Examination of Witnesses (Questions 120-139)
17 SEPTEMBER 2003
RUSSELL GARD,
TERRY SCUOLER,
DR PETER
WHITE, TERRY
MORAN, AND
CHRISTINE HEATON
Q120 Chairman: What do you identify
as the problem of getting those skills?
Mr Scuoler: University graduates.
We are looking, in terms of electronic design engineers, for a
2:1 or a first or a PhD. We do not find many of those immediately
in the Oldham area. In terms of skilled electronics technicians
we have to trawl from the wider area. That is not to say we do
not get some from Oldham. We do and in many cases we are pleased
with them but it is not a ready market for us.
Mr Gard: I will have to answer
on two levels on behalf of Oldham United. Oldham United, as you
are probably aware, is a group of private businesses that have
got together to prove they can contribute massively to cohesion
and that there is a business case to do so. We have had help from
the CRE which has been the main catalyst to allow us to do this.
We think that if we can prove a business case for social cohesion
that positively affects the bottom lines of businesses that can
move into Oldham, then we can persuade them to do more, quite
simply. That will be done through transferring best practice,
talking about and addressing the issues in private business. With
respect to First, we are probably one of the larger employers
in the area and our view has been that many of the impediments
to recruiting people from different areas of the community are
simple matters of asking people in the right language, addressing
the training issue, which causes a blockage, and looking at medical
issues. We have managed to clear a lot of those blockages away
and have benefited accordingly. That is why First thinks it is
very important to be part of Oldham United, because we believe
we can do something.
Mr Moran: Jobcentre Plus, as you
know, is a national organisation but primarily here in Oldham
we are about ensuring as far as possible that disadvantaged people
who are excluded from work have opportunities of getting work
and that we can help them overcome those disadvantages that are
preventing them from getting work.
Q121 Chris Mole: Dr White, the submission
that you have made to the Committee says that you are not giving
any special treatment to Oldham and Burnley. Why not? Surely there
is clear evidence that they deserve special treatment. You have
a social inclusion agenda. Does this not go against what the Government
is expecting you to do?
Dr White: No. I think it turns
on the word "special". Oldham and Burnley are very similar
in many respects to a lot of other places in the north west. Our
board took a view that to give special treatment in the sense
of additional resources as a response to the disturbances would
probably have sent the wrong message. It might have been seen
as a reward for the disturbances in a sense. That is not to say
that we did not intensify our efforts in other ways through close
working with places like Oldham and Burnley, but to flag them
up as in some way different from other places in the north west
I think would have been the wrong message to send.
Q122 Chairman: But there is a perception
that you have put an awful lot of resources into Warrington and
the bits around the new town and that that is where development
in the north west goes on. There are a lot of people on this side
of Manchester who would say that Oldham is a much more attractive
place than Warrington. It has got a very attractive landscape
and a lot of advantages. Would there not be a big advantage in
putting a bit more pressure on encouraging people and companies
to move to somewhere like Oldham?
Dr White: Probably. In terms of
Warrington, that just happens to be the place where our major
office is located. We spend very little of our resources in Warrington
or anywhere like it. The majority of our funds goes into what
you might call the regeneration priority areas which are basically
in the two conurbations of Greater Manchester and Merseyside.
We have identified our priorities in those areas and Oldham is
one of those 25 priority areas.
Q123 Chris Mole: Mr Scuoler has just
mentioned the difficulties he has recruiting people with the right
skills locally. Is that an agenda you are engaged in helping him
with?
Dr White: Yes, both at the regional
and at the local level. At the regional level we are trying to
promote initiatives to get a better joining up of the supply and
demand sides of skills training. There is a view that it has largely
been supply-led and we are trying various things to make sure
that the needs of employers are much more explicitly brought into
the equation.
Q124 Chris Mole: The report of the
independent review team in Burnley said that economic support
agencies should recognise that you are not going to turn an economy
such as Burnley's into a knowledge-based, high growth economy
overnight, so have you reflected this in your policies towards
towns like that?
Dr White: Yes. The whole of our
regional economic strategy is long term in recognition of just
that point. We took the view that it would probably take 20 years
to make a step change transformation in the north west economy.
Clearly places like Burnley have got a bit further to go, if I
can put it that way, so it is a long term process. I do not think
there are any short solutions for Burnley or anywhere like it.
Q125 Chris Mole: So if it is 20 years
how does it get to be a step change?
Dr White: Can we use another phrase:
to make a significance change in the economy.
