Examination of Witnesses (Questions 20-39)
Department for Work & Pensions, Learning &
Skills Council and Jobcentre Plus
26 November 2007
Q20 Mr. Touhig: So she would be no
better off than at the moment. She will either have to give up
the job or try to persuade the council to job share so that she
can keep the little job that she loves, which has changed her
life. She has had a difficult life caring for elderly parents,
and if she loses her benefit, she cannot afford to live.
Adam Sharples: That would depend
on which benefit she was on. Each benefit has different rules
on the income that a person is allowed to generate without—
Q21 Mr. Touhig: I should write to
the Secretary of State—that is your advice, is it?
Adam Sharples: Do please write,
and we shall try to provide a detailed answer.
Q22 Mr. Touhig: One final question
before my time is up. In my part of South Wales we had an organisation
called HOVAC—the Heads of the Valleys and Caerphilly standing
conference on the new deal. As we got more and more young people
into work, we were left with a reservoir of young people who lacked
basic literacy and numeracy skills. They were kids who had been
expelled from school and were never going to go back into a classroom
situation. How do you go about giving them the basic skills to
get a job?
Adam Sharples: That is exactly
what our programmes are designed to deliver. At the moment, the
main programme for helping those people is the new deal for young
people, which, as part of the reforms that I was talking about
earlier, will become part of the flexible new deal. The idea is
that we will increasingly try to provide a more targeted and personalised
service that takes account of the particular needs of each jobseeker.
So, if somebody has serious skill needs, we will try to identify
them right at the beginning. Another commitment from today's statements
is that every benefit claimant will get a skills screen when they
apply for benefit. Those who need support on skills will be pointed
quickly towards either basic skills courses or—
Q23 Mr. Touhig: But you are not going
to get these people back into a classroom situation, are you?
They are kids who have dropped out of school and have all sorts
of difficulties.
Adam Sharples: It is a very good
point that trying to get people back into formal education in
those circumstances will almost certainly not work. That is why
our approach to local employment partnerships is an attempt to
link between Jobcentre Plus and local employers to identify vacancies
when the employer is prepared to consider applicants on benefit.
Jobcentre Plus can then work with the benefit claimants to try
to give them the skills for those jobs.
Q24 Mr. Touhig: My time is up. Are
you aware of the scheme in the southern United States of using
computer games to help kids get basic literacy?
Adam Sharples: No, but we would
be delighted to hear about it.
Q25 Mr. Touhig: Are you aware of
a scheme in Hainault in southern Belgium about getting young people
into work?
Adam Sharples: Again, we would
be delighted to see the details.
Mr. Touhig: I shall come and have a chat
with you.
Chairman: Thank you. I call Angela Browning.
Q26 Angela Browning: Can you tell
us more about the marrying of skills and skills training with
regional vacancies, and the skills that employers want? We heard
a lot in the statement earlier—you have touched on it—and
I do not dismiss the importance of numeracy and literacy. There
is also the big question of interpersonal skills, which are enormous
but rather vacuous. That apart, how do you find out what skills
are needed in a locality to train people for appropriate jobs
that they might apply for locally? May I draw your attention on
page 47 to figure 15? The south-west is right at the top of the
list for vacancies as a percentage of the unemployed and workless,
which makes me wonder whether there are people who would work
but who are not being trained in the right skills. How do you
do that?
Stephen Marston: We try to do
that by working with regional development agencies, and locally
with employment and skills boards. Every RDA has a regional economic
strategy that sets out in the short, medium and long terms how
it sees economic development in that region, including the priorities
for jobs growth and sector growth. The RDAs, with the Learning
and Skills Council, get together to say, "Okay, that is the
demand-side need, those are the priorities and that is where we
expect the jobs to go," and that feeds into the way we work
with colleges and training providers to expand and change the
supply of training places over time. We work particularly with
the RDAs to get that sense of growth in a region and what jobs
will come through, so that colleges and training providers know
what they should train people for.
Q27 Angela Browning: So what is going
wrong in the south-west? The region stretches from Swindon on
the M4 corridor to the Isles of Scilly, so I suspect that what
is relevant in Bristol or Swindon is not relevant to my people
living on the edge of Exmoor. Do you never talk to people who
employ people, to the representatives of employers' forums and
so on?
Stephen Marston: Yes.
Q28 Angela Browning: Are they not
the people who would know what skills they want?
Stephen Marston: Yes. In each
region, I think it is true that there is a disaggregation to a
more local level. Several regions have employment and skills boards
more locally, and Bristol is one example. We are trying to operate
at several different levels to find out what employers expect
by way of jobs and long-term skills needs. In the immediate term,
the Train to Gain programme also tries to respond directly to
what employers say about their vacancies and skills needs today.
We are simultaneously trying to match the aggregate level, and
for the long term, where the jobs are expected to be. And today,
we can support the training that an employer wants for their local
area.
Q29 Angela Browning: Can you look
at page 34, which is in appendix 1, on the case studies? They
are very interesting and cover a big spread from Merseyside to
London, but they are urban examples. How will you deal with the
more fragmented problems of rural communities?
Stephen Marston: One important
development over the past few years has been the way in which
the Learning and Skills Council has established its regional and
local presence. In 150 different local areas, there are local
partnership teams for it, and their role is to keep close to local
circumstances. In rural areas—rural counties—there
are local partnership teams whose job is to understand the skills
needs and the training supply in that local area.
Mark Haysom: Perhaps I can build
on that a little. It is no coincidence that the examples given
are from urban areas, because that is where the greatest number
of workless people are and where the greatest issue is. However,
we are very conscious of the fact that that is not the whole issue
and that there are real issues for us to confront in rural communities
up and down the land. Stephen makes the point that we have organised
ourselves in that way—to work very locally, with local authorities
and others, to understand the requirements of each area of the
country, and then to work with learning providers as well, because
often learning providers, as we have discussed previously, have
the greatest understanding of the needs of their area.
