“Get Britain Working” White Paper

Baroness Sherlock Excerpts

Wednesday 27th November 2024 Lords Chamber

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Department for Work and Pensions (Baroness Sherlock) (Lab)]

My Lords, I thank both noble Lords for their very constructive responses. It is a marked difference from the other place, but plus ça change. I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Stedman-Scott, both for her welcome for the White Paper and for the constructive way in which she approaches these questions. I pay tribute to the work that she has done over many years at Tomorrow’s People and looking at this. I think we will find as we go on that she and I probably share more of an interest—a commonality—in these questions. I may differ with her on some of the choices that her Government made, but we share a view that we have to do what is right to get people into work and to support them to stay there.

Let me do the formal bit first. Yesterday the Government published the Get Britain Working White Paper, bringing forward what we see as the biggest reforms to employment support in a generation. We have already heard that the UK now faces a significant challenge. We have a near-record 2.8 million people out of work due to long-term sickness or disability. Add to that that one in eight of our young people is not in education, employment or training. A stat that I had not seen before but that shocked me is that in England almost a fifth of working-age adults do not have even the equivalent of one GCSE. If we are starting from that position, how can we possibly carry on as we are and expect things not to carry on the way they have been?

Addressing challenges on that scale needs a different approach. We are determined to start a process that we know will take time but will continue to drive down economic inactivity and create opportunity. It will involve fundamental reform of the Department for Work and Pensions, focusing it firmly as a department for work. It will mean overhauling Jobcentre Plus to create, as we have heard, a new employment service, bringing it together with the National Careers Service in England.

The noble Baroness, Lady Stedman-Scott, asked whether we would give people help to stay in work. She is so right: our aim is not just to get people into jobs. The whole point of the new service is that it will not just be for those out of work, because it will be careers as well. It is there to get people to get into a job, get on in work and then progress and develop a career. We have to turn this country from one of inactivity, low pay and low-opportunity jobs to one that can transform not just the lives of individuals but the country, so the system will be universal and do all those things.

Supporting young people has to be crucial. We will improve access to training and job opportunities and establish the youth guarantee that was mentioned, so that young people are earning or learning. As a first step, we are working with mayoral authorities to set up the eight youth guarantee trailblazers with £45 million of funding. I think there is a dialogue to be had between the two Front Benches, because one reason that we are doing trailblazers is that we need to know what works. The noble Baroness, Lady Stedman-Scott, is absolutely right: if we find out that something works, we do more of it; if we find out that it does not work, we do something different. That is why we need trailblazers to know what will work. How can we better get local and central government working together to give people better support when they are young and desperately need opportunity?

Local knowledge is crucial. The White Paper is based on the assumption that we want to empower local leaders to know best what is there for their community and show leadership. Every area in England will be supported to bring forward a local “Get Britain Working” plan, and there will be £125 million going out for those eight trailblazers, looking right across England and including one in Wales. Three of the English trail- blazers will also receive a share of £45 million for dedicated input from the NHS. So often, health is a barrier to getting people into work. We have to join up public services to have any chance of getting this right.

We also know that good work is good for health. We want to get the NHS and the wider health system working to improve employment outcomes, so we will target extra support on driving down waiting times. But we also have to address the key public health issues that contribute to worklessness. We will expand access to expert employment advisers as part of treatment and care pathways.

We are also committed to tackling the root causes of mental health problems. The youth guarantee will support young people to access and navigate their way through mental health services, and there will be specialist mental health support in every school and health professionals available in colleges. We have prioritised funding, despite the tough spending round, to expand NHS talking therapies and the individual placement support programme.

There is loads more going on. We have an independent “Keep Britain Working” review, in partnership with business and led by Sir Charlie Mayfield, who used to chair John Lewis. That will help us to understand the role of employers in creating and maintaining healthy jobs and healthy workplaces. We have set out the principles to reform health and disability benefits, to ensure that the system supports people who can work to start or remain in work, in a way that is fair but also fiscally sustainable. We have launched the guidance for Connect to Work, our new locally led supported employment programme.