Q126 Chairman: Are you not almost
cheating people in Oldham because if you are saying that an awful
lot of your strategy is to be the knowledge based economy that
you are encouraging, traditionally Oldham has not done particularly
well in getting people into further education or into higher education,
and therefore there is less chance of people in Oldham benefiting
from the things that you are trying to put your initiatives into.
Dr White: I think the best way
to answer that is by pointing to the work we have done around
industrial clusters, and we have distinguished between two sorts
of clusters. One is the rapid, high-growth potential cluster of
the sort we have referred to as a knowledge based economy, but
equally important to the north west are the more traditional sectors
of industry, the chemicals or aerospace sectors. Those sectors
are not going to increase enormously in terms of jobs over the
next few years, which is also the fairly common perception, but
they are none the less still very important to the economy of
the north west, so we have to try and balance the needs of the
growth sectors, which are quite small, against the needs of the
more stable sectors which are not going to create vast numbers
of jobs but have to be nourished and protected because of their
overall importance to the economy of the north west.
Q127 Mr Clelland: The 2001 disturbances
presumably had an adverse effect on the attractiveness of Oldham
as a place to set up new business. What has been done since to
reverse this in order to attract new business to Oldham? How effective
has it been and what more needs to be done?
Mr Gard: My personal view is that
there could have been a lot more done. There has been an attempt
to try and engage with the private sector. In some ways though
the private sector has not been regarded with the seriousness
that it deserves. There are a lot of people in private business
who thoroughly and genuinely believe that social cohesion benefits
their business. I do not mean in any airy-fairy way but in a fundamental
pound notes and bottom line way. We have set out to try and prove
that and we have only started pulling this together, I guess,
over the past three months or so with the help of the CRE. The
way we would like it to go is that the needs of private business
are respected in the social cohesion agenda which then allows
us to offer better positions, better jobs, more jobs, more prosperity
in the local area. If I can make an observation on something which
was said earlier on, the problem we find is not so much a lack
of skill but a lack of expectation because we are mainly looking
for supervisory and managerial positions in terms of promotion.
We have changed our policies in terms of recruitment. A lot of
companies are like this in Oldham. We have changed our position
with respect to recruiting for bus drivers, for example, and we
are increasing rapidly the number of bus drivers from ethnic minority
groups and also from the traditional BNP heartland type of group.
What we are finding is that the expectations of those people to
have an opportunity to use the skills and undoubted qualifications
that they have got and move up is quite low and that is our next
challenge as a business. Our other next challenge as a business
is to say to people from ethnic minorities who have low expectations
across the whole of Oldham, "There is a career path here.
Let us hope there is something for the future. You can actually
have my job at the end of the day". I think that hope and
that change of expectation is what private business can offer.
Q128 Mr Clelland: In terms of new
business which is located in Oldham, what is being done to make
Oldham an attractive place for business to come and overcome the
problems of the 2001 riots?
Mr Gard: Oldham United is proving
the business case in a clear way that says that because of the
disturbances there have been changes in Oldham. I think there
was a denial that the riots had taken place, and I will call them
riots because that is what they were. There was a sort of, "If
we do not say too much about that then people will not notice
it very much in any of the publicity that is put out". Our
view is that the riots took place, they resulted in a change of
attitude. That has meant that Oldham is actually ahead of the
game in solving many of the issues that other communities have.
It has given us a good head start. In other words, the steam will
be blown away and we can contribute to making sure it stays away.
If you like, our view is based on the fact that we have had the
disturbances, we have not had as good relationships with some
of the public bodies as we could have done, and in many ways the
project we are on is a mission to generate a better relationship
and better understanding between the public and private sectors.
That will make such a difference.
Q129 Mr Clelland: But is business
responding to this? Are you now seeing this turning round and
new businesses being attracted into Oldham?
Mr Gard: Not from our point of
view. From our perspective we do not know very much in terms of
the economic development people. We find that people are asking
questions and are asking questions about the riots. Whether that
puts them off or not I do not know. We are saying that it should
not do; it should encourage them to come. Whether that is turned
into inward investment I could not tell you.
Mr Scuoler: We have in the last
two years rented, leased,—whatever the term is—40,000-50,000
square feet to a business in Ashton to relocate in. The key in
Oldham for some time will be in terms of infrastructure. These
infrastructure projects are critical and they are moving forward.
Witness the cranes you see out here. It does take time, but I
think that you do need some entrepreneurial people in both the
public and the private sectors. We spent many hundreds of thousands
of pounds refurbishing an old mill to a standard where a modern
insurance company in this particular case wanted to rent the space
from us. It is patchy but there are a number of things happening.
