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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