I was asked a number of questions. I probably will not get through them all in the time, but there were a few practical ones. The noble Baroness, Lady Stedman-Scott, asked about fit notes. She may remember that there was a call for evidence about fit notes. That closed in July and we have received more than 1,900 responses. Those are being analysed at the moment, and the results will inform our approach going forward. On the question of work coach support, I completely relate to her comments about the Friday girl. At the heart of this is the relationship between the work coach and the people they try to support into work. If we can get that right, all kinds of things are possible.

I have long said—I think I said this to the noble Baroness when we were in opposite positions—that I have been worried for some time that the danger was that our system was still designed as though the major challenge facing the labour market was unemployed people who did not want to work. However, for quite some time it has been people who struggle to work for a range of reasons to do with health or disability, and the system has to be able to address all of that. We are trying to turn this around to focus on making sure people get the support they need, at the time they need it, in the way that works best for them, so they can get jobs and keep them.

The noble Baroness has loads of experience working with young people, and, if it is going to work, we need to make sure that work coaches have that. We will set up a work coach academy to make sure that we can drive up the skills of our work coaches. That will be at the heart of making this work.

I was also asked about GDP per capita and productivity. GDP per capita is essentially about growth and we have to get this right. If we are going to deal with growth, we have to deal with the fundamentals of the economy. I will not go through the pantomime of mentioning black holes because, hey, life is short.

[Noble Lords]

Oh, go on.

[Baroness Sherlock (Lab)]

If you insist. My Lords, this Government inherited a massive black hole—

[Noble Lords]

Oh!

[Baroness Sherlock (Lab)]

Oh well. The reality is that it was quite clear to us that the Government needed to take some difficult decisions to deliver long-term stability and growth. Businesses need stability, infra- structure and a health service and transport system that function, to be able to operate.

We recognise the pressures on business, and our Ministers have been out there speaking to the Federation of Small Businesses, the Chambers of Commerce and the CBI. They are very keen to work with us on this, because they know that their members have hundreds of thousands of vacancies they cannot fill. One-third of those are because of skills gaps. They know that 300,000 people every year fall out of work due to a health or disability problems. We have to support them and support the individuals dealing with that. We want our jobcentres to serve business and to be not a place you go as a last resort when you cannot hire anyone but a place of first resort where you find people and get the learning, experience and support to make your business function.

I would really defend against the challenge that the programme is too small. This is one-year funding for a reason. It is because these are trailblazers to figure out what works. We know what does not work. If what we had been doing worked, we would not have 2.8 million people who are out of work due to long-term sickness or disability. We have to test processes to make sure they work. We are going to learn from that, but we know this is a long-term process.

I should add for the record that many of the policy areas described in the White Paper are devolved in Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales. To be clear, in those cases, the focus on the White Paper is on the actions of the UK Government in England. But we will be working closely with the Scottish and Welsh Governments to ensure that everything we do dovetails well with existing devolved support. We are keen to understand what works well across the UK and to learn from Northern Ireland’s experience of delivering employment and career support.

I recognise that these are ambitious reforms. I know they will take time and they will need help—not just from the noble Baroness, Lady Stedman-Scott, but from stakeholders and experts across the economy. But we can do this. Together, we can build a labour market that gives everyone the opportunity to be the person they want to be. Also, we can be the country we all want us to be. To do that, we need to get Britain working again.

[Lord Laming (CB)]

My Lords, I thank the Minister for setting out the numbers of young people we are talking about who are not in employment or education. The Minister will know that earlier this year the Public Services Committee of this House set out a report based on a study of the transitional arrangements many of these young people experience as they move from school to employment, especially those with a disability or long-term health problems.

We had the extremes in the evidence. Some were simply brushed aside as being unemployable for a lifetime. For others, services and employers at local level got together and produced some wonderful opportunities to completely change the life chances of these young people. Could the Minister assure the House that the Government will look at this report and take forward the recommendations? They were considerable and intended to achieve some of the outcomes set out in this paper.

