Economy: Productivity

Baroness Sharp of Guildford Excerpts

Wednesday 16th March 2016 Lords Chamber

[Lord O'Neill of Gatley]

My Lords, there are many complex aspects to the ongoing productivity puzzle around the world, and I do not have time to speak to many of the issues that the noble Lord implied in his question. I remind the House that next week we will have a debate on the Budget, when I will have the chance to go into some of the issues in more detail. However, in a recent discussion with independent directors at the Treasury, I was particularly pleased to hear them commend the Government’s efforts to boost productivity through their policies and to address some of the long-term, powerful weaknesses of the UK.

[Baroness Sharp of Guildford (LD)]

My Lords, is the Minister aware that there is a strong link between innovation and productivity and that Britain continues to lag well behind our competitors in business R&D? Can he tell the House precisely how the Government are proposing to encourage businesses to increase their contribution to R&D?

Children and Vulnerable Adults: Abuse

Baroness Sharp of Guildford Excerpts

Thursday 26th June 2014 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Sharp of Guildford]

My Lords, it gives me very great pleasure to thank my noble friend Lady Walmsley for initiating this very topical debate. I declare an interest as a primary school governor responsible for special educational needs. Until last year—I confess that this is a role that I have now “rolled off”—I was also a governor of my local college, where I had responsibility for child protection functions.

I was interested to read in the Guardian this Tuesday about the experiences of a number of secondary school heads who claimed that, although Ofsted is nominally responsible for checking on school protection procedures, in practice this amounted to little more than checking that people had had their Criminal Records Bureau or Disclosure and Barring Service checks appropriately undertaken, and that the school or college had up-to-date child protection policy and procedures, rather than checking on the impact of the policy on the actions of the school. The Guardian spoke to 11 secondary school head teachers who, between them, had had a total of 47 inspections but,

“only twice did the inspectors ask if any safeguarding referrals had been made to the local authority”.

I was interested in this because my experience as a governor with responsibility on the governing board for child protection issues was that when we had an inspection, I was questioned at some length about my knowledge of the policies and procedures that were pursued and how I kept track of what was going on in the college. This led me to think more widely about the role of Ofsted, which is quite topical, given the issues in Birmingham over the Trojan horse issue. It also goes back to one of the central questions in child protection; namely, the role of different agencies and the co-ordination between those agencies. In the Daniel Pelka case in Coventry, for example, his school was concerned about the child’s physical state and his obvious hunger, but did not see fit to follow this up either with social services or with the police. Similarly, it is amazing that in Rochdale, the care homes with which many of these young women were attached asked no questions about the activities of the young people.

Ofsted describes itself as follows:

“The Office for Standards in Education, Children’s Services and Skills (Ofsted) regulates and inspects to achieve excellence in the care of children and young people, and in education and skills for learners of all ages. It regulates and inspects childcare and children’s social care and inspects the Children and Family Court Advisory Support Service (Cafcass), schools, colleges, initial teacher training, work-based learning and skills training, adult and community learning, and education and training in prisons and other secure establishments. It assesses council children’s services, and inspects services for looked after children, safeguarding and child protection”.

As one senior inspector remarked in recent evidence to the House of Commons Select Committee:

“Ofsted is not primarily a child protection agency, but there is absolutely no doubt in my mind that safeguarding is our core business”.

Ofsted, of course, is not just about schools. As the list I just read out indicates, it is pretty unique in cutting across all the other agencies involved in children and being the one thread that links them all together.

This brings me to the nub of what I want to say. Successive issues in child protection have hinged upon early intervention and the need for the various agencies with responsibilities in this area to work together to recognise the early signs of all forms of neglect and abuse and take appropriate action. Within the college, our biggest problem was the difficulty, first, in persuading local social services to inform the college about the young adults and other vulnerable persons who attended the college but who needed help and support, such as 16 year-olds who were or had been on child protection registers; and, secondly, with those same social services departments taking an interest when the college felt that young people might need more help and support.