Q30 Angela Browning: I am a little
disconcerted. You mention local authorities. I have to say, with
no disrespect to the local authorities I deal with in my job,
they would not be the people I would go to if I wanted information
on skills shortages in the work force in my locality. They would
perhaps be interested as an employer in the public sector, but
I would not expect them to have the sort of expertise that I hear
three times a year when I host a business breakfast for all my
key local employers. I get a lot more tangible information there.
Why do you not take an approach more like that?
Mark Haysom: Forgive me, we do.
I was building on the point that Stephen was making, because he
rightly said that we talk to local employers, employer and skills
boards where they exist, and so on. I was just adding another
dimension to that. Yes, we spend a lot of time working with employers
at local level.
Q31 Angela Browning: Would any of
you like to venture a suggestion as to why the south-west of England
is at the top of the list for skills mismatch?
Mark Haysom: Is that not in some
ways a measure of success? I was just looking at the chart and
they are the most successful regions in terms of growth, aren't
they?
Q32 Angela Browning: May I come to
that, because the next point I want to discuss is how you measure
success? Do you really believe that in terms of sustainability,
13 weeks is a good figure to use, bearing it in mind that, certainly
in the south-west of England, there will be many jobs in hospitality,
tourism and retail at this time of year that will probably last
only for 13 weeks? If you are to measure your success more accurately,
should you not be looking at a period of, say, six months minimum
rather than 13 weeks? Do not the 13-week people who go into your
statistics just mop up seasonal jobs?
Adam Sharples: Could I start on
that question? I am sure that others will want to come in. I think
the best way of understanding the 13-week point is to look on
page 14 of the Report, where a very interesting chart shows the
duration of a job for lone parents who go into work. It shows
clearly that the real risk point in the life of a job is the first
three months—the first 13 weeks. In that time, more than
40% of lone parents who go into work exit from the jobs. The risk
factor in each of the subsequent three-month periods is very much
lower. That is probably typical of other groups as well, such
as jobseekers and incapacity benefit claimants, so it is one reason
why 13 weeks is quite a reasonable threshold to focus on.
However, in each of our employment programmes,
we weigh up quite carefully what the most appropriate definition
is of a sustained job, so for example in the Workstep programme,
the definition is a 26-week rather than a 13-week job. We will
almost certainly be using a longer period as we move towards the
flexible new deal, so we are very open to the discussion about
what the most appropriate definition is of a sustained job when
we are incentivising and rewarding providers.
Q33 Angela Browning: I think we are
still waiting for a note on Workstep from a previous session,
because I asked about it last time. May I bring you back to something
that has been raised today, particularly in the light of the statement
in the House, which I listened to? We welcome the fact that, for
those on incapacity benefit, the housing benefit rules will be
changed to abolish the 16-hour rule, but is not one of the triggers
that really hits hard when people move from benefits to work the
situation with income support, because it carries with it so many
things, including prescription charges and council tax benefit?
To me, the real measure of whether the action is successful is
how it impacts on income support, because such a lot is riding
on that. What consideration have you given to exemptions from
people having to pay? Has anyone done any work on that?
Adam Sharples: You are absolutely
right to focus on what the financial incentives are for someone
on income support moving into work. However, if you look across
the range of measures that the Government have adopted to address
that issue, you will see that many people moving from income support
into work will now qualify for working tax credit and will get
help with child care. In some parts of the country, we also have
an in-work credit for longer-term claimants, which pays £40
a week for a year—£60 a week in London—on top
of tax credits. From next April, that credit will be available
nationwide for lone parents. Those are just two examples of the
steps that the Government have taken to try to improve that financial
incentive in the first year of moving off benefits and into work.
Angela Browning: My time is up, thank
you.
Q34 Mr. Mitchell: I see from the
Report's summary, on page 7, that: "in 2005-06 over 1.6 million
people entered work from unemployment and almost two million entered
work from economic inactivity." Do we know how many people
left work to either of those two more sedentary categories?
Adam Sharples: I can tell you
the answer to that: 1.4 million people left work for unemployment
and just more than 2 million left work for inactivity.
Q35 Mr. Mitchell: So there is a substantial
turnover.
Adam Sharples: There is, and that
reinforces a point that comes out strongly from the Report. The
labour market is very fluid, with a lot of churning and people
moving between jobs—about 6.5 million a year.
Q36 Mr. Mitchell: So, 1.6 million
entered work from unemployment and 2 million from economic inactivity;
how many entered from Poland?
Adam Sharples: I am afraid that
I do not have the answer at my fingertips. It is a sensitive area
on which I would not want to make any mistakes. [2]
Q37 Mr. Mitchell: Could immigrants
have been in either of those categories?
Chairman: You must have statistics on
immigration; you cannot just brush aside this question. Surely,
you have done work on this. You might not have the figures for
Poland, but you must have broad statistics on immigration from
which to give us a proper answer, or send us a note.
Adam Sharples: We have some data
based on the labour force survey on the number of employed people
who are either foreign nationals or foreign born. We will be happy
to try to answer specific questions based on that data.
Q38 Mr. Mitchell: It would be nice
if you had some figures on it.
Chairman: But can you do that?
Adam Sharples: We will try to
provide answers to questions based on that data. Until we know
what the questions are, I cannot be absolutely certain that they
are answerable.
Chairman: Do you want to make sure, Mr.
Mitchell, that he knows what you want?
Q39 Mr. Mitchell: I want to know
the figures on people entering work from either of those two categories
who are immigrants.
Adam Sharples: We will do our
very best to provide an answer on that.
2 Ev 19-20 Back
| 