[Baroness Sherlock (Lab)]

I am grateful to the noble Lord for that intervention and also of course for his many years of experience and work in the field of social policy and social care. I very much feel that what he described is what we are trying to do, and I absolutely assure him that the report will be looked at in detail and we will go through the recommendations carefully. One challenge we have is that it is too easy to write off young people. Nowadays, they are judged: the assumption is that they are not trying very hard and the expectations are there. Actually, I do not meet young people who do not want to be out there building a life. It is just that, sometimes, the challenges feel too big. If we can find the right way to support them—if we can get proper mental health support in place and if we can help employers to know how best to work with people who have mental health challenges—we can get people into jobs and they can stay in them.

In the years that I worked with single parents, for example, one thing I learned is that if people have found it difficult to get a job, if they find one that works for them, they are the most loyal employees anyone could get, because they have found a way in and something that works, and it becomes a brilliant relationship. So I am grateful to the noble Lord for that and I will take a careful look at it.

[Baroness Browning (Con)]

My Lords, on Friday morning, I was in a Jobcentre Plus office with a 50 year- old woman who has always worked—but not for the last two years, following a major spinal operation and rehabilitation. She is now ready to get back into work. When we went into that office, we were told that she was not entitled to any support from a disability job coach or adviser, although she is in receipt of PIP. The reason given was that she does not claim an unemployment benefit. What does the Minister suggest I do next to help this person? Why are we discriminating against disabled people wanting to get into work, whether they are claiming a benefit or not?

[Baroness Sherlock (Lab)]

I am sorry to hear of the experience that the noble Baroness’s friend or family member had. What she said goes right to the heart of what we are doing. The point of the national jobs and careers service is that it is not just for people claiming benefits: it is for anybody who needs help getting into work, getting back to work or getting on in work. If we narrow it down to simply being about benefits, we will end up putting the incentives in the wrong place.

One thing that worries us about how the system has worked is that a lot of work coaches’ time is spent checking up to see whether everyone has ticked all the boxes and whether those on benefits have done all the right things. Of course, conditionality will always be a part of the system, but we want to see whether there are ways to reform that so that we can test different ways of making sure that people stay connected and work coaches can spend more time devoted to individuals —including the person that the noble Baroness described —to get them back into work if they want. There are 600,000 people out there who are long-term sick or disabled who want to work, but somehow they are not able to. We have to do something about that and we are determined to.

[Baroness Lister of Burtersett (Lab)]

My Lords, there is much to welcome in these proposals for reform of employment support and their aim of better health and good work. But can my noble friend please assure me, first, that the emphasis will be more on carrots than on sticks? Secondly, can she assure me that transforming a department for welfare into a department for work will not mean further social security cuts or abandoning any attempt to repair the serious damage wreaked on the social security system over the past 14 years, at the cost of its role in addressing poverty and providing genuine security?

[Baroness Sherlock (Lab)]

Let me reassure my noble friend of two things. First, we are absolutely committed to tackling the scourge of child poverty, and the Government are completely committed to making sure that how the social security system works is part of that—so I can reassure her on that front.

Secondly, we often talk in terms of carrots and sticks, but I am not sure that that is very helpful. Most people want to get on: they want a satisfying job that will be rewarding in itself and that will also feed them and their family. People want the same things that we want for them, but lots of things get in the way. Our job is to set the system up so that it is aligned to go with that—to get barriers out of the way, to support people, to give them all the help they can get and to get them over the line.

Obviously, some people will not be able to work on grounds of severe disability or perhaps sickness, or maybe their caring responsibilities do not make that possible. The Department for Work and Pensions is there to support them, as it is to support pensioners and those who need our help. A small number of people really do not want to work and, frankly, they should. We are quite clear that we will support them and, in return, we expect them to do their bit. But, in between, surely we can design a system that is not just carrots or sticks but goes with the grain and helps people to be themselves.

[Baroness Manzoor (Con)]

My Lords, I welcome the White Paper and the Minister’s comments. I know her total passion for trying to unlock the potential of young people. In that spirit, my question is about education and the links between education and skills. She mentioned one GCSE. I am concerned that the financial literacy of our young people is very poor and we need to lay particular emphasis on that. I would also welcome the support of the Government to unlock apprenticeships, with better conditions for employers to take on young people much earlier than they currently do.

