not see it as one at the expense
of the other. I think with the employer-led demand-led intermediary
focused organisation it is a win/win situation, and you are helping
both sides of the equation.
(Ms Monk) I would endorse that through the experience
we had on the hospitality initiative. We were probably the first
sectoral initiative so we were finding our way and at that point
the notion of intermediaries did not really exist so what we were
able to do was a combination of the best effort of the employers
that participate in this (15 large companies) with a view to spinning
out the learning to smaller companies, but there was definitely
a piece missing in the puzzle because the effort of putting in
place what we did, which was laudable and had some good results,
was unrealistic to expect to spin out to smaller companies because
they would not have the HR resource available for help. When one
is looking at the long-term sustainability of any of the initiatives
we are putting in place, we need to recognise the gap that does
exist between the pool of New Deal candidates now where perhaps
some will be easy to place, people who have been spun off more
quickly, which means that the distance travelled between somebody's
starting point and being job ready is quite long and most probably
needs specialist help. I think from an employer's point of view
it opens up an enormous pool of talent that potentially otherwise
would not be available and from a client's point of view it is
not just a shift from something that is focused on them to something
just meeting the employer's needs. It is making a deliverable
contract between both parties and without the contribution of
intermediaries I fear we will be left with a not insignificant
pool of people who are quite hard to help and too big a gap between
their needs and employers' needs for it to be deliverable. I am
very excited as an employer by the notion of intermediaries and
I wish we had been aware of that as a device to help us when we
set up our hospitality initiative.
(Ms Thompson) Certainly in the Tyneside Coalition
we are exploring the use of an intermediary in developing the
transport sector. There are a lot of transport companies including
at the airport and we are going to use an intermediary which has
already successfully operated with one of the transport representatives
on the Coalition. The initial step is to have a very clear outcome
and that is that you are going to have a job, specific training
and a specific skills set which is required for the job which
the employer describes so that the input of the employer in terms
of specifying the employee needs is vital. It allows smart purchasing,
as it were, from the intermediary but it also gives the clients
enormous confidence and a greater willingness to participate in
the scheme because they can see the likelihood of employment at
the end of it and they can see the relevance of the skills which
they are acquiring and so they are very keen to develop that further
within the transport sector. The other area that we are particularly
keen, to pick up Stephanie's point, is small businesses because
certainly talking to the Federation of Small Businesses which
are part of our coalition part of the reason why so many small
companies fail to participate in New Deal is lack of awareness,
but where they are aware they have a huge personal workload, life
is very busy and speedy and they are not inclined to take on extra
red tape, so an intermediary would be a catalyst in that sense
to take that administrative burden away from them. We believe
that that would be a very useful way forward as well as long as
the terms of the contract of the intermediary are very clearly
specified and link in with what the employer needs.
150. Can I follow that up and wrap a few questions
in together. I am not sure how far we are talking theoretically
and how far you know something about how intermediaries have been
working. Have you experience of the intermediaries working and
being able to reach different groups within the labour market?
Can you say a bit more about exactly what services the intermediaries
would have to offer to be really appealing? When would you and
other employers wish to use them rather than another method of
recruitment? What skills does an intermediary have to have in
order to perform those functions, looking here really at the effectiveness
of the intermediary and how we can ensure there is an effective
method of operating?
(Ms Thompson) Two things struck me from the Wildcat
example which we have been looking at. One question I asked Jeff
Jablow and what I found very interesting is when he set up an
intermediary organisation he found that the labour market was
actually different from the labour market he had anticipated from
his labour market intelligence and I have seen some of that within
our own Coalition and an example would be a call centre job which
can be a very different job depending upon which call centre you
operate in. A call centre in Transco is an emergency service,
a call centre elsewhere might be tele-sales, so I think that knowledge
of the intermediary of the employer and the employee needs is
a vital component. The other thing that struck me from Wildcat,
and this is something I do not have sufficient detail about, was
that they have split into a commercial and a social division,
as I understand it, and the commercial division incentivises its
employees again by understanding the labour market and by being
able to bring out the best in the clients involved, and I think
that is a very interesting concept in terms of how an intermediary
operates so that you do get almost a quality control in there.
The first point that I mentioned, knowing the employer and what
the labour market looks like, has certainly been the experience
of Stagecoach which is in the transport sector on our Coalition
and they use an intermediary who has precisely done what I have
just described to you.
