Select Committee on Education and Employment Minutes of Evidence



ANNEX 1

THE EMPLOYMENT SERVICE LARGE ORGANISATIONS UNIT

  1.  In order to offer a more customised service to national companies the ES, in 1997, created the Large Organisations Unit (LOU). Its initial brief was to engage large employers in New Deal and more widely in the Government's Welfare to Work initiatives. Over time the LOU's role has developed and it now operates across the full range of ES business. Essentially the LOU offers major corporate customers of the ES a single, highly professional point of contact for seeking to meet all of their recruitment needs. Each such customer has allocated to them an LOU Account Manager who will seek to agree with them a service package, tailored to meet their individual needs and labour market circumstances. The Account Manager who will seek to agree with them a service package, tailored to meet their individual needs and labour market circumstances. The Account Manager will then take a "hands on" approach to ensuring that all the elements of the service package are delivered by participating Jobcentres.

ASDA

  The Employment Service, through the LOU, has entered into a Service Level Agreement with Asda which gives it exclusive rights to the 27,000 new jobs which Asda is creating over the next five years. The SLA was piloted in the ES's East Midlands and Eastern Region with recruitment for the Asda stores at Sinfin and Wisbech. Under the SLA Asda has agreed to help design and deliver job preparation courses to help people at a disadvantage compete effectively for jobs with the company.

  2.  Initially the LOU targeted the UK's top 500 companies, signing New Deal agreements with over 350 with them and with 800 of their subsidiary operating companies. In many cases the LOU has developed joint recruitment plans and helped to develop innovative approaches such as sector based initiatives, and to customise and deliver job preparation training. For these companies alone, the ES has achieved more than 440,000 job placings and 20,000 New Deal starts in the last two years.

  3.  The LOU approach has subsequently been developed further to cover a number of large and medium sized regional employers based around a team of Account Managers based in the Agency's regional offices.


 
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