Examination of Witnesses (Questions 40
- 59)
WEDNESDAY 24 NOVEMBER 1999
MR PAUL
FORBES, MR
MICK BURROWS,
MR RICHARD
COHEN, MR
ERIC OSEI,
AND MR
PETER COPPIN.
40. Are programmes such as New Deal offering
different new opportunities for partnerships and ways of working
that we need to develop and continue?
(Mr Forbes) Most certainly we do—yes,
it does need to continue. There is very strong evidence that it
is working, but in addition to that I think we do need to treat
the symptoms as well as the causes and as we address workless
households and move people into work and give them competence
and skills, we also have to link the performance of their children
in schools and sometimes at a local level, because of the way
initiatives are structured, that is not always brought together
and that is something that we do need to address.
41. My very last question, Chairman. What are
your feelings about regenerative monies being allocated on a competitive
basis? Is this a fair way? How would you do it?
(Mr Cohen) That is a discussion
that has been around for a while actually, ever since Inner City
Challenge and the like. My view is that a lot of resource can
be wasted in a competitive process and there are losers, or so
we think. If there are losers there may still be needs among those
losers and that needs to be addressed. How can you make sure that
they may be winners next time. I think that is very important,
but when all said and done, the competitive process focuses your
energies as well. I would hate there to be further losers but
I think encouragement of a competitive nature is useful to make
the partnerships actually focus on the job in hand. Now that is
a view which I could not say is necessarily held by the rest of
the table.
(Mr Burrows) I would like to just add
that I think one of the issues we face is actually targeting resources
on the areas of most need and I think that documentation and the
work we are doing as agencies to actually highlight those areas
of most need, including lone parents, school meals, literacy and
numeracy issues, is where the money should be targeted into. We
have pockets of very affluent areas in Nottinghamshire; we have
pockets of major deprivation. There may be people living on the
fringe of those affluent areas who are almost excluded from support
because that area does not get funded for anything, so we have
the fragmentation within it. I think just to capture some of that,
the partnerships we have seen taking place in the last 18 months
to two years, I think there is a new commitment—this is
me speaking for Nottinghamshire—a new energy in those partnerships
and around the Welfare to Work strategy groups, around the partnerships
within that, there is a bit of a buzz that has not been there
before in my 25 years of this work and I think that that is very
encouraging and there is less agency alienation. I think partnership
is going to present longer term issues for us in terms of identity
of partners within those partnerships. There was a point made
earlier about the lack of resources in the community and voluntary
groups to participate fully in those voluntary forums. As officers
of a statutory agency we are paid to be there at the table in
effect. Voluntary community groups struggle now to get the resources
together to be in all the partnerships that are demanded of them
to be at and the funding that is around does not enable them to
actually be fronted into that. I think that is one of the issues
that we face; there is roles/responsibilities issue there as well
for all partners, including the private sector, as there is with
debate.
Chairman: Thank you. Ms Mallaber?
Judy Mallaber
42. Ethnic minority groups, as we know, make
up a disproportionate share of unemployed groups of the working
population. How are the particular problems faced by those groups
being tackled by supply side measures such as the New Deal and
what lessons have been learned? Are there other things that we
should be taking through into the next round of employment initiatives?
(Mr Osei) Well, in Hackney, resources
are being targeted towards certain minority groups who need certain
skills, for example ESOL training in order to increase your employability
and other skills. So the targeting of resources are taking place
quite significantly, but again most of these resources come through
SRB programmes and so many of them are limited, so if we bid for
SRB funds and we do not get the money then we would not have sufficient
resources to deal with particular problems.[8]
(Mr Cohen) The flaw in focusing
purely on the supply side initiative is that you do not necessarily
address the attitudes of employers and what might be traditional
recruitment practices which exclude ethnic minorities either inadvertently
or sometimes even sometimes purposely; it is possible. If you
focus on the demand side, i.e. focus on the employer, then that
is an opportunity to improve their recruitment and retention practices,
particularly towards ethnic minorities but also towards people
with disabilities and other excluded groups. You can make people
as employable as possible, but if an employer does not want to
give them a job for whatever reason that employer has, they will
still remain unemployed.
(Mr Burrows) I think there is a
fundamental issue here about access, there is a fundamental issue
about bringing access to provision into the communities and into
the different groups that are functioning within those communities
and I think we have had experience of some of that happening in
City Challenge initiatives, in Task Force initiatives where we
have brought mainstream challenges out into the streets in effect
and unless we actually come onto the turf of the community in
terms of provision and unless we affect the contractual culture
that is around in some of the way we contract programmes, we will
not get full engagement within ethnic minority and disadvantaged
groups.
