Examination of Witnesses (Questions 130
- 139)
MONDAY 20 NOVEMBER 2006
MS CAY
STRATTON CBE AND
MS SHRUPTI
SHAH
Q130 Chairman: Good afternoon, everybody.
Welcome to this our third evidence session. Unfortunately, Iqbal
Wahhab cannot be with us today, for reasons we do not need to
go into, so if anybody was expecting to hear him you will not;
but, Shrupti, welcome, we are very glad to have you with us and
we recognise the work that you are doing and we find it valuable.
If I can kick off, what do you think that we have learned so far
about how to increase employment rates of disadvantaged groups?
Ms Stratton: I think there are
about five key lessons that I would start with. The first—and
you would expect us to say this, coming from the perspective of
the Panel—is that, in our view, employer engagement is really
essential, because without employers you have no jobs, and without
jobs obviously you are not going to make the 80%. We have advocated
for some time the importance of what we would call a dual customer
system, a delivery system which looks at both ends of the equation
and tries to customise its services to both individuals and employers.
The second lesson the Panel has advocated is that labour markets
are local and, within the context of a national framework and
a national strategy, we believe it is important that local communities
have the flexibility to tackle and solve local problems. Being
able to decentralise, give more flexibility to communities to
deal with disadvantaged groups and depressed neighbourhoods, would
be, I think, our second point. The third is something which has
become increasingly clear through our work on the Ambition programme,
with Fair Cities, which Shrupti runs, and a lot of the work that
our Employer Coalitions do, in about 10 cities; and that is that
the power of a known job is an incredible magnet for pulling people
into work. We have a number of programmes traditionally which
focus on the supply side and prepare people for jobs with the
hope that they will find something out there, and our view has
been actually if you start with the employer, and particularly
a known job with a known salary, and work backwards to meet the
client need your success is probably greater. The fourth thing
I would say is that skills matter. The Panel has been interested,
almost from the outset of New Deal, in saying it is really, really
important not just to put people in jobs but to help move them
out of poverty, and that means focusing on jobs which pay decent
wages, which offer career progression and particularly it means
putting considerable weight on retention as a value in the system.
Skills, and the whole investment of human capital in this, is
a really important dimension, particularly if you are focused
on disadvantaged people who lack language skills or basic skills
and in terms of helping them not only to get the job but actually
to succeed in that; over the longer term we think skills matter
a lot. One thing I would say is we believe very strongly in the
concept of performance, and I will come at that from several angles.
First of all, by that I mean actually focusing on outcomes and
not prescribed processes, which relates back to the flexibility,
but also on having very high ambitions for people, high aspirations
for people, having robust standards, performance standards, for
your contractors, and again putting emphasis on retention as a
value and paying for achievement of that.
Q131 Chairman: Can I pick up on just
a couple of things you said there. Unemployment is broadly constant
at the moment, 900,000, 950,000, yet there are two and a half
million people who lose a job and get another one every year,
so for an awful lot of people it just works, does it not? Picking
up on what you said about language and other skills, should we
be having skills programmes which aim to recruit people for a
local labour market or is there space for national or generic
skills programmes, and what do you expect Leitch to say, on that?
Ms Stratton: On the first question,
I think you are absolutely right, that many of our programmes
and measures work in simply just the job search; the basic, work-focused
interviews and job search are entirely appropriate and very effective
for large numbers of people. I think what I was drawing from your
initial question was what were the lessons actually for dealing
with people who are facing substantial barriers to employment,
and I think that is where looking at much more specialisation,
really focusing on the right job for somebody, becomes particularly
relevant. National versus local, I think, probably, if you look
at most occupations, sectors in occupations, you can design programmes
with a common curriculum for 70 or 80%, but the tailoring of the
last 20% and making sure that employers are committed to hiring
the people who are coming through the pipeline is absolutely essential.
I think one of the things we have learned is, particularly with
Fair Cities and the Ambition programme, up-front engagement of
employers, so that they are in that programme, so that they are
involved in the design, and basically they are committing, in
principle, certainly guaranteeing interview, but certainly in
principle to hiring people matters a lot.
Q132 Chairman: From your point of
view, should employers have a social responsibility to take people
from disadvantaged groups, or should they be outside of that?
I am thinking particularly that there are a number of employers,
but not too many, who are happy to work with ex-offenders, for
instance, but most employers are not.
