Examination of Witnesses (Questions 60
- 66)
TUESDAY 31 OCTOBER 2006
PROFESSOR IVAN
TUROK AND
PROFESSOR ALAN
MCGREGOR
Q60 Justine Greening: How aware do
you feel clients are that they are in a process? If you sat down
and said, "Maybe the first thing you might be doing is getting
out of the house, possibly on a train, re-skilling you",
is that something you think people are aware of, that they are
going down a path, and if you were to discuss that with them and
explain the route they were going down that would hinder or help
the process?
Professor McGregor: I am not sure
that the people who deliver the services know that they are in
a process. It is a little bit more difficult than that. The other
thing you need to be careful about is people talk about "a
package" and it is not really. That suggests it is something
relatively straight, but people can fall off the roadside or go
backwards, it is much more complicated than that. Jobless folk
are looking for a bit of help, a bit of advice, a bit of consistent
advice where they go to the same person to get it, they do not
want to be referred off here and referred off there, they would
rather somebody came and spoke to them rather than they get sent
off to some other office. A lot of the process issues for jobless
are the same ones we have: we are in work when we are booking
our holiday or trying to get through the health service.
Q61 Justine Greening: Can we measure
people as they go through adequately enough that we could use
it to say to organisations involved in delivering the services,
"Yes, you have done it" or "No, you have not"?
Professor Turok: We have got to
be careful about being too mechanistic about it, which is what
Alan was saying. If we had a range of indicators so that it is
not two or three but a whole range of things, everybody is in
a different situation at the starting point and any system of
measuring has to recognise the different starting points that
people are at and the different barriers they are facing. Not
too rigid a system that is able to detect subtle improvements
in people's lives, and it might not just be themselves but also
their family circumstances—you heard a bit about this morning,
are their kids attending school regularly, have they got their
childcare arrangements sorted out and so on—that is all
part of the process because it is not just individuals, they are
part of households and that should also determine their progression.
Professor McGregor: I have to
say in any kind of system this would be quite cumbersome, there
would be a lot of resource invested in monitoring and reporting.
We already do a lot of that. You would have to design something
that was light.
Q62 Greg Mulholland: This comes under
the term "engaging employers" which is obviously crucial
to the success of this. With all the work that is going on in
Glasgow at the moment, do you think there are genuine signs of
a joined-up approach in terms of economic development and employability
or not?
Professor McGregor: There is a
number of issues there. I am involved a lot on the construction
side of things looking at major construction investment programmes.
Glasgow Housing Association is a major landlord in the city now,
and there is a lot of controversy around that which I will not
go into, and they have got a £4 billion programme of spend.
There are potentially lots of opportunities in there for jobless
people. We have also got developments on the waterfront and a
lot of that is housing where there are commercial development
and commercial opportunities there. The reality is this is an
area where we have not been terribly successfully historically.
Currently I am involved in helping write the DWP City Strategy
bid for the city and we have got a little sub-group on employer
engagement and it is a very, very messy set-up with lots of different
people going to employers at random in an ad hoc kind of way and
it is very, very unstructured. My view is that in the next five
years there is so much happening in the city that if we do not
manage to connect the development of Glasgow investment with a
significant reduction in joblessness then history will look upon
us as having failed really. The fundamental problem here, to be
absolutely honest, is that there is no one agency in particular
that is responsible for bridging these things, for pulling together
and making sure that the economic development opportunities and
the jobs generated by that, some of the benefits flow to the city's
jobless population. There is nobody responsible for that. Nobody
is going to get taken out and shot if we fail on that. I am not
suggesting that as a policy intervention, but you know what I
mean.
Q63 Justine Greening: Metaphorically.
Professor McGregor: Nobody is
responsible for it.
Professor Turok: We do have a
system whereby the Economic Development Agency does not like to
see some of these responsibilities associated with it because
it makes the job more difficult, so there are natural reasons
why organisations shy away from joining things up. As Alan has
said, nobody in particular has that responsibility. As a result,
employers struggle because they see this complex infrastructure
of employability services and do not know their way through it.
In some ways the analogy with the Business Gateway is quite an
interesting one, and you might be familiar with it as a Scottish
project. Basically it is trying to rationalise small business
support programmes and create a single system, a single set of
agencies to provide small business advice. I am not suggesting
that is possible in the case of employability because it is a
more complex issue with many more people involved but we do have
some sort of model of simplification available.
Professor McGregor: What I said
was fairly negative but can I say that there have been some big
retailing developments in Glasgow over the last one to two years.
There have been very successful interventions in Easterhouse where
there is a big retail development, Glasgow Fort, and more recently
in the greater Pollock area where there is a major retail investment
programme going on. That has involved very, very simple mechanisms
of working closely with the site developer, the retailers coming
on site and the local economic development companies that work
in these communities connect and provide a single bridge between
the local community, local jobless people and the job opportunities
that become available. It is like a person looking after that,
somebody doing it whose job it is to get the retailers together
to find what work and jobs they have got, when they are going
to become available, what is the spec for these jobs, who have
they got locally who can fill them, and they manage that process.
