Examination of Witnesses (Questions 360-379)
MR BILL
WELLS AND
MR JEREMY
GROOMBRIDGE
17 OCTOBER 2006
Q360 Lyn Brown: If there was an influx
of people during the times that traditionally are the holiday
period which is greater than the numbers for the rest of the year,
despite the fact that there has been a diversification in tourism
and some people go to walk in the autumn or by the sea in the
winter, or whatever it is that people choose to do, presumably
you would have greater pressure on the services that they use,
whether it be restaurants or pubs, whether it be laundry services
or clubs. Presumably, therefore, one needs a higher level of staffing
during that time than one would need during the rest of the year,
despite the fact that one might not decline or decrease one's
workforce as significantly as one did in the past. Presumably,
therefore, there are still jobs that are seasonal, that are attached
to tourism, which you are not actually classifying as seasonal
tourism?
Mr Wells: I think there is a difference
between temporary jobs and tourism jobs. There are more tourist
jobs during the high season but some of those jobs would be filled
by people who actually leave the towns as well. Also, there is
a difference between the jobs and the people taking the employment.
If someone works in the high season, they may work somewhere else
during the rest of the year. As I said, I do not want to overstate
this, but I do think that—
Q361 Lyn Brown: What you are telling
me is that, although there are more jobs there, the unemployment
that one sees as an underlying factor is not actually caused by
casual or seasonal employment?
Mr Wells: I think that is right.
Actually the levels of unemployment as opposed to the levels of
inactivity are actually relatively low compared to the past and
not particularly different from other parts of the country.
Q362 Martin Horwood: I was almost
with you until you said that. I was beginning to think that perhaps
the explanation for this is that when you are talking about temporary
employment in other towns you are talking about permanent temporary
employment, in other words jobs that are continuing but that are
always on temporary contracts, whereas in coastal towns we were
seeing peak season temporary contracts that did not exist off-peak,
but you have just said that seasonal unemployment is no worse.
It sounds as though you just said that seasonal unemployment was
no worse in coastal towns either.
Mr Wells: It is higher, but it
is lower than it has been in the past. The degree of seasonality
in employment and unemployment is higher in most coastal towns.
I think there is an issue about the scale and how it has changed
over time.
Q363 Chair: The evidence that your
department has given is different to the evidence that has been
given by the DCLG, which appears to be that temporary employment
is higher in coastal towns than elsewhere, but also to the evidence
that was given earlier this afternoon by the foyers. Is the issue
that many temporary jobs in coastal towns are not included within
your statistics because they are grey market jobs paying less
than the national minimum wage?
Mr Wells: This is a survey of
individuals rather than the jobs themselves. The tourism jobs
are surveys of jobs, but the temporary work is from the Labour
Force Survey, which is actually a survey of individuals in those
areas.
Q364 Chair: At what time of year?
Mr Wells: Throughout the year.
There is a continuous survey of 60,000 households across the country,
about 120,000 people, and you ask the individual what their labour
market status is, including their employment status, in terms
of its permanency or temporary nature.
Q365 Chair: But if they are being
employed at less than the national minimum wage, they are not
likely to declare themselves, are they?
Mr Wells: In these figures there
are a lot of people who seem to tell the truth, even though it
looks like they are doing things illegally.
Q366 Anne Main: In your memorandum,
you said there was a slight rise in the proportion of sick and
disabled people claiming out of work benefits. I would like to
explore that on two levels: (1) are we sure that your figures
are not reflecting maybe people being classified in a different
way, so that they are falling into a different category now, so
that is why your figures look lower, and (2) do you think that
this rise in the proportion of people claiming incapacity benefits
is anything to do with it being coastal towns, or the age demographic,
or is it acceptable, is it predictable?
Mr Wells: The figures we presented
in the memorandum tend to be the numbers receiving the different
types of benefits, and so, therefore, the unemployment benefits—Job
Seekers Allowance—have declined over time.
Q367 Anne Main: Is that because they
are now on incapacity benefits?
Mr Wells: No, because the numbers
going onto incapacity benefits have actually been declining across
the country for a number of years. However, for a while—they
are now going down—the numbers on incapacity benefit actually
increased because the average duration on the benefit went up.
It was not that more people were going on to the benefit; it was
that the people on the benefit were staying on the benefit for
longer.
Q368 Chair: Are they starting to
claim incapacity benefits somewhere else and then moving to coastal
towns, or is there something about living in a coastal town that
affects your health so that you are more likely to claim incapacity
benefit?
Mr Wells: I think it is true overall
in our figures that the level of overall benefits are higher in
coastal towns than in other parts of the country, and actually
in some cases higher than the level of employment, and we identified
two or three towns where the employment rate was higher than the
national average. But they also had a higher level of total numbers
on benefits than the national average. So, of the people who are
without work in the coastal towns it does look as though for a
lot of them a bigger proportion of them are on benefits.
Q369 Chair: Which are largely incapacity
benefits?
Mr Wells: Which are largely incapacity
benefits.
Q370 Chair: That is my question.
Do you know whether they were claiming it before and they moved
to a coastal town as a claimant, or whether they got ill when
they were there?
Mr Wells: I do not know; I suspect
that most of them will have joined the incapacity benefit in the
area where they live.