Ms Stratton: Corporate social
responsibility is a very important dimension and it is right and
it is good. My difficulty is that I think if you are trying to
tackle unemployment and raise employment levels you cannot do
it through corporate social responsibility. That is why we have
tried really to think about almost turning the process on its
head and say the better that you meet employer needs the better
that you will meet disadvantaged people's needs and make sure
that they succeed in the labour markets. At the margins I think
corporate social responsibility works, but I think, in terms of
getting to scale and actually engaging people, you need to understand
your business requirements and you need to be sure that the provision
which Government is paying for actually delivers people who are
pretty close to being job-ready.
Chairman: Thank you for that.
Q133 Mrs Humble: Can I pick up on
what you have just said about engaging people, and in your submission
to us you did say: "We will need to reach people who are
currently out of the labour market..." In other words, there
is that group of people who are neither working nor claiming benefit,
and we know that we have a lot of Bangladeshi and Pakistani women
who are part of that group, also students and Afro-Caribbean men.
What can we do better to engage with them, what sorts of mechanisms,
what sort of provision should we have for identifying those people
and working with them?
Ms Stratton: I think the first
thing is to recognise exactly what you said, which is that they
are a highly diverse group and if we try to tackle this from the
standpoint of what benefits there are, or the fact that simply
they are not on benefit, we are not going to be very successful.
Even if you are looking at Pakistani and Bangladeshi women, the
difference in age and generation and how long they have been here
matters a lot, in terms of crafting your measures. There are some
common themes, however. Certainly we have learned that outreach
in the community is essential and it is essential, by and large,
not by government agencies but by community-based organisations
that the groups are trying to reach, have connection with, that
those organisations are credible with those groups. That I think
would be the first thing I would say. I think the second thing
is it is very important to understand where people are starting
from, and you can call that assessment or diagnosis or whatever,
but understanding an individual's aspirations, their aptitude,
their skills and starting-point is critical, because that defines
where they want to end up. For Pakistani and Bangladeshi women,
for example, the right job for them is probably a safe job, it
is culturally comfortable and, probably like any single parent,
the same kinds of interest in a flexible workplace; whereas, for
many Afro-Caribbean young men, something that looks much more
like an apprenticeship kind of programme, leading to a proper
job, if you will, with a lot of support built into that. It is
being able to customise your outreach and customise the provision
you are getting. I think the other thing is ensuring that there
is effective case management support, whether that is provided
by Jobcentre Plus or by a community agency, somebody who is working
alongside that individual, from early on right through to the
point where they are in the job and probably through the three-month
period in which it is most precarious for them in that transition.
Q134 Mrs Humble: There, are you making
assumptions that these people want to go into employment? You
are talking about customised jobs, but what about a culture which
does not approve of women going into work? We have to remember,
in this country, it was only 50 or 60 years ago that a lot of
jobs were closed to married women, and our equal opportunities
legislation is only 30-odd years old, so there have been huge
cultural shifts in this country. If women come into this country,
or indeed are born in this country but have a culture that we
had 50 years ago, what do we do to get them to recognise that,
in fact, there is another world out there and that they can take
part in it: overcoming barrier number one before we get to barrier
number two, about culturally-appropriate work?
Ms Stratton: What I do not mean
to suggest is that we are trying to force people into work. I
will turn to Shrupti in a minute, because I think Fair Cities,
at least in one location, focuses particularly on people who are
not on benefit, but it appears, at least, from early evaluations,
early research, that some—I cannot quantify it faithfully—younger
women, under 35, from Pakistani and Bangladeshi communities, are
interested in working, if they can find the right support. That
does not mean all of them and it certainly probably does not mean
some of the older women.
Q135 Mrs Humble: I would rather not
talk about Fair Cities at the moment because a colleague is going
to ask more detailed questions about that. I am starting with
the basics here and colleagues are going to build on it, to look
at all sorts of initiatives, so again just staying at that basic
level. We did have from the DWP the Ethnic Minority Outreach programme
and that seems to have worked better with people who were closest
to the labour market. I just want to explore with you what we
can do for those people who are further away and, in turn, try
to measure the distance travelled?