Would they have happened without the riots? I doubt it. I think
we got the focus after the riots that enabled the kind of refurbishment
here that you are beginning to see.
Q130 Mr Clelland: You are not suggesting
these troubles were a good thing?
Mr Scuoler: I am not suggesting
that at all.
Q131 Mr Clelland: But positive things
are coming out of them?
Mr Scuoler: It has got to be.
Would we have had the money from the European Social Fund that
my company has accessed? Would we have had the enthusiasm of Business
Link and the Chamber of Commerce to channel development and research
funding into my electronics company without those disturbances?
I suspect not, and if that is a positive then let us regard it
as a positive.
Mr Moran: While Jobcentre Plus
has a really important role, which is about promoting work for
people who have been excluded from it, perhaps because of their
skin colour or other diversity issue, our key role is about working
with employers to ensure that Jobcentre Plus is going to be seen
as a resource that might supply labour. What we are still challenged
about is that not enough employers yet see us as a resource that
can be seen to be valuable because often the perception is still
that we only deal with the problem sector, the low-pay, low-skill
type jobs, or the problem people who cannot get into work because
they are problem people. Increasingly we are battering on doors
to make that perception a myth that people accept. At a regional
level, for example, we are working with an organisation called
the Association of Economic Partners, and on this sit the CBI,
the Federation of Small Businesses and the federations of most
employer businesses across the North West, where increasingly
we are beginning to open a few more doors about why Jobcentre
Plus might be a valuable resource to them. For us it is really
important to do that because we have got a lot of people who are
excluded from work and who for many jobs we can skill up. I do
not know whether we can for Ferranti in terms of the very specific
needs that Terry has outlined, but for lots of jobs—and
the NHS this morning was a classic example—increasingly
public bodies in the past have not used the public employment
service as a source to meet their recruitment needs, which means
that we are missing an opportunity in terms of meeting that diversity.
Increasingly public services particularly are recognising that
but often they are worse offenders than employers per se.
Q132 Mr Clelland: A lot of the Committee's
time has been taken up in looking at this whole question of promoting
social cohesion. Can someone tell us what they think the private
sector's role in all this is? Can the private sector help? What
should the private sector be doing in promoting social cohesion?
Mr Scuoler: What a question to
answer in a couple of seconds. Clearly we have a role when June
Smith and Vaz Patel of the CRE came to me and I think a dozen
or so other employers in the town and asked for help in launching
an initiative. Anyone with any form of conscience, anyone with
any form of belief in our society had to say yes, and that has
resulted in what Russell has outlined in terms of Oldham United.
What can we do? We can do what we are doing and that is advertising,
running activities. For example, we are running at our expense,
although we have been offered money from the CRE, an open day
to get ethnic minorities in to see us, to get all our sub-contractors
open so that Asian or ethnic companies will bid, because at the
minute they do not bid. This is not—forgive me—an
issue with the many hundreds of Asian youths in the town. There
are more unemployed and unemployable working class white youths
in the town because that is what, for reasons we may or may not
understand, is coming on to the streets. I suppose this is an
issue of education and the role we can play is in mentoring, through
economic growth, opportunities for jobs.
Q133 Mr Clelland: How important is
the workplace in bringing people together and promoting social
cohesion?
Mr Scuoler: In my view, assuming
that those employers do what is sensibly and humanly and legally
required of them,—and it is no coincidence that the unemployment
rate here in Oldham is about twice the national average—it
is enormously important to get jobs into the town, even if those
jobs are at a fairly ordinary level, because then it is a positive
spiral. That ordinary level of employment supports different levels
and it starts that positive spiral.
Q134 Mr Clelland: I can see that.
In my constituency that happens as well in terms of the level
of unemployment, although I was talking more about the mix of
employees and how it helps people to work and understand each
other much better.
Mr Gard: If I may add a point
on that, in addition to bringing jobs in, the workplace is where
people can have most interaction with other people. How the workplace
treats different groups of people is very important, and therefore
how a company represents itself to its workforce, and the biases
it might or might not have is very important. I cannot emphasise
how important that is. If the workplace is not offering a cohesive
atmosphere to work in then you will have problems in society.
What we are doing is trying a number of initiatives, campaigns,
what we are calling social themes, (which is something that comes
from the CRE), employment open days, bringing customers together
and other groups of people together so that they understand each
other. We believe that if people understand each other's needs
then they are more likely to be able to accommodate those needs
and therefore the business runs better. I know it is very hard-nosed
to say this, but this is for pound-note bottom-line reasons. We
believe that having that happen better is better for businesses
in Oldham. It is continual, ongoing work to make this happen.