43. Are you suggesting that the New Deal programme
has not been able to meet the issues that you are all raising?
(Mr Burrows) The New Deal has started
and I think the efforts of the Employment Service to recruit advisers
from local communities has, I think, worked well but I think there
is another step to go, which is to take the access to that provision
into the different community groups that are functioning within
our inner city areas, etcetera.
(Mr Forbes) I think also with New
Deal after two years and the success it has had so far, the test
will come really in the next couple of years, certainly in cities
like Leeds, as to whether it can make inroads, as I have said
earlier, into those particular areas of greatest need in which
a lot of the ethnic minority communities do reside. But I think
you have to go sometimes where it hurts and with some of the employer
partnerships I can think of one where with one employer we specifically
trained 12 Bangladeshi men to secure employment within the
company and that was very much around the company showing the
competencies with us that they wanted, us providing the language
skills and the behavioural competence to the Bangladeshi men and
securing the jobs for them. Because what we convinced the employer
of was that if you gave them a job they will be loyal and they
will remain with you and that has proved to be the case.
44. May I follow up further on what Ms
Atherton was asking about, about co-ordination and local partnerships.
She was starting from the point of view of whether at national
level there has been sufficient co-ordination and joined up government;
if I could pursue it a bit further at a local level, I am very
well aware with Mr Burrows talking about the ONE service
that it goes over into part of my constituency and there are all
kinds of cross-barriers and that creates difficulties about joint
working with different agencies. Do you feel, between you, that
the various agencies in your area have been successful in co-ordinating
a coherent response to the problems faced in deprived areas and
maybe you could also say what you think are the most important
factors in getting a successful local programme going?
(Mr Forbes) I think the practice will
vary. I think one of the important features of ensuring there
is a response—and I do think this is where local government
has a role—by the very nature of our organisation being
so large we do hold a lot of information on families, individuals
and communities and often we are in the best place to share that
information so that the delivery of services, which may be done
by a range of different players, can be better focused, better
targeted and into those communities. Without that, if you do not
have a structured framework, you find a whole range of very well
meaning organisations bidding for resources and then seeking to
put programmes together and then going out to market those programmes
to attract people onto them when in a sense if the programmes
were put together in a better co-ordinated way, using the information
that was available, you could focus them far better. So I think
that as we progress over time I think that that will become an
issue that local government has to address with the Learning &
Skills Councils, particularly in skilling people and getting them
back to work. I think it is early days yet.
(Mr Burrows) I have a very simple
answer to this one. I call it the win, win, win. We try to find
ways where the different agencies can come together within their
own identity, within a strong roles and responsibilities picture,
to be more innovative and draw things together. When we get that
happening we get a win for the clients and I think that is the
function of what we are trying to do with the support and New
Deal, etcetera. There are some soft things here as well though.
A lot of partnerships work because a lot of people around the
table get on with each other, trust each other and you cannot
write that down anywhere. That is what makes our partnerships
work, with seven district councils, the groundwork trust with
the Employment Service and colleges; it is about that kind of
relationship and that is about personalities who are thrust into
the table to lead the partnerships. And that is when you get innovation
in my opinion, from my experience.
(Mr Cohen) I would reiterate what
has already been said. I think it is how people go to the table.
Yes, some of it is about the personalities, it is what motive
takes a person to the table. If they go to the table saying: "What
can I get out of this?" then that is a bad starting point.
If they go there saying: "What can I help to achieve collectively"
then that is important. Unfortunately you cannot write that down
in the rules so a partnership is a learning experience for many
organisations and much of it has to do with how they are resourced
as well. We said before, we are paid to be there as local government
officers, the community are stretched anyway but they need to
be there—in a sense they do not feel they can miss out on
it and that is right—and employers all want a clear idea
and a clear purpose, they do not just want to sit in endless meetings.
So it is not easy making sure that every party is satisfied and
sufficiently well resourced to do that. There are some other developments
of the new programmes; we have to do them on quite tight budgets
or if there is any money at all and some of them are speculative
and a lot of time and energy has to go into those and for many
organisations there is no return on that development process either.
It is jam tomorrow and if that arrives, that is great, but the
development process is actually quite a strain for a number of
partnerships.