(Mr Banks) I think Amelia will be able to speak in
some detail about a specific initiative in the financial services
sector here, but I just thought it might be helpful to give a
bit of context to that from the London Employers' Coalition because
there are three areas that we are working on where we are engaging
intermediaries and I think the learning from them is in some ways
similar, so I just flag it up. The three are financial services,
the IT sector and the creative and media sector which are all
very relevant to this part of the country. I think that we have
found that it is more difficult to get the right intermediary
partner identified that is skilled and capable of doing what we
need them to do here than I guess it looked on paper initially.
That is again an important theme. The second one is that employers
have a really important role to play, I think, in helping those
intermediaries deliver and develop both as organisations capable
of delivering the service that the employer needs but also, importantly,
in helping them develop, making a commitment to them in the longer
term, making investment and management time with them as well
as creating a really genuine business partnership rather than
something you can buy off the shelf. We should not under-estimate
the amount of quid pro quo work on both sides that is required
in order to make that partnership work. It seems to us certainly
from the Coalition perspective that at the moment the work being
done is being funded largely on a business-by-business or sector-by-sector
basis, to get it going, to find out how it will work, but there
is some serious consideration needed for proper funding of these
initiatives if they are going to be big enough to make a difference
over time.
(Ms Fawcett) Let me give you two examples, one from
the United States because we are a member of the Wildcat programme
and have been for a number of years. The key to this is that we
promise to provide permanent employment positions. It is not done
on spec. We do it not for philanthropic reasons but the hard-headed
business reason I referred to earlier—it is difficult to
find good quality people. It is very much a hard-headed process
rather than a philanthropic process. The permanent job offer follows
on from about 16 weeks work at Morgan Stanley Dean Witter in New
York. We must offer them a job at the end of that temporary period,
which Jeff Jablow referred to before as "temp to perm"
which must end at that time and you either "fish or cut bait",
you hire them or they go back to Wildcat. Again, the key here
is Wildcat, and have found that they go to another employer and
then keep the job, this has been in a wide variety of areas. The
result has been that these people are highly motivated. In the
words of an HR Director in New York, "impressive candidates".
Their commitment to the firm is higher than normal, their retention
rate is much higher than the industry norm. We started originally
with 12 hires and we are in excess of 50 now who have come in
on an annual basis and who are staying for a longer period of
time. There is no discount whatsoever for the people coming off
the Wildcat programme, they are treated like anybody else. The
average salary range is about $26,000 which is about £18,000,
which is about where we will start our programme when we start
it in London which we will be doing with NewTec in Newham. This
is roughly the starting range for the positions that we will be
offering people, £18,000. The characteristics, therefore,
I think of successful intermediaries are they are entrepreneurial,
which clearly Wildcat is, they understand our needs precisely,
they present a candidate who meet to a "T" the job specifications,
skills qualifications, personal understanding of what the firm
is, they have development training and training is provided by
the intermediary. I think it is really almost like a "boot
camp". For their own clients Wildcat offers an opportunity
to return to a job, a good job and stay in a good job for a long
period of time. To pick up on what Chris said, what we are now
going to do in the UK, sponsored by the London Employers' Coalition
and the New Deal Task Force is a financial services sector initiative.
We are working with Wildcat, they have looked at 30 different
intermediary organisations and I would say that probably there
are about five they have discovered, picking up on Ruth's point
and Chris' point, who have the skills ability, the resources,
particularly financial resources and the infrastructure to really
do a Wildcat-type programme. There is no question 12 leading financial
services firms, accounting firms and law firms were asked to participate,
ten are participating. We already have six on the go with two
intermediaries. I will be chairing a group which is going to review
this and it will be clearly employer-led. I have every reason
to think that this will work. To echo something Chris said, it
is a fragile system of intermediaries you have here, it is not
as well developed as in the States. Clearly the New Deal programme,
the intermediary programme, needs to be flexible, we need to spend
our money wisely. If this were someone coming to me for resources
in my firm this is where I would put my money because I think
it is "bang for your buck on both sides".
151. I think you have probably answered my next
question. I take it you would agree with Cay Stratton when she
came and said that there were actually very few intermediaries
who would have the skills to take this on and develop it?
(Ms Fawcett) Yes.
152. Does that mean that it will be employer
organisations who will have to develop that? If you are London
based there are potentially more facilities for doing that although,
what happens outside of an area where you may have a wider range
of organisations and ability to come together to develop those
strategies?
(Ms Monk) If I could pick that answer up and use it
just to respond to an earlier question about the requirements.