It is for this reason that I welcome very much the announcement earlier this week that Ofsted had taken the lead in suggesting that various inspections of these agencies that are responsible for children’s services should come together for an integrated programme of inspections. I gather that this will bring together the Care Quality Commission, Her Majesty’s Inspectorate of Constabulary, the Inspectorate of Probation and, where appropriate, the Inspectorate of Prisons. Their focus will be on the effectiveness of local authorities’ health, police, probation and other services in helping to protect and care for children and young people. These are real moves towards bringing the services together and encouraging them to work co-operatively.

Yet we are left with the fact that such moves encourage them to work together but do not make them do so, when we know that to be effective they have to co-operate and work together really closely. In the Children and Families Act that we passed in the previous Session we wished upon these services a duty to co-operate, yet we also know that this comes at a time when those same services are under great pressure to cut costs and suffer considerably from the churn in their personnel. Last year, for example, one in three local authorities saw a change in their children’s services director. We also know that many social workers are carrying a case load of well over 30 cases, whereas the optimum is between 10 and 12.

With the establishment of the academies and free schools, many local authorities now have only minimal education departments and are looking to schools to provide the lead in safeguarding cases. In the local primary school where I am the governor, we have used our pupil premium money to recruit a family liaison worker, but we are in no position to take the lead role in co-ordinating supportive activities for children in need of such support.

To sum up, in issuing new statutory guidance last year in the form of Working Together to Safeguard Children, we are clear that early intervention and integrated services are what we need. We all will these ends, but I am not yet confident that we have willed the means to achieve them.

Economy: Sustainable Jobs

Baroness Sharp of Guildford Excerpts

Thursday 27th June 2013 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Sharp of Guildford]

My Lords, I join others in thanking my noble friend Lady Brinton for introducing this timely debate. The subject is the importance of sustainable jobs to the Exchequer and the British economy, and there is a certain truism in that statement. Obviously the more jobs that we can create, the more tax revenues there are for the Exchequer, and the less it has to pay out in welfare payments—so it is very good for the Exchequer—and the more jobs that we can create the more we add to GDP and therefore to measurable growth, which is the yardstick by which we currently measure success in the economy.

What do I mean by sustainable jobs? There is in fact considerable churn among the unemployed. Some 70% of those who register as unemployed find jobs within six months. However, there are differentials between different quintiles of income distribution. Of the lowest-earning quintile, the bottom 20%, 30% of those who were unemployed had spent less than a year in their current job. This compares to only 7% of workers in the top quintile spending less than a year in their job. Of those in the bottom quintile, 24% were in temporary, not permanent, jobs. One-third of those claiming jobseeker’s allowance claim benefits again within eight months of starting work; 8% of them work less than 16 hours a week.

The good news that we heard from my noble friend Lord German about the way in which the Work Programme is becoming effective perhaps makes one a little more optimistic about what Jobcentre Plus can achieve. However, to some extent its role is to place people in jobs, with the emphasis on getting them off welfare and into work, and perhaps too many of the jobs are short-term and non-sustainable. This is disproportionately the case for the bottom 20%, many of whom have very low or no qualifications, a point again picked up by my noble friend Lord German.

The group I am particularly worried about comprises young people in the 18 to 24 age bracket who now find it extremely difficult to find jobs. As my noble friend Lord German mentioned, the group that experienced unemployment in the 1980s and the 1990s is now referred to as the lost generation, as the unemployment had knock-on effects on their self-confidence and their ability to hold down jobs. Many of them have experienced substantial periods of unemployment since then. It is noticeable that in this recession there has been relatively less unemployment. Nevertheless, 12% of the 22 to 24 age group who make a new claim to Jobcentre Plus have spent at least half of the past four years on benefit, so while there is good news here we also have to address problems, such as the paradox raised by my noble friend Lady Brinton in introducing the debate, of there being very high levels of skills shortages in some industries. Currently, 16% of vacancies exist because employers cannot find people with the critical skills. As I think she mentioned, this applies particularly to intermediate skill levels—the three-year apprenticeships for craftsmen and the two years on top of the three-year apprenticeships to gain the equivalent of higher national diplomas or foundation degrees. We are particularly short of people qualified at technician level.