45. Just out of interest, how many regeneration
and new job partnerships are you all part of and have you got
partnership fatigue, which has been suggested elsewhere?
(Mr Burrows) I do not think I can
add up the total number, but there is an umbrella happening around
a lot of that now. We are beginning to bring umbrella activity
together so that they are not running off by themselves and I
think that is a pretty common thing that we seem to be seeing
happening. Welfare to Work partnerships are actually acting as
quite an anchor in some of this. I have to say that the New Deal
strategic group promises that the one steering group is beginning
to bring on brothers within different arenas so that we are making
more sense of the connections, because it is very often the same
people playing around the same partnerships.
46. Has Hackney had the same experience, because
I am sure I have heard over the years you have had more kinds
of programmes going into the area than anywhere?
(Mr Osei) Yes, that is correct,
but what we have done over the past few years is to actually co-ordinate
a lot of the partnership that has been going on. For example,
we have a partnership called Hackney Employment Strategy Group
where employer representatives, Employment Services, the local
authorities, voluntary sector representatives meet on a regular
basis to co-ordinate the employment related work that the different
agencies are doing to avoid duplication and also to ensure that
there is a strategic direction to what the other agencies are
doing. So those are some of the key benefits of some of the partnerships
that have been operating in our authority.[9]
(Mr Coppin) A different example,
I think, is probably the European Social Fund Cross-Sectoral partnership
in East Sussex where following the change to the ESF in 1997 we
tried to encourage a partnership between different sectors. The
partnership includes: local authorities, the health authority,
the police, the College of Further Education, the Careers Service,
the Training and Enterprise Council and the many voluntary groups
representing, for example, people with disabilities. Basically,
the partnership sets out to do two things. Through networking
it allows groups to interact and jointly come up with projects
for funding and secondly the group itself actually provides training
in the provision of the expertise of actually completing all the
paperwork for funding purposes and it has been successful in the
number of bids made prior to and after the partnership; they have
increased from three to 31.
Chairman
47. Perhaps we could turn to the New Deal for
Communities for a moment, and you will know that the Treasury
held a series of seminars during the summer and there is a summary
document which I am sure you have seen. It said there that getting
people into jobs was the easiest of the four priority areas that
the New Deal for Communities had to tackle. There is also agreement
that no neighbourhood suffered from a lack of nearby jobs and
that job creation was not an effective answer. Do you find that
getting people into jobs is the easiest of your New Deal for Communities
or respective areas in your areas? Is that the easiest thing you
have to tackle?
(Mr Burrows) It is certainly not the
easiest thing we have to tackle. I cannot speak about New Deal
for Communities directly as I do not have one within our administration
boundary, but getting people into jobs is not necessarily about
the availability of a job. It is about that person's readiness
for work and one of the best things that we can give somebody
is a current work record and recent work experience which does
more than just give them a piece of paper. It actually gets them
into the discipline of working again. I think some of the efforts
we have been making to do that have actually achieved that success.
It comes back as well to the access. I know in the City where
they have done consultation on New Deal for Communities they have
walked the streets as City Council teams with community voluntary
groups to try and enable people to better access the New Deal
for Community. There is a massive commitment to make it a bottom-up
approach and get the community to own it. That is very difficult
to achieve in that it requires massive resources and jobs for
people on the streets are only part of the whole package for them.
(Mr Cohen) We do have a New Deal
for Communities in development at the moment in Bristol and the
area chosen is in close proximity to the centre of the City where
there are significant employment opportunities. But that does
not mean that it is easy to get people into those jobs. I find
that again I come back to the issue of the skills gap which is
very significant, the motivation and self-confidence within that
community as well. We are finding that also employer attitudes,
we still do experience post-code discrimination in the City. It
is by no means the easiest and also it is not just getting people
into jobs, it is about keeping them in jobs as well which is one
of the strongest challenges. It needs a sustainable solution for
that individual and that is going to be the hardest thing to do.
We have a lot of jobs available, but just because you are unemployed
does not mean you are not discerning about the sort of employment
that you want to take and I think there is a question about the
quality of some of the employment on offer to those individuals.
I would much rather we spent time and energy working with individuals
to improve their skills and improve their long term access to
employment rather than what could be quite tritely saying: "There
is a job, there is a person. Put the two together."