Ms Stratton: There are several
questions wrapped up in that one. I do not mean to suggest that
we know the answers on this. I think we are learning a lot as
we go. One of the things I think may be emerging as one answer
to this is being much more flexible in our approach about where
we deliver services. For example, for women who speak either no
English or not fluent English, who normally are associated with
a mosque or community health facilities or a childcare centre,
provision delivered there, in a setting which is safe and where
they are doing something else. Also, if you are taking PSOL, it
is related to the family, to life, the ordinary things going on
in your life, it is of interest, and it does seem to be attracting
a lot of women. That is the first step, getting English skills,
because obviously it is a step forward. I am reluctant, I think,
to say that Government should step in, in any way, to pressure
people whose culture makes it very difficult. I think our job
should be to make sure that all the opportunities are in place
for those who make a choice to work.
Q136 Mrs Humble: How then do you
think the fact that the Ethnic Minorities Outreach programme is
going to be absorbed into the Deprived Areas Fund is going to
affect the situation that you have outlined? Do you think there
should be specific programmes for people from minority ethnic
backgrounds, or could they be catered for adequately within the
wider heading of "deprivation" and the Deprived Areas
Fund?
Ms Stratton: I think that the
issues of poverty and ethnicity are really closely intertwined,
but I think when you put in an overlay of cultural issues there
are distinctive differences and if we are really going to customise
our services to meet the needs of individual people with different
barriers to employment we have to do whatever we are doing now.
The answer to the DAF question is I do not know yet. For the DAF
funds that are going into the City Strategy, I think, any City
Strategy proposal or business plan which came forward from a community
which had a large number of ethnic minorities in it and did not
address how they were reaching that, certainly there would be
questions. I think, for the balance, the Jobcentre Plus districts,
I would assume there is a process which reviews against the profile
of the local population, and I think it is very important that
any Jobcentre Plus district, as in any City Strategy, reflects
the needs of that local district. To answer the question about
whether you will see less of the Minority Outreach right now,
because of the DAF programme, I do not know.
Q137 Mrs Humble: Clearly, you want
to build up a support system where there are individuals who are
proactive and drilling down into local communities in order to
get to the hardest to reach people. We have had a Special Employment
Adviser pilot; do you think that should be extended? There are
so many pilots, and sometimes I wonder whether they are actually
allowed enough time to prove themselves, and then also sometimes
they disappear without trace. That again is a question to which
you can give a great long answer, but should we be doing more
with them, go out there, be proactive, to do what you want them
to do?
Ms Stratton: I think we launch
pilots a lot. We invest an enormous amount in developing strategies
and policies. I am not sure that we spend an equal amount of time
looking at execution and what it takes actually to deliver on
the ground. For a ground-breaking operation of any kind to get
up and running for two years is extremely difficult; extremely
difficult. Whether the Special Employment Adviser was a well-designed
programme I think is up for questioning. I think the Ethnic Minority
Outreach programme is an important one, and I think whether it
is designed as a specific programme or just as part of the mainstream
of how we do business and reach our clients is what we have to
be looking at. Personally, if I see any business plan coming across,
a City Strategy, which does not have an outreach component I will
question that very seriously.
Q138 Miss Begg: In reply to Joan's
questions, you talked about what is successful in getting minority
ethnic people into jobs is to customise outreach and customise
the provision. Are you in a position to say whether the DWP is
actually any good at doing that?
Ms Stratton: I do not think it
has to be done through DWP necessarily. Increasingly, ministers
are interested in looking at what services can be decentralised.
I am very clear that increasingly our ministers want to customise,
for both employers and individuals, the services which come through
DWP. I think that one of the most promising aspects, in my view,
of the City Strategy is that it tends to do just that, and for
the first time really we are seeing quite a rigorous examination
of what best can be delivered by local public partners and community
organisations, as opposed to Jobcentre Plus or a central government
department. We are not there, but I think we are on the right
track.
Q139 Miss Begg: The moves to move
all of that employment provision out of the DWP into whether it
is the private sector or private companies you think is the right
move, in trying to reach these harder to reach people?
Ms Stratton: Let me qualify this
a bit. I think it is very important that you have a national framework
which sets out exactly what the objectives are that the Government
is trying to achieve, which sets out the eligibility criteria,
so that the system does not cream, and it sets out the kinds of
objectives, and this is where I come back to retention and progression,
the value system, which this is about. Within that framework,
I think that the more authority and flexibility which can be devolved
to localities, I think the Panel would say, the better, to allow
local communities to understand what those problems are and to
engage both individuals and community-based organisations most
effectively. That, it seems to me, is what should be taking place.
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