[Baroness Sherlock (Lab)]

I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Manzoor, and commend her for her work in the field of financial services over many years. She makes an important point about financial literacy. It is an interesting question. To give a simple example, if I go into a supermarket, I will sometimes see an offer on four cans of tomatoes which will actually be more expensive per can than the single cans sitting next to them. If people do not have basic maths, they will not even have the life skills they need when they most need them. If people do not understand what an APR means, how are they to know whether they are getting a decent deal, never mind beginning to think about pensions? I absolutely agree about the importance of that.

I also think it is really important to get apprenticeships right. One thing we are doing is putting money into more foundation apprenticeships, to give more young people the chance to get in much earlier. If people can get a foot on the ladder, or just get in the door, they can be inspired by something: it is a chance to do something, see something, achieve something, often to just be part of a team. After that, who knows where it can go? The noble Baroness raised two important points and I thank her for them.

[Baroness Butler-Sloss (CB)]

My Lords, I have two questions. I very much support the eight trailblazers for the youth guarantee, but what is meant by “the west of England”? Will the Government take further education to be as important as higher education?

[Baroness Sherlock (Lab)]

The main trailblazers are based on combined authorities and the youth trailblazers are being negotiated, so I will have to come back to the noble and learned Baroness on the boundaries of the west of England. On further education, I am absolutely supportive of that. The Government have already invested an additional £300 million of revenue funding into further education to support young people to get the skills they need, and are providing £300 million of capital investment to support colleges to maintain, improve and ensure the suitability of their estate. If she has been to one recently, she will know how much that is needed in some parts. On the apprenticeships fund, £40 million is being directed into delivering shorter and foundation apprenticeships in key sectors. We think that is a way to help people to move forward in the skills area.

[Baroness Blackstone (Lab)]

My Lords, following up on the point made opposite about apprentices, does my noble friend the Minister agree that nothing less than an apprenticeship guarantee is required? If so, what steps will the Government take, working with employers, to make sure that there is an apprenticeship guarantee, so that the many young people who are leaving school and are unable to get access to an apprenticeship will in future be able to do so?

[Baroness Sherlock (Lab)]

My Lords, the aim of our youth guarantee is to go further than that. We want every young person to be guaranteed to get either high-quality training, an apprenticeship or a job, or the support to get into one of those places. There are many young people for whom an apprenticeship is absolutely the right thing; there are others for whom more training is necessary, and others for whom a job is the right way forward. That is what we want: at that age, that is the choice that people should have. They should be earning or learning, and a job, an apprenticeship or education is the way forward.

[Baroness Smith of Llanfaes (PC)]

My Lords, I welcome this White Paper, especially the emphasis on supporting young people into work and recognising that there are lots of different pathways that are suitable for people. It is difficult to distinguish what parts are relevant to Wales. There is reference in the White Paper to the trailblazer in Wales, so can the Minister clarify how this will work and where in Wales it will be?

[Baroness Sherlock (Lab)]

I share this: I have a grid that tells me which bits are devolved and which are not in different parts, because I struggle to keep track of it. The noble Baroness probably knows much more about this than I do, for which I pay tribute. Essentially, in Wales, as she will know, health is devolved; employment support, including youth, skills and training, is devolved; careers are devolved; and welfare reform is reserved. We are going to work with the Welsh Government; for example, there is already a youth guarantee in Wales, as I am sure she is aware. Some of the principles in our White Paper go with the grain of work that has already begun in Wales and we will work with the Welsh Government on a Wales-based trailblazer and to figure out how best we can join up with what they are already doing, where the gaps are and how we can learn together. It will be very much a partnership question. In Scotland, it is slightly different again—not that she asked about Scotland—because different parts are devolved. In Northern Ireland, it is pretty much all transferred. We have already begun speaking to officials in all the devolved Administrations with a view to taking this forward.

