Examination of Witnesses (Questions 32-39)
MR ANDY
WESTWOOD AND
MR MAX
NATHAN
WEDNESDAY 1 MAY 2002
Chairman
32. Ladies and gentlemen, can I reconvene the
Committee and welcome Max Nathan and Andy Westwood from The Work
Foundation. Gentlemen, we are very grateful to you for appearing
but also for submitting a fascinating memorandum which we have
all had the opportunity to read. Perhaps, Andy, if you could maybe
start the session. It would help us to understand the recent changes
that the Work Foundation has experienced, the metamorphosis from
the Industrial Society. Maybe you could start with a word about
that and then a short opening statement and then there are some
questions we would like to ask you, if we may.
MR ANDY
WESTWOOD AND
MR MAX
NATHAN
(Mr Westwood) As I am sure you have realised,
the Industrial Society as was changed quite a lot over the last
couple of months. At the end of last year effectively we split
in two. I suppose one of the things we have been best known for
over the last 30 years is training. In effect that has gone, it
has been sold off as an entity to Capita and what has remained
has become The Work Foundation and the model which we are trying
to perpetuate is to retain the campaigning and the interest in
working life in the UK with a particular interest on employment,
employment levels but also productivity and performance and to
be a much more research led body, to inform those campaigns rather
than effectively to be a training body. That is the big difference
and we felt it warranted a name change, which we know is not the
most popular thing to do in the world, which is why we have kept
it fairly simple, and we like to think The Work Foundation does
what it says in the name rather than anything more elaborate.
In common with that, and I think it was appropriate, on the night
we launched we were lucky enough to have Gordon Brown to come
and speak and whilst the world seemed to be very focused particularly
on productivity and performance in the run up to the Budget, the
Chancellor chose to speak about full employment and how he felt
that was a key route to improving the UK's productivity as a whole,
and that we should never lose sight of how the effect that achieving
higher and more sustainable levels of employment can feed in to
the overall performance on the economy. Obviously, myself and
Max, we work very closely in these areas, and we are pleased to
hear that. In a sense that brings us to where we are today and
brings us to our particular analysis of what the problem is within
the UK. Increasingly, as Government policies since 1997 have been
a success across the piece, what has happened is that the greater
problems experienced by particular people in particular parts
of the country, particular parts of cities and towns have been
exposed more and more as the people who are relatively easy to
help have been helped into work via the effect of the current
economic cycle. What has been exposed are the harder to help both
in terms of individuals and in terms of particular locations within
the country. Our submission was on one level trying to make people
more aware of where those places are, what the kinds of problems
are in those places and what is holding them back both as individuals
and communities from taking part in the economic boom, if you
can call it that, experienced by the rest of the country, and
then also just some suggestion from our work around where we think
it is worth intervening in those problems, both at an individual
level but also crucially on a community and infrastructure level.
In a nutshell that is where we are as an organisation, why we
are here and what we have said. Is that a good enough start?
33. Absolutely. Finishing the logistics and
the changes you have been through, you used to be a membership
funded organisation, the Industrial Society, do you now look to
public sector Government for your core funding? Do you get any
public support in the context of your current funding?
(Mr Westwood) Yes. We are still a membership body
and at the moment that is where most of our funds come from still.
It is still a mixture of employers, both public and private sector
and that is still a very strong element of where our income will
come from.
34. Nothing from central Government directly?
(Mr Westwood) Not directly we get bits and bobs for
bits of resources, bits of research, bits of policy work but I
do not think it covers much.
35. How big is the residual of The Work Foundation
if you have hived off training?
(Mr Westwood) It is about 80 or 90 people.
Ms Buck
36. In the memorandum you talk about there being
a political choice in not talking too much about or addressing
regional variations in employment, it is more attractive to talk
about the national picture. I would like you to explain why you
come to that conclusion, partly I think because I would personally
have thought—and I am very concerned about regional variation—that
we do have a plethora of area based initiatives, we do have regional
government on a slow burn, Scotland and Wales and so forth, so
I am not sure quite why you have drawn that conclusion, can you
just tell me why?
(Mr Westwood) I think slow burn is the key. What we
think is that if we really want to crack full employment now then
we have to do via a more regional route. On one level I think
that is quite obvious to policy makers, civil servants and politicians
but on another level it does not sit as comfortably with the narrative
that sits alongside which is that various national level interventions
are working very well, we have the highest employment levels for
30 years, the highest number of jobs in the economy ever. I think
it is slightly difficult to say on the one hand this is a remarkable
success story, we would agree it is a remarkable success story
but it is very hard to say that on one level, particularly around
election time, and they come and go quite frequently, and also
to admit that in essentially deprived areas that there is a problem
and there needs to be a hell of a lot more done in particular
parts of the country. I think there is a bit of a tension between
admitting that, even though we know it, and the overall picture.
(Mr Nathan) I think it is also fair to say that as
time has passed there is this sort of growing awareness of the
regional agenda and the importance of spreading economic activity
and employment opportunity across the country. I think you are
right to say that that is coming through more than it was but
that tension is still there between talking up the big national
success story of New Deal and admitting, in a sense, that a lot
more needs to be done at regional level.
37. I would like you to help us work through
what I think are two very different strands of the same problem.
Clearly we have a chronic problem in parts of the country, mostly
in the north, where there is high unemployment and not many jobs,
and where you have particular characteristics around the population
out of work, with high levels of incapacity benefit—and
that is a crude profile—and, quite separately, we have a
chronic problem in London where there is massive unemployment,
in Hackney, Tottenham and bits of my constituency, alongside a
lot of jobs. So the regional variation is even more complicated.