As my noble friend Lord German mentioned, although there is no relationship between youth unemployment and immigration, it is certainly true that many employers are importing people with these skills because we are not growing them ourselves. As I say, a somewhat difficult paradox exists at the moment, as we know we have these crucial skills shortages, which are limiting the degree to which some of our new industries can grow, yet we do not have the skilled people to fill the vacancies that need to be filled. We are failing to train our own people to fill these vacancies, so the apprenticeship programme is very important and is a great success story, and we are beginning to see some of these vacancies being filled due to that programme. However, that takes time. To train somebody to HND level can take five years. We are beginning to see this progression within the apprenticeship programme, but it is a slow process.

As I say, the fact that 1.2 million young people now have apprenticeships is good news. However, those apprenticeships are still disproportionately at level 2: that is, one or two-year apprenticeships whereby participants qualify immediately as plumbers, electricians, retail workers or workers in hospitality or care services. The level 2 qualification is now the minimum qualification that is required. We are seeing more young people going on from a level 2 qualification to gain a level 3 qualification, which is the craftsman qualification, but sadly not nearly enough are doing so. Of the 1.2 million, only about 300,000 are going on to the higher-level qualification. We need to see many more of them proceed to the level 3 qualification. Indeed, the Government have made it known that they would like to see most apprentices move on to a level 3 qualification.

The other problem that has arisen is that these apprenticeships have been taken up disproportionately by 19 to 25 year-olds, and indeed by those in the 25-plus group, as opposed to 16 to 18 year-olds. In many senses this is very good and reflects the fact that employers want to take on as apprentices those who have some experience of work and who they can rely on to get to work on time. Nevertheless, it creates something of a problem for the 16 to 18 year-olds. For that reason, the Government have created the trainee programme, which is a pre-apprenticeship training programme. Yesterday, we had the good news that this pre-apprenticeship training programme is now being extended to the over-19s. It had been concentrated on 16 to 18 year-olds, but its extension is good news. However, it is very important that we get more of these younger people into apprenticeships that not only provide them with very satisfactory training programmes but help them to get satisfactory, sustainable jobs over the longer term.

This raises three questions that I would like to put to the Minister. Are we doing enough to make sure that these young people know about the opportunities that are available in the apprenticeship field? Raising the participation age in schools means that next year those aged 17 will stay on in education or training. Training is very important, but many of them, perhaps too many of them, may be told by their schools that the choice is for them to stay on at school in the sixth form and take subjects that may or may not include some form of vocational training, rather than being told about alternatives such as apprenticeships or other more practical vocational college courses. We need to look to the schools careers service, but that is experiencing real problems. Indeed, it has collapsed to a considerable extent. Does the Minister feel that the careers service is sufficiently engaged in schools, particularly in advising young people aged 13 to 14 to know what opportunities are available, as they face crucial choices at that age?

Secondly, is Jobcentre Plus geared too much towards finding short-term jobs rather than helping young people into training to enable them to get sustainable jobs? I, too, was present at the APPG meeting at which two principals from FE colleges gave evidence that indicated that a number of young people were taken off college courses by Jobcentre Plus in order to fill short-term job vacancies. Rather than thinking holistically about what was necessary to train the young people, they were pushed into short-term jobs that were jobs not careers, if you like, and were not given the opportunity to develop a career. Should we not learn rather more from the Scandinavians, who see unemployment as an opportunity for people of all ages to upgrade their skills and move into higher levels of employment within their range?

Finally, it is entirely in this country’s interests to minimise unemployment and maximise job creation, but in doing so it is also vital to upgrade the skills profile of the population. We have succeeded in encouraging a lot of young people to go on to university, but far too many still leave school with no, or low, qualifications. They are the ones who find it difficult to find jobs. I suggest that for these young people unemployment should be seized upon as an opportunity to undertake training to gain a career and a sustainable job and should not be seen just as time out before being pushed into another short-term job.