(Mr Forbes) I think we have to
find more innovative ways to help certain groups of young people
and adults who have not found work. Certainly all the big cities,
I am sure, have areas where there are workless households and
where communities experience very long term unemployment. They
are out of the networks in terms of how you find work. You find
work through networks. People tell you about jobs that are going
and many of the people in these communities are out of work. We
are into an interesting partnership with Tesco which is going
to open a store in Leeds, one of the largest in Europe. They are
working to recruit 500 people through the New Deal and we are
endeavouring to make sure that we recruit people who are long
term unemployed. Already we have started the process and in the
first tranche of mail and networking that has gone on, 150 people
have come forward and something like 50 of them have basic skill
needs and they have come forward of their own volition to get
those skills because they now understand, it is beginning to register,
that you will not get a job unless you have skills. That is now
filtering down into communities and it is the first time in a
long time that that is beginning to happen.
48. Would you all agree that it is enough for
an initiative such as New Deal for Communities and some of the
things that you are involved in to change the behaviour patterns
of people in deprived areas, or should there be some attempt to
provide new jobs?
(Mr Burrows) If I look at the jobs
gap in North Nottinghamshire, and I have very close evidence of
people we have got to the point of job readiness, willingness,
motivation and travel/transport, communication, job availability
issues have hit us right between the eyes and we do not have a
job that is appropriate for their living—and they are not
looking for fortunes, they are looking for £150, £160
per week very often—so it is a very complex issue. I think
rural areas are quite badly affected by this, certainly the areas
we are dealing with at the moment. I do not know if other colleagues
want to add to that?
(Mr Osei) Certainly, we would like
a lot more job creation schemes in our authority. The ideal solution
would be for a big foreign direct investment to happen there;
the Japanese or Americans or a major relocation into the area.
But one of our biggest problems is lack of developmental land,
brown field sites and so on, so we do not have the land basically
that attracts investors into that area. So having said that, our
main strategy is to basically provide employability training in
order to get our local unemployed to jobs in other areas. The
West End, the City, Stansted are not too far from where we are
so our key strategy basically is to prepare the locals in order
for them to get jobs outside the area, because that is the only
realistic option we have at the moment.[10]
49. I suppose what I am trying to get at is that
I think the Government are coming round to the view, at least
the debate seems to be centring round this question, that there
may be enough jobs, it is just that people either cannot take
the jobs because of their lack of employability or their lack
of mobility or something like that, other points of access. Does
that accurately reflect your own situation, because we all began
by agreeing that there was a jobs gap but it seems as though the
Government are coming round to the view that there are plenty
of vacancies really, the problem is getting people to take the
vacancies and being job ready to get at them or to provide the
transport links which may get them to the jobs?
(Mr Forbes) Certainly I would say
that is the case in Leeds and I often say Leeds should perhaps
be a test case really where one looks at a longer term to see
if a city like Leeds, which is going to create lots and lots of
jobs in the coming years, whether you can actually, as I said
earlier on this afternoon, make inroads into that hard core of
long term unemployment, because that is where we will really put
all these different measures—SRB, New Deal, European funding—to
the test. The opportunity is there because as we are seeking to
raise attainment and achievement of children in school, unless
we bring the two together then further down the line we will end
up with the same problem, only greater. That is the challenge,
and I think I have gone on record, saying that if it is going
to work it will have to work in Leeds.
(Mr Cohen) Similarly Bristol has that.
It is a growing city, there are significant new job opportunities
happening there. New job sectors as well, which I think is important.
Now many of those sectors are actually further away from the current
levels of unemployment. We have high tech jobs, we have new media
industries, in fact breaking the mould of what just used to be
a sector any more, and I think as Mr Forbes was saying,
what happens at the moment is that all the various Government
programmes are individually evaluated. What actually needs to
be done is that you need to look at the evaluation of all those
programmes and say: "Actually, are they making a significant
difference to that city, to that travel-to-work area?" At
some point in the future we need to judge that, not just the individual
programme but actually the area on which it is supposed to be
having an impact; that is going to be very important.
50. I know you have already answered, but in
Hackney you have a very different, distinctive feel about your
area to your other colleagues?
(Mr Osei) Yes. As I said before,
it is a small scale economy and most of the businesses do not
employ more than 10 people, so it would be a major challenge trying
to get the 12, nearly 13 odd per cent of the unemployed
into local jobs, because jobs simply are not there and we do not
have inward investment opportunities as I said before. So the
only realistic option is to provide the relevant training to equip
the unemployed into areas where there are jobs. Central London
is less than 15 minutes from the borough on the tube and
we have fairly good transport links, so travel to work is not
a major issue.
