Place-based Employment Support Programmes

Amanda Hack Excerpts

Tuesday 10th February 2026 Westminster Hall

[Amanda Hack (North West Leicestershire) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Dr Murrison. I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Southport (Patrick Hurley) for giving us the opportunity to speak in this debate. In my career before being elected, I was involved in a number of successful place-based employment schemes, including having direct responsibility for delivering some of this work within a housing association. I am therefore a strong advocate for the approach, and I will come on to that later in my speech.

As a member of the Work and Pensions Committee, I visited Durham last week to speak to participants and employers on the Connect to Work programme run by DurhamEnable and Triage. It offers voluntary supported employment initiatives designed to help people with learning disabilities, autism, health conditions and complex barriers to employment to find and sustain meaningful work. Such programmes offer a great example of why and how place-based employment really works.

Durham uses the supported employment model, “place, train, maintain”, which focuses on finding the right job first, and then offering training and ongoing support, and I will break that down a little further. Stage one is place: finding the right job for an individual and emphasising that employers are key to delivery and engaging with future employees. Working with the person, as well as the local job market, to discover who they are is a key principle.

Stage two is training. DurhamEnable ensures that future employees are benefiting from the right support. It was also clear that that support inspired confidence. One person we spoke to had recently been made redundant from a long-term job. DurhamEnable had helped them to navigate the more complicated process nowadays of job applications that they had never needed to do before. Stage three is maintain, which includes offering ongoing support to participants and employers to navigate reasonable adjustments in the workplace while applying for such things as Access to Work.

I will briefly mention JobsPlus, which has already been mentioned, and information from the Learning and Work Institute. The latter found that in 2003, social housing tenants were nearly twice as likely to be out of work and more than twice as likely to be disabled. When in work, social housing tenants are twice as likely to be in lower skilled work on average and are paid a third less than people who live in other housing tenures.

JobsPlus, which is being piloted in 10 sites across England, is a key initiative. It brings together tenants, landlords and key agencies to provide targeted support to those who need it. It works because of that joint commitment and the targeted support that is provided. In fact, it is the simplicity of the scheme that works overall. The non-reliance on system-based referrals sets JobsPlus apart from most other employment programmes. All the programme needs to know is where somebody lives, and then it simply helps them.

It will be no surprise to Members that as a long-standing housing professional, I advocate the work done by housing associations. East Midlands Housing, based in North West Leicestershire, is not only a great local employer, but part of the Placeshapers initiative, which is about creating place. That is another important part of employer-based support, because it means putting support right at the centre of the community. Above all, it is the community that knows how best to boost engagement and to support one another.

I conclude by emphasising that the key point to take away from today is that we do not need to reinvent the wheel to be successful; we just need to look at what is being done already. I agree with my hon. Friend the Member for Southport about limited contracting. My experience over two decades is that we have great schemes, but they are often reinvented, which means we then lack consistency. Consistency develops our communities and the long-term commitment from employers that we need to see real change in place-based support. When schemes come and go, momentum is lost. Can the Minister tell us how we will breed that consistency to ensure that place-based schemes have a seat at the employment support table for the long term, and not just the short term?