Jobs and the Unemployed

Baroness Chapman of Darlington Excerpts

Wednesday 7th July 2010 Commons Chamber

[Mr Heald]

I think the hon. Gentleman is wrong, because the headline figure shows an increase of 5% over the past six months, but he is right about the differences between sectors and regions. He makes an important point, which we should not ignore, and I shall return to it later in my remarks. However, Sir John Rose’s point was also well made. On the question of what needs to happen in this country, the role of apprenticeships should not be ignored, and 50,000 more apprenticeships are welcome, particularly given the good quality of education that they provide in technical areas.

In the latest CIPD survey, there is a lot of criticism of the abilities and work-readiness of our graduates, and there is a lot to be said for schemes such as internships, which get people ready for work so that they can do a good job as soon as they enter employment. I represent North East Hertfordshire, and a good thing about Hertfordshire is that we, as a county, have a series of institutions that are business-facing but educational. Our colleges are business-facing, and our university is well known as business-facing, which means that the county asks businesses what skills they need and our university provides the skilled workers. In terms of the employment service in Hertfordshire, if a graduate who is placed with a Hertfordshire company needs an extra skill, our university will teach them it, and our colleges all feed into that. It is no coincidence that we have the lowest number of NEETs in the country.

[Mrs Jenny Chapman (Darlington) (Lab)]

Teesside university, the university of the year, is basing itself in my constituency, and I am quite interested in the hon. Gentleman’s idea about graduates not being prepared for the workplace. Will he please identify exactly when in the history of university education employers said, “All our graduates are prepared for the workplace”? When was that golden age of preparedness?

[Mr Heald]

The hon. Lady makes an extremely good point, which is that we are not good enough as a country at preparing people for work. If we look at why we have so many workless families, and why employers are dissatisfied, it goes right back to the beginning—to school. The fact is that 40,000 young people leave school every year in this country who cannot read, write and add up properly. It is not good enough that we do not have the technical people we need in business coming through. This is a failure of the whole system that needs to be addressed. [Interruption.] The hon. Lady chunters, but Sir John Rose is probably one of the most eminent chief executive officers in the country, he is running a company that is a great success story, and he is right to highlight the need to do better on technical education and skills.

Over the years, we have had a range of employment programmes that have not succeeded as well as we would have hoped. A few years ago, the Work and Pensions Committee looked into what contractors can achieve. We did a major report on how the Department for Work and Pensions commissions employment programmes and the role of prime contractors. We were encouraged by the international examples. We looked at what had happened in Australia and visited the Netherlands to look at what was being done there. That seemed to show that contractors were able to provide programmes more cheaply, but also to get better results. Professor Finn, who was advising the Committee, found that Australia was achieving, through “contractorisation”, an improvement of about 10% in job readiness and people’s ability to find placements. In the Netherlands, we were told very strongly that the people who ran these contractor companies were able to specialise provided that they were given enough flexibility in respect of the barriers to employment that there have been and still are.

Looking at the picture overall, I have reached the view that as soon as a person is not working, and we are aware of that, they must be interviewed to find out what the barriers to employment are that they face and start to tackle them. If somebody has basic skills problems, we need to get on to that at an early stage and tackle it—and equally, if somebody needs child care or has a problem with addiction. These are all areas where action is required. In relation to the work capability assessment for incapacity benefit, a lot of people have not been seen for many years, and the on-flow that has been examined so far seems to suggest that many of them are capable of doing some kinds of work, but not necessarily all kinds. Those people need considerable help.

If we are to help people who have the classic problems suffered by those on incapacity benefit—musculoskeletal problems such as back injuries, and mental health problems such as stress, and worse—it is very important to get in with an early intervention. More can be done by employers, the NHS and the system as a whole—including, perhaps, the companies that provide insurance for people who are unable to work—in getting together to see whether they can do more to get this help in quickly. It is not acceptable that somebody of working age who has a back injury and needs physiotherapy has to wait 10 weeks for an appointment whereas if they were seen quickly they could get back to work. I ask the Minister whether it is possible to have liaison and discussion with the NHS, employers and insurance companies to try to do better in getting involved more quickly and stopping some of these conditions becoming chronic in the first place. With back problems, that means physiotherapy; with mental health problems, it may mean talking therapies as well as the drug treatments for depression of the sort that are available these days.

Yesterday, I talked to people at the National Ankylosing Spondylitis Society, who said that all too often they have to wait a long time for the treatment they need to deal with their condition. For people of working age, we need to prioritise their health and have something amounting to a national occupational health approach so that we do not end up with a lot of people who become chronically ill. It is well known that someone who has been out of work with a disability for two years is very unlikely to work again.

I welcome the Work programme. The criticisms that have been made of it are a little unfair, if I may say so. The fact is that the economy has been put into a terrible situation by the previous Government. The future jobs fund is a scheme that has only just started, and it is not as though it is not being replaced by something that is probably better—namely, more apprenticeships. It is a bit disingenuous to describe it as a jobs fund, as though these are permanent jobs, when they are really job placements for six months.