I think it is unrealistic to expect employers to do it, partly
because many of the employers are small, as Ruth has already alluded
to, and they do not have the resources, but broadly unless companies
go out and recruit quasi-intermediaries in-house I do not think
between us we have got the right repository of skills. The sorts
of things that an intermediary really wants to do is first of
all help with the preparation for work. This obviously is quite
a bespoke process, it depends on what someone's needs are. It
is a range of specialist skills, a lot of life skills, giving
confidence in personal skills, communications, creating work habits.
It is quite an intensive process which needs to feel like work
and, unlike the Gateway at the moment, it needs to be full-time,
intensive and it needs quite a lot of close contact between the
tutors and the candidates. I do not think most employers have
the understanding of how to handle some of the difficult problems,
like drug abuse and homelessness, that they would need to tackle
in a credible way to retain a candidate's interest. The second
area after preparation for work is in placement and there I think
an intermediary can play a role that an employer cannot because
they are an independent third party who can bring a quality assurance
and a reliability about the offer to both the candidate and the
company. They can see that the deal is properly delivered on.
Thirdly, and importantly, something you have just touched on lightly,
I think intermediaries can provide as a necessary part of the
process post-placement support, really staying close to people
in that first 90 days when they are quite vulnerable, when difficult
problems might occur. A nice example someone brought to me was
about a young person who came to work who ended up making it quite
clear he was more scared of his mother than he was of his employer
because he had a phone call to go home and look after the kids
because she had to go out and he went. That is not the kind of
thing that endears you to an employer, even an understanding employer.
It probably needs an understanding third party who can help people
cope with those difficult problems in the early days of employment.
I think it would be optimistic of us to expect employers to be
equipped to fulfil those sorts of responsibilities. Equally, no
criticism of the Employment Service, I think it is unrealistic
to expect the Employment Service to do that too.
Mr Nicholls
153. I wonder if I could go back to the business
and sectoral approach which Stephanie was mentioning ten minutes
or so ago. I know you have done a lot of work with the London
Employers' Coalition on the sectoral approach side. What I cannot
quite understand is precisely what does it mean? Does it mean
that you identify a particular sector, namely hospitality, identify
it as a round peg and try and shave as many corners off a square
peg as possible to get it in there? In a sense any approach is
sectoral because you are trying to train people and get them job
ready for a particular job. I wonder if you can elaborate on that
a bit for us.
(Ms Monk) Yes. I think it was the beginnings of us
articulating a demand-led strategy. I must say that as one of
the employer members of the Task Force, from the outset I had
always imagined that in a sense demand had to play a part in this
somewhere but the design which was established prior to involvement
was much more around the principle of a client centred approach
initially. Because we have had some difficulties in seeing the
follow through in the employment option, some groups of employers
have got together and said "if we put our collective effort
behind it can we do a better job and each of us as an individual
employer creating an independent relationship with the Employment
Service?" What we did was look for about 12-15 willing partners
in hospitality—these are the big employers of people—and
we said "would you put some effort into designing a programme
which will give people a better chance, whether it is on the Employment
Service side of doing a good job for us or on the client side
of being more prepared, understanding the job you are going to
take on better, and bring those two together and put our collective
efforts behind creating a more considered approach towards recruitment."
154. Is it really in a sense another way of
saying demand-led?
(Ms Monk) Absolutely it was demand-led. It has now
got that nice label but that is absolutely what is and needs to
be. There are two approaches that are quite promising. One is
demand-led through sector where, either with an intermediary or
through an industry led training programme, you can begin to help
people be more job ready for jobs that are available. Secondly,
by looking at geography. There is no doubt that one of the problems
is mobility and a mismatch of jobs and people. Therefore, arguably
looking at geographical focus can equally help. I think both of
those, however well intended and well executed they are, would
be done better and offer a more sustainable outcome if they were
supported by people who had a real expertise in training hard
to place candidates. It is a different job from inducting candidates
into a job which is the normal skills set you have within a company.
Mr Twigg
155. Earlier on Amelia spoke about the number
of languages spoken in Canary Wharf and more widely in the East
End. One of the issues that has come up a lot when we are looking
at issues around New Deal is the relative success for white people,
ethnic minorities, for the black community in particular. Could
any of you say a little bit about what you see as the main reasons
for the high rates of unemployment amongst a number of ethnic
minorities and the fact that the New Deal has been more successful
for white people on the New Deal than a lot of black people on
the New Deal?