Chairman: Thank you. Ms Mallaber, did you want
to ask some questions?
Judy Mallaber
51. Yes, about intermediate labour market projects.
We are interested in whether your authorities support them and
whether they have been effective? There does seem to be some degree
of ambivalence in Government thinking towards them and whether
they just prolong the period that a person is out of the open
labour market, so your experience would be useful in whether you
think they are effective?
(Mr Burrows) If I could kick off
with this one, we have developed intermediate labour markets based
loosely on the WISE model which everybody has heard about, for
the past 18 months in a Nottinghamshire coalfields area and we
have done it for several reasons. One, we believed if we gave
people a wage rather than placing them on a scheme, which is how
people perceive it, we would get different value from that programme
and we tested it. The hard facts and figures are that we have
taken over 110 people through an intermediate labour market which
costs £11,000 per place per annum. That place
will normally hold about two people because we try and keep them
for about six months. We managed the whole of the Environment
Task Force for New Deal in North Nottinghamshire and the comparisons
are—I have just done a report for the National Task Force,
because we represent local authority interests on that—the
intermediate labour market outputs are standing at 87 per
cent in the conurbation where there is job availability and about
20 per cent in the coalfield area. That means people getting
jobs at the end of their six or eight months' time on the intermediate
labour market programme and I am talking about people here who
are seven years unemployed, some of them have never worked in
their life and I have some really nice stories around what it
has done for them. The New Deal EGF provision at this moment is
seeing 14 per cent get jobs. Go and speak to the young people
or the adults on that programme and the main thing they will say
is: "It is a wage. You have given me a job. I am not on a
scheme, I can walk down the street with my head held high"
and their motivation, the job search support we put in, the mentoring
support we put in because it is an expensive programme, makes
the difference. Now we are quite hard on scrutinising them. We
do not deliver them ourselves. We enable the delivery and that
is important to note because local authorities, all seven districts—and
we are sharing it with Derbyshire very shortly—and the County
Council deliver through agencies. We deliver the intermediate
labour market through agencies. For each 100 placed programme,
our calculations—and I have this in detail if you wish to
see it—saves the Exchequer £328,000 in benefit in the
preceding 12 months and the following 12 months and we can
demonstrate that to you. I will not pretend the intermediate labour
markets are the total answer but they fill a valuable gap and
we see it as three types of job activity. One is 45 jobs created
in North Nottinghamshire in a new business; it is one of the fastest
growing businesses in North Nottinghamshire outside of a Toyota
investment which we will not get. Coalfield regeneration funding
is likely to double that programme for us. We have created 110
temporary six month, eight month employment positions that would
not otherwise have been created which allows people, 65
per cent of them, to step into the real market place. Ollerton,
coalfield village, nothing up there, people will not travel more
than two miles from it. There are no jobs for those intermediate
labour market people when they come off the end, so we are about
to set up a business in its own right, in Ollerton, for four people
to supply woodchip to a woodburning power station, I think, that
is up there. So we are finding market placed jobs which do not
displace the existing job market. That is my very brief version
of the intermediate labour market. May I just finish on one thing,
sorry. 300 people attended the National Intermediate Labour
Market conference yesterday. Lots of interest. There are some
serious questions to be asked about intermediate labour markets
because Employment Service policy somewhere in the centre is not
sure about them—you know, should they be six months, 12
months, 2 years. We have our own view on that and I think there
is a time people stay, we get them to a point and then they move
on quickly. We are taking some steps forward with the Employment
Service to maybe review intermediate labour markets nationally
to actually question what should they be about and what shape
and format should they be because if the Employment Service and
DfEE are not endorsing them, we are on an uphill battle forever.
52. This is very interesting. I am just going
off to Chair a meeting with the Minister on ETS, so I shall maybe
be able to make the comparisons.
(Mr Burrows) I will give you a
report to take with you.
53. Do we want to see if there is any other experience?
(Mr Forbes) Well, yes, may I just
say very quickly that Leeds has an Environmental Task Force project
under New Deal under which it pays the wage option and it is called
the Estate Workers' Project and young people are improving some
of our council stock which we are able to put back in the market
for young people to go and live independently with support from
youth workers. The evidence there shows they all pursue an NVQ
in caretaking and concierge work. They are similar to those who
have been described; very long term unemployed, all experiencing
a whole range of difficulties. The role that the supervisors,
many of whom again have youth work backgrounds, plays is incredible.