Q371 Dr Pugh: I am trying to get
it clear about what you are saying, so if you would help me on
this, as we do need to get this very clear. If we had a pie-chart
that had all the jobs of all the coastal towns and you had to
shade in a section of the pie-chart that indicated the measure
by which some of them were part-time or seasonal, or whatever
you want to call them, what would it look like and how would it
differ from a pie-chart filled in for the whole country?
Mr Wells: I might get the numbers
wrong but the tourism/seasonal jobs will be somewhere around 10
to 20% in the coastal towns and they may be 10 to 15% in other
parts of the country. So there is likely to be over the year a
greater proportion of the jobs that are filled and covered that
are tourism/seasonal temporary jobs, but they are not a particularly
large portion of the pie-chart, and although they may be bigger
than in other areas the difference is not enormous.
Q372 Dr Pugh: So 80% of people in
coastal towns are on full contracts, annual contracts of one kind
or another, who are employed?
Mr Wells: In terms of jobs I think
it is important to realise that roughly 20% of all people move
into and out of a job in any one year and most of those movements
are voluntary—the vast majority of them are voluntary.
Q373 Dr Pugh: Imagine another pie
chart that has all the jobs again but this time they are shaded
in depending whether they are low paid or not; how would we define
low paid? How would the pie chart for coastal towns look when
compared with the pie chart for the country as a whole?
Mr Wells: I know less about the
earnings in the area but I suspect that it would have a similar
set of characteristics to the pie chart you have just asked me
to describe.
Q374 Dr Pugh: Can you factor into
it—let us get these figures accurate—a lot of people
in seaside towns who work for their own little businesses, they
have a sweet shop, a small down by the front, whatever, and they
are essentially self-employed people and they will carry on, no
matter how low their earnings are, for quite a long time. Do you
have any measure for that?
Mr Wells: In the memorandum we
put in on information on self-employment, which is again from
the Labour Force Survey, again the story is one of differences
across the coastal towns, but with perhaps a slightly higher proportion
overall in coastal towns who are self-employed.
Q375 Dr Pugh: On the demographic
features, if you take into account that every town has so many
people in employment, be it part-time, be it high paid, be it
whatever, and so many people who are not, who are either unemployed
or elderly or whatever, how does the profile of coastal towns
look different from the profile of the country as a whole?
Mr Wells: Again, some are above
and some are below but the general trend was that 10 or 20 years
ago the coastal towns would have been further towards the bottom
of the distribution of employment rates: i.e. they had less employment
than other areas, but that everybody has moved up; but in general
the areas at the bottom have tended to move up slightly faster
than others.
Q376 Dr Pugh: So there is more economic
activity, in other words?
Mr Wells: Yes.
Q377 Dr Pugh: What actions are JobCentre
Plus taking to monitor the impact of migrant workers on employment
in coastal towns?
Mr Wells: I will pass over to
Jeremy in a moment. Within the department we are monitoring the
labour market for migrants, both by considering all the various
different statistics that there are available, including national
insurance numbers, and they tend to be issued by JobCentre Plus
in those offices, and the conclusion on that—which has been
published—is that we can find no discernible statistical
effect of migrants on the claimant unemployment. Maybe Jeremy
would like to add something?
Mr Groombridge: That is certainly
our view of local labour markets. We are very much informed by
the national picture that we have available to us, but this view
is augmented by what we see happening in the local labour market,
albeit anecdotally. We look, for example, at the way that traditional
entry level jobs are filled and we are noticing changes over time,
but the critical factor, as Bill has said, is that there is no
clear unequivocal statistical connection that the department has
been able to identify.
Q378 Dr Pugh: So the assumption is
normally that a lot of low skilled jobs in coastal towns, tourism
and seasonal jobs of one kind of another—obviously there
are Polish plumbers and so on—quite a lot of the migrant
workforce is a relatively low skilled base. You would assume that
they would disproportionately migrate, as it were, to coastal
towns, and you are saying that the evidence does not stand that
up so far?
Mr Groombridge: There certainly
has not yet been proven any statistical link. So all we can really
do is to monitor the kind of entry level jobs that we would normally
put people into, and we do notice changes over time. But that
does not amount to a proven statistical link of the kind that
Bill was referring to.
Mr Wells: There is also some information
on national insurance numbers and the workers' registration scheme,
and there are some areas of coastal towns—Bournemouth, Brighton
and Great Yarmouth—where a higher proportion of the population
have asked for national insurance numbers, who are migrants, relative
to the national average. But in general, for all migrants asking
for national insurance numbers the coastal towns that we have
looked at tend to be less, partly because places like London and
other places dominate migration still, even though with the accession
countries they have spread across the country more than in the
past.
Q379 Lyn Brown: You have made reference
to the Labour Force Survey as the source for your evidence this
afternoon, and given that that survey is national do you think
that you have robust enough evidence to confidently supply us
with the evidence that we have required this afternoon, or do
you think that you might have evidence of a data gap in reference
to coastal towns?
Mr Wells: The Labour Force Survey
is run by the Office for National Statistics and their objective
is to make it nationally representative and nationally representative
in the sense that all areas of the country can be represented
fairly. There are a couple of areas where the Labour Force Survey
is a little reliant on population estimates and so therefore there
may be issues about some migration. It also a household survey
and so therefore communal establishments tend not to be represented
as much in it and, as you heard earlier, there may be particular
types of communal establishments, what they call houses in multiple
occupation, which are more prevalent in coastal towns.
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