The initiatives we have got are a start, a model. Those that work
we will pass on as best practice. Those that do not work, we will
let people know they do not work, but it is a start. The workplace
has been under-regarded but is absolutely fundamental to this.
It is more important, I would say, than social leisure activity
and in some elements of society more important than multi-faith
activity.
Q135 Dr Pugh: May I address this
to Job Centre Plus? I was somewhat surprised to find that the
unemployment rate in Oldham as a whole is something like 3.6 per
cent but that it is 25 per cent in some ethnic minority communities.
Is that an age thing, is it a skill thing, or is it a race thing?
Mr Moran: Speaking generally,
I think it is difficult to know which it is. What we try to ensure
our staff understand is that having a job means that you are probably
likely to have a more fulfilling role in society because you are
less likely to have health problems, you are less likely to be
involved in crime; in other words, all the rest that goes with
it. There is an important message there. Why it is in Oldham I
do not understand. I think there are legacy issues around where
employers may not see the people in particular parts of the patch
they are on as attractive employees. I do not have the evidence
to support that assertion but I see that in other parts of the
region, so I think it is potentially the case here.
Q136 Dr Pugh: We have been told anecdotally
that if you put in a job application with an Asian name on and
you put in the same job application with the same qualifications
with a British name on, you get different results. Would you support
that?
Mr Moran: I am not aware of specific
evidence on that. I am clearly aware of the anecdotal evidence
that is quoted to me often in visits around the patch. Our role
in working with employers is that if they do not come to us with
their vacancies we have got a very limited opportunity to influence
that employer about why it is important to recruit people from
a broader community. Where they do come to us we exercise very
clear requirements about what is and is not acceptable. If we
found an employer who was practising that and we had evidence
of that and we could not persuade them of the inappropriateness
of that evidence, we would take that to the CRE.
Q137 Dr Pugh: I think Mr Gard wants
to say something here.
Mr Gard: From first perspective
we found that it was not so much an active racist issue or even
an expectation from the point of view of the company. What tended
to happen was that the recruitment process (and I do not like
"institutional racism" as a description) made it difficult
for people to apply and people from certain ethnic minority groups
would not even think of applying to become a bus driver. When
we went and spoke to the social leaders in those communities and
said, "What can we do to improve the enthusiasm for people
to apply?", it was very simple stuff; it was putting out
leaflets in a first language and stuff like this, which actually
broke down the barriers incredibly rapidly. About 18 months to
two years ago we would probably have had 15-20 per cent of applicants
coming from ethnic minority communities. It is now well over 40
and nearly 50 per cent. We have quadrupled the number of ethnic
minority employees in our workforce at the lower skill levels,
and I refer to my comments earlier. I think it is more passivity
than activity, if I might say so.
Q138 Dr Pugh: So there is a role
for somebody at any rate disseminating good employment practice
through this?
Mr Gard: Yes. We have worked with
Job Centre Plus a couple of times to get something sorted out
in some of our recruitment activities which has been quite good.
It is somebody somewhere having the vision, wanting to make these
things work, wanting to take advantage, if I can put it in blunt
terms, of the extended workforce that is available there, and
saying, "What gets in the way at the moment?". Everybody
with any sense does market research about the markets they serve.
Everybody keeps an eye on what their customers are asking for,
but in a way we are a customer of somebody's working ability,
are we not? We need to keep an eye on what our workforce wants
and we have got to have the vision and drive to want to go and
overcome what are in many cases incredibly small impediments to
employment.
Q139 Chairman: Can I turn to the
North West Development Agency? The Cantle report was pretty scathing
about some of the problems of competitive bidding for regeneration
funds. What are you doing about it?
Dr White: We have two government
targets which are sometimes slightly conflicting. One is to promote
social cohesion and we have a specific target to reduce deprivation
in the 20 per cent most deprived wards. Our approach in the past
to that has been things like the Single Regeneration Budget which
we inherited, and there are still some Single Regeneration Budget
programmes here in Oldham and one in Burnley and so forth, and
we will see those through to the end of the period. Our approach
has been to move away from area based competitive approaches,
like the Single Regeneration Budget, and to try to work on a more
local authority-wide basis, working, as I said before, through
the Local Strategic Partnership. It is moving away from those
competitive initiatives where success for one group can be resented
by other groups, trying to promote initiatives which in fact are
of significance to the whole community, but we still have this
obligation to target the worst 20 per cent.
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