It is not rocket science.
Professor Turok: It is increasingly
important to do it because we do face, as in other parts of the
UK, increasing immigration so there is now more competition for
lower paid jobs at the bottom end of the labour market. The risk
is our Incapacity Benefit and other jobless clients do not get
these jobs because there is a more productive workforce available.
Q64 Greg Mulholland: In terms of
getting the people furthest away from the job market into work,
you have argued that organisations need to be honest with employers
about the challenges of taking such people on. Is it possible
to be honest in that way and at the same time encourage employers
to get involved in that process?
Professor McGregor: You have got
no option but to be honest. Often there is nothing to be honest
about, by the way. Often long-term jobless people are long-term
jobless for all sorts of reasons and there is no story, as it
were, that employers need to know about. Sometimes there may be
a mental health issue and there might be a risk, whatever the
risk might be, and you have to tell an employer that because if
you do not tell an employer and there is an issue or a problem
that employer is never going to look at you again and that employer
will be lost to your potential pool of employing organisations
down the line. You have to be honest on behalf of your client
who is the jobless person. They might need support in the workplace,
there may be something the employer needs to be briefed about
so that if something goes wrong they will know how to handle it.
On both sides of this honesty is really, really important. It
is general good practice.
Q65 Greg Mulholland: A final question
from me: one of the key things is sustaining people in employment
and I think one of the issues is who should be responsible for
that specifically. Who would you say should take on that role
and how big a commitment to the job would that be?
Professor McGregor: I have a slightly
different attitude to this. I think that sustainability starts
before the person gets a job. Sustainability in employment is
about making sure that the jobless person you are working with
is really well prepared for the opportunity that they go into
and the opportunity they go into is really well matched to their
skills, their aptitudes and their aspirations. If you make a really
good match at the outset that is the best way to get sustainability.
Secondly, there is a lot of talk about aftercare, and there is
a need for aftercare in relation to joblessness no doubt, but
the reality is that a lot of jobless people would not want to
know about the training provider or the other organisations they
have been working with after they get into a job. Who wants somebody
looking over their shoulder all the time? It is about being independent
and being the same as everybody else. The only way you can build
that process in is to have a really good relationship with your
jobless client before they get a job so that if they have a problem
or they see a problem coming they come back to you, the organisation
that helped them before. Thirdly, there is the question of aftercare
for employers and that touches on your previous question. That
is where I think there is a client you have placed with an employer
where there may be some issues, you explain to the employer what
the issues might be and you also offer to be available should
these issues arise, so there is aftercare support for the employer
which in turn supports your jobless client. The responsibility
starts essentially with the organisation that hands over the jobless
person into an employment setting, I think it is their responsibility.
Whether they get paid for carrying out that responsibility is
another issue. Very few funders pay for that kind of service beyond
the point of somebody going into a job.
Q66 Harry Cohen: You have given a
very strategic overview but I have just realised that we are focusing
at one level on raising the employment rate through three categories:
the lone parents, ethnic minorities and the over-50s. If you were
in our position here doing this report, what would be the one
point that you would focus on in one of those to tell us to look
at and improve it?
Professor McGregor: I would say
the over-50s because I am one of them and you have got to look
after yourself! I do not think it works that way. Some of the
things we have been talking about are generic, so they are about
knowing what the employment opportunities are that you are targeting
on behalf of your clients, preparing them for jobs they are going
to be comfortable with and will benefit from, that is the first
thing. The second thing is the kind of aftercare and investment
process I was speaking about. The third thing is there needs to
be an awareness of the barriers for the over-50s, for lone parents
and folk in black and minority ethnic groups that are going to
be very different. The barriers are going to be different so the
work you do with them prior to that is going to be quite different.
A lot of the problems for the over-50s sit with employers. We
have not spoken about that but there are serious issues about
the way that employers recruit and hire people, specify jobs,
specify job requirements, which are discriminatory, sometimes
deliberately, often accidental or not thought out. In terms of
the over-50s I would be targeting particular employers, I would
be looking at employment recruitment standards and mechanisms.
That is the way into customising the services to the different
groups that you are speaking about. Even if you go into the black
and minority ethnic groups there is tremendous variation across
ethnic minorities in terms of success in the labour market, huge
variations, and you have got to understand those and tailor your
services to these things.
Professor Turok: If you looked
at the distribution of these groups and others you would find
quite a close correspondence in different parts of the country
depending on the state of the labour market. These groups all
have a lower employment rate in somewhere like Glasgow than elsewhere
suggesting that the issue of employment opportunities is critical,
labour demand, and in a tighter labour market employers can be
less discriminating. The weakness of DWP is a focus purely on
supply side issues. This is where joined-up government matters
and having economic development alongside improving supply side
measures means in a tighter labour market things move much more
easily, you can slipstream all sorts of people into jobs that
otherwise you could not.
Chairman: Thank you both for coming.
Certainly the written evidence you put in was challenging and
had some stark things to say and has certainly shaken people up.
We do appreciate what you have said today, thank you.
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