I wonder if you could help us address both of those and separately.
Sticking for the moment with the high unemployment/low jobs agenda,
in your memorandum you give the Glasgow example, that only 10
per cent of those out of work might hope to find a job. Just talk
us through the greatest hits of the agenda to tackle that. What
is the solution for dealing with that particular agenda?
(Mr Westwood) I think there is one answer that fits
both a little bit, which is about individual mobility, and there
is another answer which is about: how do you increase the demand
for labour in particular parts of the country? If I could start
with the first, which is particularly pertinent, not just in London
but in parts of the bigger regional cities where job growth is
actually relatively high but it is usually in city centres or
outlying areas. For instance, in Manchester or Leeds, where you
have got growth right in the city centre, the kind of retail and
service sector boom, and then you have got a plethora of sort
of motorway corridor or airport-based areas and in between there
is not very much. There is an issue about the mobility, in a practical
but also in a psychological sense, of individuals who have typically
worked in one particular industry with one particular set of skills
for all their lives, or people from households where that is the
norm, and I think there is an issue about actually saying to them,
"Look, here is our analysis of where you might physically
be able to travel to find work." So in Manchester you might
be talking to somebody on an estate, that there is a vacancy in
Trafford Park or a vacancy in the city centre, and some of those
places are just so far off individual people's radar, either because
they think, "No, that is not a job I could do"—which
goes back to the previous evidence about an older male who is
doing an unskilled manufacturing job thinking, "How could
I work in All Bar One in the city centre of a particular city?"
So part of that is, "The job does not fit me," and part
of it is even more psychological than that, which is, "You
are talking about a place I have never been to in my life you
know, I have heard of it but I could not place it on a map and
it may as well be on another planet." I think that is the
kind of problem—the travel to work area analysis, which
is still quite heavily leaned on in terms of connecting areas
of vacancies to areas of unemployment—where it begins to
fall down. I think that is a problem, say, in parts of London,
where you have got very high pockets, very high ward level pockets,
estate level pockets, which are obviously very close to booming
labour markets. But you have to ask yourself the question: if
you live one side of the arterial road opposite Canary Wharf,
do you understand what Canary Wharf is about? Do you have the
skill level or the interest or the knowledge of actually getting
across that and finding something that you can actually do? Basically,
I think that is true within areas that are close to places with
high vacancies but it is also true of parts of the country where
the actual job creation rates are not that good. So there is a
problem that transfers over to areas where, even within travel
to work areas (which I think we mentioned in the submission),
there are still vacancies to travel to but the competition for
those vacancies might be quite high and that might be a further
factor for placing the hardest to help further from the labour
market. In those particular areas, I think, there are broader
issues to address, where we have to think about the infrastructure
within a community. You are talking about things like child care,
transport accessibility, reliability, the provision of services
in local areas, and I think there are other stepping stones to
kind of defeating that problem which are not explicitly government-aided
job creation programmes but they are about facilitating the process
by which services can be restored which will allow people to get
into work and stay there.
38. I have a huge amount of sympathy for that
analysis, I think it is very good analysis, but having met people
who regard Ladbroke Grove as something akin to the Great East
African Rift Valley, I invite you to be a tiny bit more specific
in solving the problem than just saying, "We need a 20-year
urban regeneration programme." There have to be some hard,
specific proposals that you could research that say, "How
can we encourage greater psychological mobility in accessing different
kinds of jobs; greater physical mobility in solving these problems?"
(Mr Nathan) I think the elements of the mobility issue
still need to be worked on. This is something we are researching
right now. It is a combination of practical and psychological
barriers to physical travel and access to jobs. What I would say
is there are more established areas of this agenda—the stuff
that Andy was talking about. I guess you could call it the cultural
and social proximity to employment, which is something that has
been fairly well trod over the last few years. I think, particularly
within fairly vibrant labour markets like inner London, the key
thing is to ensure the mobility of the individual and ensure reliable
connections between the individual and the employer. What you
find is a variety of barriers in place. There may be confidence
issues based on generic skill issues on the part of individuals.
Equally, employers may not know where to look or may have particular
attitudes which could be construed as discriminatory towards people
from particular places and people of particular backgrounds. An
intermediary approach there, that takes fairly seriously employer
needs and possibly takes some of the heavy lifting away from employers
in terms of putting in some kind of HR function, which I think
is particularly germane to small and medium-sized enterprises,
is one which has worked fairly well in practice. That is something
the Government is piloting and it is something that I think we
would like to see a lot more of.
39. One of the things you have not mentioned
is ethnicity, because clearly that is a well proven issue. I know
the Industrial Society did a very good piece of research on refugees
in this context. I would like you, for the record, to say something
about what your understanding is of those particular issues in
the job market.
(Mr Westwood) It is fairly common knowledge that ethnic
minorities are the group that have done least well in the raft
of welfare to work programmes that have been put in place since1997
and I think there is a great deal of concern about that. I think
there are issues around skill levels, but harder and more effective
ways of translating what skill levels exist rather than starting
from scratch again. There are issues again about mobility. We
are beginning to find evidence that, where people might have migrated
huge distances from other parts of the world, actually the plane
ride or whatever it is is almost incidental: they have gone from
a very tightly knit local circle in parts of the sub-continent
to a very tightly knit local area in East London, for instance.
So there are still interventions to make to try to draw people
out of that. There is a very clear agenda to try to do that on
the demand-side as well, which is to combat what are still effectively
discriminatory practices, which we need to keep in touch with.
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