Select Committee on Education and Employment Minutes of Evidence


Appendix 1

Response from Kirklees Metropolitan Borough Council

A) The extent and causes of any geographical jobs gap—which groups may be affected.

As an authority, Kirklees has an unemployment rate of 5.6  per cent against a national rate of 5.1  per cent. However, different neighbourhoods and social groups experience disproportionate rates. The highest unemployment is within inner urban wards in Huddersfield, Batley and Dewsbury, and amongst people with disabilities and minority ethnic groups—particularly the Pakistani community and African-Caribbean men. Ethnic minority unemployment rates are at least three times higher than those for the white communities of West Yorkshire. These generalisations hold true across the age ranges, from school leavers to retirement age. Men have been particularly affected by the decline in manufacturing, while women have benefited from service sector expansion Causes of gaps include:

    — underachievement in school, college and training programmes;
    — indirect employer discrimination in the case of minority ethnic and disabled residents;
    — stigmatised housing estates, where residents report employers not wanting to engage people from their community, and also neighbourhood despair and cynicism discouraging jobsearch;
    — public transport routes, timetables and, to a degree, cost can debar access to shift work opportunities;
    — a drop of 10  per cent (from 55  per cent to 45  per cent) of the proportion of men working full time between 1981 and 1996 in West Yorkshire.

Gaps between aspiration and available jobs are also evident. Manufacturing has declined significantly in Kirklees, but is still more significant locally than it is nationally. Manufacturing is still, to a degree, perceived as a "proper job", particularly by men. However, this is accompanied by local feeling that manufacturing is in decline resulting in skills gaps and hard to fill vacancies at skilled and technician level. Service sector vacancies, together with vacancies for skilled people in traditional industries (engineering, textiles) can be difficult to fill, for a range of reasons. Reasons include the failure of industry to invest in training, and the terms and conditions of employment in some service sector occupations such as hospitality and protective services. As the service sector expands, so too does the number of part-time vacancies which are less likely to offer ongoing training and development opportunities for staff to acquire new skills. 25  per cent of all West Yorkshire industries do not invest in staff development.

Basic skills are clearly key to employability, and we have a problem in this area. 17.5  per cent of Kirklees residents of working age have low or very low literacy skills, and 23  per cent have low numeracy skills, according to the Basic Skills Agency ((UK figures are 15  per cent and 21  per cent respectively). 39.8  per cent of our pupils achieve 5 a-c GCSEs, against a national figure of 46.3  per cent.

B) How successful the official measures, such as the claimant count areas statistics and those provided by the Labour Force Survey, are at presenting the spatial disparity in UK unemployment:

I am not in a position to comment nationally. Locally we have some evidence through household surveys and from community development workers of people who are not working and not claiming which official statistics do not tend to reflect. Many individuals in this group are those who we most need to re-engage in work and learning opportunities. The TEC and district Employment Service office provide good quality research and data on hard to fill vacancies, skills gaps, training and development rates etc. We do not generally find the Labour Force Survey adequate for anything more than broad brush strokes, as the lowest level at which data is available is by ES District. Our District includes the neighbouring authority of Calderdale, so we are unable to obtain fully accurate data for Kirklees. The LFS is no use for looking at pockets of local deprivation at ward level, and does not reflect underemployment issues.

C) The impact of any jobs gap on the effectiveness of supply side policies such as the New Deal, ONE and Employment Zones:

Our local New Deal experience is that vacancies remain hard to fill whether or not they are part of a supply side programme. Low pay and long hours look no more attractive to New Deal candidates than they do to the "mainstream" unemployed. However, employer expectation of filling the vacancy if it is part of New Deal is significantly higher than if it were advertised through usual routes, resulting in business disaffection. New Deal has not really got to grips with ensuring that the volumes of young people in different vocational areas on the full time education and training option reflect the range and volume of vacancies across different occupational areas. This is an inevitable consequence of providing places based on client demand rather than labour market demand, but it does mean that many young people are going to be disappointed when they cannot get a job that they feel that they have trained for and have to look to other vocational areas and rely on transferable skills.

It will be interesting to see what the impact of the up coming ONE pilot will be in the area. Clients who have not previously had "back to work" style interviews with advisers (lone parents, people with disabilities) are the very clients who tend to seek the opportunities that are expanding and available in the local economy—part-time, flexible working, service sector jobs. More intensive intervention with these clients, together with the introduction of tax credits and other make work pay initiatives could have a significant impact on our hard to fill vacancies. I suspect that men seeking full time work in traditional occupations will become increasingly marginalised in the local labour market.

D) The extent of local, national and European sponsored initiatives aimed at creating better balance between the supply and demand for jobs at the local level and whether these are sufficient.

Local, national and European funded initiatives have varying degrees of success at bridging supply and demand gaps. Many European funded programmes are aimed at basic skill requirements and/or focus on the needs of particular groups—ethnic minorities, women returners. The largest of these programmes (ESF) do not claim to be vocationally specific; they are designed to provide basic employability/transferable skills at entry level. Small programmes in the HE sector have a more directly interventionist approach, but arguably are not working with those people most marginalised and furthest away from the labour market.

Local labour initiatives, predominantly funded through SRB have had more success in tying demand and supply together through pre-recruitment training programmes in partnership with inward investors and linked to specific developments, through the on-going employability support offered to targeted residents and through directly intervening with companies who have vacancies, including hard to fill ones, to develop appropriate strategies. Such strategies may, for example, include re-visiting the job description, reconsidering terms and conditions; looking at training and development within the company and support offered through SRB and non-SRB funded training.

There is a pressing need to be able to "join up" programmes in order to expand eligibility, reduce "cherry picking" participants and to provide sustained support for those most distant from the labour market. There also needs to be more support and intervention with small and medium enterprises—those who struggle most with developing systematic training programmes for new recruits and existing staff, yet who supply the greatest number of jobs in the local economy. The plethora of different programmes—and the cracks that exist between them do not help the supply or demand sides of the economy. An integrated administration and monitoring system would also encourage training suppliers to"join up" programmes far more than they do currently. A more radical solution that we have fantasised about locally would be to have local budgets to target unemployment—ie to pool the local, national and European resources currently devoted to working with the unemployed and to business support, and allow local partners to allocate funds according to local priorities.

E) Examples of good practice in this area.

The KHETI programme (Kirklees Housing Employment and Training Initiative)

Funding Sources: FEFC; Capital receipts; ESF 03; New Deal for Young people; Work Based training for Adults; Youth Training.

Participants: residents in target CRI areas, aged 16-40, who wanted to work, train and qualify in bricklaying or joinery.

Partners: Kirklees Council Housing and Economic Development Services; Huddersfield Technical College; Construction contractors; Housing Associations.

How it Works: The Housing capital programme is assessed for the type of works to be undertaken; the contracting process includes information about the availability of local trainees to help undertake the works, each attracting a wage subsidy of £75 a week, and an invitation to contractors to indicate if they are interested in participating.

Trainees are recruited locally. They attend a 3 month block-release course to gain a minimum of NVQ I. During this period trainees are paid an allowance equivalent to their previous benefit, or £52, whichever is greater. At the end of 3 months, trainees go out on site, and are given jobs on industry terms and conditions with the contractor. They return to college for day release to achieve a minimum of NVQ II. All participants who completed the programme have now gained jobs in the industry.

The programme works because it uses a cocktail of funding to attract as wide a range of participants as possible, and ties training into a skill shortage area and local regeneration activity. Partnership between the council, private sector contractors and the local college is also crucial.


 
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