(Mr Banks) Shall I just answer that because it is
particularly relevant within London. Just a couple of interesting
statistics. 44 per cent of young New Deal participants in London
are from minority ethnic groups, 41 per cent of those who move
from New Deal into paid employment are from minority ethnic groups
and 55 per cent of the total number of young New Deal participants
in the full-time education and training option are from minority
ethnic groups so making sure that there is a successful outcome
for what is to a large degree no longer a minority but a fairly
large proportion, almost half, is really important and we do under
New Deal have really good quality information on the minority
ethnic outcomes relative to other historical programmes. You are
right, we have seen that the minority ethnic origin participants
obtain work at the end of New Deal at around about 80 per cent
of the rate for whites and that proportion is higher than for
the labour market as a whole. So there is a difference in outcome
but not as much, if I can put it that way.
156. That is a composite figure. If you take
black Caribbeans the disparity is much wider.
(Mr Banks) It is and you make a very good point, you
have to look at it broken down into as much detail as possible.
The way that we have in London chosen to do that is again to get
very, very specific and real on the ground rather than stay in
the statistics. We are coming to the end of a really useful project
that was run in Southwark which was a partnership project between
London Employers' Coalition, Camelot, Southwark District and MORI
to get right down into the detail of the outcomes and the reasons
why. It is something that I cannot share at the moment because
it has not been published but it will be published next month.
I think what it will provide is some very important insight into
the differences in aspirations, in job search techniques and chosen
routes to gain employment between young white and young minority
ethnic people. I am absolutely confident that it will be relevant
to more than just the district. So I think once that information
is available we can certainly submit it and I think you will find
it useful.
157. Thank you.
(Ms Fawcett) Could I just add from our East End experience
clearly the big issues there are three. Language is the one I
alluded to. Then there is the culture; for instance, there is
often no culture of women working. There is also an understanding
of the workforce. So those people are not going to work in the
sink-or-swim environment of the Gateway so the one-size-fits-all
clearly does not fit, but I am quite clear that it is not a situation
where there is no hope. Just the opposite from everything you
have heard us just say. As long as you have a system, one way
we think is intermediaries, that is not one-size-fits-all, that
is flexible—some people may need a month, some people may
need nine months to get them ready for the job, these people with
cultural and language issues may need a little more—then
I am fairly confident that we will see the take up in positions
in long-term jobs going up.
(Ms Monk) I would endorse that. There are some people
who are difficult to access. These are people who may feel quite
uncomfortable about going to places that look official like the
Employment Service offices or they may be people who are not on
benefit and therefore on the face of it have a concern about being
engaged. One way of touching a part of the population that we
are not reaching now is through intermediaries who are very well
networked into their local community and therefore people have
a confidence and will feel that they are going to be involved
in something where they are better understood. That is one way
of increasing the likely involvement of young minority people
in the programme and increasing the success of those who are involved.
I think, as Amelia was saying, the other aspect is the design
of the programme. Where people have multiple difficulties, it
is fair to say this is the experience of many of the young minority
candidates we are talking about, a programme which is a relative
light touch does not solve their problems and if you have something
which is more bespoke then more time can be invested in helping
them overcome some of their difficulties and they become fully
job ready, and I am confident that we will see the success rate
going up.
(Ms Thompson) In Tyneside the ethnic population is
2.2 per cent of New Dealers. What we have seen of job outcomes
the figures are comparable. Within the Coalition we have set up
a ethnic Sub-Committee of employers. Our concern is that those
within the ethnic community seeking work may not be reflected
in the numbers on the New Deal register and that is one of the
things which we are going to explore. My other comments would
merely be echoing what Stephanie has just said to you.
158. To some extent my next question has been
answered but you might like to elaborate a bit. What more do you
think the Government should be doing to address these issues.
We have had Tessa Jowell here talking about some of the steps
the Government is taking to address the points you have made to
me. Do you think there is a lead the Government can take? What
are the key components of that?
(Ms Monk) I suspect resource usually follows money
and if we are looking for a way to have a more robust intermediary
resource available, then we need funding which is earmarked to
help the development of organisations that are going to have the
right skill sets. What we do not need is people who simply change
their name and go on doing what they were doing before under a
different guise. We really do need people who have the right skills
and capabilities. There are small clusters of these around the
country but not sufficient to meet the needs, so funding which
is earmarked is vital.
(Ms Fawcett) And a willingness to make sure the programmes
are flexible. We do not want to have lots of complicated programmes;
we just want somebody who is ready for the job. I do not care
whether they are 50 or 18 so flexibility from programmes is essential.
159. Are there lessons from the States in that
area?
(Ms Fawcett) Those would be the lessons from the States
in this area. If you take the Wildcat initiative, we all talk
about people at the bottom of the labour pool in terms of how
hard it is to get jobs, and that is precisely the pool of candidates
that Wildcat is servicing and they are servicing it in large part
with funding from the public sector as well as from the private
sector so there is help.
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