Quite a significant number have progressed into work and sustainable
work and it has changed their lives. I think that intermediate
labour markets have a role, but I would say the difficulty we
experience is stacking up the funding. It is an extremely complex
progress and unless the Adjudication Service and the Benefits
Agency are at the table when you are doing that, it makes it very
difficult.
54. May I just ask one more question before I
go? It is an area which has been of some preoccupation to us in
looking at this study which is we have national strategies to
deal with employment and some say that is not appropriate to different
local circumstances, to different issues in different areas and
that you might need different local strategies to deal with particular
local problems in areas of high deprivation. Do you think that
is the case and, if so, what responsibilities would need to be
devolved to the local area in order to make them effective?
(Mr Cohen) We have national plans,
we have regional plans as well as far as European funding goes,
but we plan locally. Partnerships plan locally. As local authorities
we try to use what national and European programmes there are
as flexibly and appropriately locally as possible. Some of them
are more flexible than others. I would say that ESF is quite a
flexible programme, whereas New Deal 25+ is not particularly flexible,
so there are trade offs to be done there. It seems to me that
what should be the case is that there is a trust given to the
local level, that local authorities and the community organisations
they work with, whatever the partnership is, it is a matter of
making funding programmes available that trust the local partnership
to deliver what is needed locally. As long as we do deliver that
and we are evaluated and it is proven that that is done, it seems
to me that would be the approach.
(Mr Burrows) There is a power issue
here I think. We view certainly the work that we are doing here
as enabling the powers of local authorities to come together to
better serve the community together in terms of labour market
activities. I know the paper talks about £322 million of
economic development funding that can be engaged alongside this.
That, to be honest, is a trickle in the water compared to the
overall powers that environment departments, social services departments,
education departments can actually bring to the table and the
way we view this whole approach is enabling the powers of local
authorities to actually work best together to serve local community
need. National frameworks do create some problems there. The contractual
process of New Deal is one that we are sharing with Employment
Service and Employment Service themselves are agreeing with us
around some of the issues that we are facing there. I have forgotten
what I was going to say; there was an important point I was going
to make and it has gone and I will come back to it in a second.
(Mr Forbes) Just finally to say
from a Leeds perspective again that we have pursued a policy of
one stop provision, putting services under one roof so that people
can come in and be treated with dignity and respect, so nobody
knows why they are coming. It is at a local level that you can
often reach an agreement to bring services together, but unfortunately
when it goes down the line to a national debate it gets blocked
and I think that is where the local issue needs to be addressed
in perhaps greater detail. I think that is something that we are
talking very closely with in terms of the development of the One
initiative.
(Mr Burrows) The thing I forgot,
which I have remembered, is this. The one thing that is potentially
going to stifle a lot of this is audit requirements that have
been placed and if you are running programmes here, it is not
the delivery of the programme that is such a problem at times.
It is the audit issues that as a provider and a developer you
face. If you have ESF and New Deal and SRB you are faced with
three separate audit streams and we are finding frontline staff—we
are having to pay people to administer it rather than paying people
to be on the frontline and if there is one request that I bring
it is can we see some easing up and a bit of parity between the
audit systems so if ESF is audited that counts. I know there are
different outputs there, but there is an audit mania around us
at the moment and colleagues feel that.
(Mr Cohen) Which is not the same
as evaluation.
(Mr Burrows) That is right, yes.
(Mr Cohen) Evaluation is useful
while audit is number crunching.
Chairman: We actually have a few more minutes than
I originally indicated so I hope you can stay with us a little
longer. Ms Atherton, I think you wanted to put another question?
Ms Atherton
55. Yes. We have touched on transport a few times
in the course of discussions, certainly in the rural areas and
famously my colleagues will know that I have gone on endlessly
that the New Deal really had great problems in Cornwall because
it could not get the people to the jobs, but that is not purely
a rural area issue and it is an issue about out- of- town developments
and anecdotally we hear this a lot. But actually just how big
an obstacle to tackling unemployment is public transport? Just
how big?
(Mr Cohen) In the run into the
implementation of the New Deal in Bristol, the Employment Service
carried out survey work on the eligible client groups and found
out that behind lack of experience and lack of skills, access
to affordable and appropriate transport was the third biggest
barrier that the unemployed themselves said was the problem. That
was for a city which has a bus service and has a large population.
