Unpaid Work Experience (Prohibition) Bill [HL]

Baroness Brady Excerpts

2nd reading (Hansard): House of Lords
Friday 27th October 2017 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Brady (Con)]

My Lords, it is a privilege to speak in this debate today, not least because it is on a subject about which I am hugely passionate. I fully support the aim of the Bill, which is to ensure that all work experience placements that go on longer than four weeks pay the national minimum wage. Others have spoken with great conviction, in particular the noble Lords, Lord Holmes and Lord Mitchell, on the issue of internships, all of which I fully support, but I shall focus my remarks on the importance of work experience and the role it can play in getting young people ready for the workplace.

Work experience is just that; it is a taste of the workplace, allowing some understanding of what it is like, in order to enable young people to make one of the hardest transitions we all ever have to make in our life: moving out of education and into work. It helps young people understand what careers might be right for them and what they can expect when they get into work, but it is very obviously not a job. They are not doing something an employer needs to have done for no cost. It should be for the employer to tailor a programme that gives participants as much exposure to the realities of the labour market as possible, as well as some insights into that particular sector.

One of the biggest challenges employers face is that school leavers are simply not ready for work. They can lack even basic soft skills, such as confidence, engagement, conduct and punctuality. That is why I am very proud to be associated with what Barclays is doing with its LifeSkills programme—I declare an interest as an ambassador and as chair of the LifeSkills council. It offers young people the chance to build job-hunting toolkits, helps them with CVs, covering letters, LinkedIn profiles, and even the role of social media in improving an application or a CV in order to get a job. It offers interactive challenges to help young people identify the skills they may already have, to help sell those to an employer. Most vitally, it offers a portal to help young people access real work experience opportunities—but, crucially, work experience that is relevant to them, so they can see for themselves if the career they have thought about is what they expected. LifeSkills is completely free of charge and has helped 5 million young people gain valuable skills to be work-ready and organise work experience.

It has even had to offer virtual reality work experience to help bridge the gap. This is a video-based programme in which a young person can journey through a day of what it would be like if they were at work—meeting virtual colleagues and completing virtual tasks. That is because even though 66% of employers believe that work experience is valuable in recruiting young people, only 30% actually offer it. This means that it is for employers to do more in offering these placements to young people, and it is in their interest to do so. So I think we need a change of mindset from one in which employers think of work experience programmes as something they can exploit to get something done for nothing, to a community-based approach where a business asks: what can my business do to give a young person the support they need to make the transition to the workplace and get on the road to having a career? Instead of complaining about the skills pipeline, employers should step up and do something about it. They should ask what they can do to offer more quality workplace experiences and be ambitious and creative about how they do it.

This is no longer about free labour, as the Bill makes clear; it is about making a contribution to improving the life chances, skills and workplace readiness of a young person, as well as finding possible recruits for the future. Now, what business would not be interested in that?