You would expect that urban areas are not going to have so much
difficulty; they do. If there are individual pleas to be made,
one is that the transport planning should pay more attention to
issues around travel to work and to employment. We work with our
colleagues in Bristol who develop the transport plan to make sure
that that is the case. It is not necessarily always the case that
a transport plan reflects issues of people's opportunities to
travel towards employment and to training.
(Mr Coppin) We have a bus strategy
which aims to improve rural residents' access to jobs and we in
fact support a number of services or they have been funded through
various Government rural bus initiatives to that effect. Another
way in which we are attempting to tackle the problem is in terms
of land use and transport policies in the replacement structure
plan where we focus on achieving sustainable patterns of development
generally, in terms of safeguarding employment land and encouraging
new housing locations which are close to jobs or proposed employment
sites and ensuring that new employment uses are well served by
public transport.[11]
56. You are saying obviously it is a big problem,
but just how big a problem? You are talking about some of the
answers in your local authority area; how big a problem is it?
Is it number two, number one, number three?
(Mr Coppin) I would not be able
to rank it in those terms, but certainly the whole problem of
transportation is important not only for people's access to work,
but in terms of attracting new investment into the area, given
that indigenous growth alone is unlikely to regenerate the local
economy. We are faced with the situation as the resident population
increases more rapidly than jobs, which it is likely to, people
have the alternative of either being unemployed or commuting long
distances which, in itself, may well be unsustainable. So one
of our aims is to try and provide measures which would give people
the option of working locally rather than having to commute long
distances which effectively in many cases is going to be by road.
57. I think that is right and something that
a lot of us would be seeking, but in a situation where you have
jobs in part of a city or a town and then people with maybe skills
but no transport, whose responsibility is it to tackle this gap?
Employers, the local authority or the Government?
(Mr Burrows) I think it is a joint
support.
(Mr Cohen) Yes, it is joint.
(Mr Burrows) In our New Deal client
group in North Nottinghamshire, 80 per cent of them have
transport as their first barrier to getting a job.
58. That is the sort of figure I am interested
in?
(Mr Burrows) 80 per cent
have put that. That is from the advisers and from the sampling
of the client group and there is a cultural thing there as well.
There is a very strong cultural thing there as well.
Chairman
59. Falling out of bed into work?
(Mr Burrows) It is more about the
community they have lived in, their parents, their grandparents
have lived in, they have been brought up in. It has been round
the coal mine or whatever else it might have been. To move to
a village down the road to work in another pit was a problem;
to move more than two or three miles. I am being very general
here; it is not for everybody certainly, but there is a cultural
thing. We are looking at ways of doing driving lessons as part
of a New Deal programme to actually enable people to better travel.
Somebody is hiring scooters somewhere to enable people to hop
onto scooters and go and we thought:"Oh, shall we try that?".
That is the issue, getting people around it is both culture, it
is employer responsibility, it is local authorities. Stage Coach
gave a 50 per cent discount to everybody on the New Deal
in North Nottinghamshire, but it has to be nationally but buses
are not going past some of the places the people are at.
(Mr Cohen) On that particular issue
there is another thing as well on this issue of transport, because
where people live and there are jobs in different places it is
a challenge to regeneration initiatives that have their boundaries
around where people live and I think it is important that there
is flexibility within regeneration programmes to allow for parts
or whatever of criteria within that programme to allow for people
to be encouraged to find jobs outside. It should not just entirely
focus within the area.
8 Note by Witness: Other agencies operating
in Hackney, particularly the Employment Service, the New Deal
contractor (REED) and FOCUS TEC have been doing a lot of work
to prepare and get local unemployed (including ethnic minority
jobless) into work. Some of the successful schemes include: Local
recruitment agency, job match and job guarantees schemes; targeted
schemes on estates; schemes for women returners; and schemes for
people with local basic skills. Back
9
Note by Witness: As a result
of this partnership, an employment action plan (with set targets
for getting people into jobs as well as job related quali¢cations)
has been estabilshed - and is being implemented proactively. Back
10
Note by Witness: Hackney and partners' other strategies
to improving employment in the area includes: Supporting local
businesses in order to encourage growth and job creation, and
encouraging inward investment through relocations. Back
11
Note by Witness: Local Transport Plan policies emphasise
improved public transport, including the promotion of new rail
stations to better serve less accessible urban areas. Back
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