[Lord Spellar (Lab)]

My Lords, paragraph 45 refers to the fact that the economically inactive are

“more likely (than the population as a whole) to have no qualifications, and some may also face other complex disadvantages, including homelessness, drug or alcohol addiction and contact with the criminal justice system”—

I stress that final point. In many cases, especially regarding criminal convictions and paper qualifications, these factors become insuperable barriers to gaining employment, even when they have no relevance to the actual requirements of the job concerned. Given that the best way to get a job is to have a job, I ask the Minister to look critically at these discriminatory practices, which are as prevalent in the public sector as in the private sector, and are not only damaging to individuals and their families but incredibly economically inefficient as they impact on hundreds of thousands of our citizens.

[Baroness Sherlock (Lab)]

I thank my noble friend, and I do not need persuading of this. One of the most inspiring things I have seen in the DWP—I did not start it, so I can say this—has been work with prison work coaches. They are based inside prisons, working with those who are preparing to leave, to try to make sure that we can get them into a job. I am working closely with my colleague, the noble Lord, Lord Timpson, and our departments are working together to try to find the best ways in which we can ease the transition from prisons into work. When we look at the levels of recidivism, which are staggeringly high—never mind what happens in young offender institutions—we know that, if we cannot crack this, it will not only be a potentially lifelong challenge for an individual, which they will never really overcome, but a huge problem for the state, both in the loss of opportunity for that individual and their talents and in terms of future crime. My noble friend raises a really important point.

[Baroness Gohir (CB)]

My Lords, I refer to my interests as set out in the register. Black and Asian women, particularly Bangladeshi and Pakistani women, have high unemployment rates and find it very difficult to get back into work after 15 or 20 years of caring responsibilities; for example, they may not have the digital skills they need. What are the Government doing to get these women into work? Are the apprenticeship schemes aimed at returners to work reaching these groups of women?

[Baroness Sherlock (Lab)]

The noble Baroness raises an important point and I pay tribute to her work with the Muslim Women’s Network and with so many in her community. There is a range of support out there and I have seen some good examples. On Employability Day, I spoke to one programme which was doing fantastic work with women from a number of minority communities who were returning to work, or maybe had never been in work, after their children had grown up. They had very particular barriers and the scheme was designed to focus on them.

One of our challenges is finding a way to get people not only into work, which is really important, but to develop in work. I am sure the noble Baroness will know this better than I do, but if you look at the distribution of people who are in jobs at national minimum wage or national living wage, there are overwhelmingly more young people and older people, but also Bangladeshi people and Pakistani people are much more likely to be in low-paid jobs. The one thing we know from the evidence is that if you start at a low pay, you stay in low pay—it is very hard to break out of it. One of the challenges in the new system, which we are determined to get right, as we develop the new national jobs and careers service, is: how do we help people, whatever their background, to have the opportunity to get in, but also to get on and have ambitions?

[Lord Bellingham (Con)]

My Lords, in opposition, the Labour Party said it would be the most business-friendly ever. However, since the last Budget, is the Minister aware that every single employer organisation, ranging from the CBI and the IoD to the NFU and the British Retail Consortium, have condemned the Budget as being thoroughly anti-business? Can she answer the question from the noble Baroness on the shadow Front Bench about how the Government are now going to repair relations with business? How can the Government deliver these programmes and strategies without the good will and support of business and wealth creators?

[Baroness Sherlock (Lab)]

As I said earlier, we have been very grateful that business and business organisations have made it clear that they do want to work with us on this, because there is a clear area of common interest. There are currently over 800,000 vacancies in the economy and businesses need to be able to recruit people, but they cannot do so.

On the broader point, I try not to play the political pantomime game on the Front Bench, but I have to say to the noble Lord that if we had not had the economic crash we did, we would not have to take the measures we have done. We did not want to take them, but we have to repair the economy and our public services, and get our economy growing again, and this Government will do what it takes.

[Lord Beamish (Lab)]

My Lords, the community and voluntary sector plays a key part in getting people into work, not only offering placements but actively working with groups that are difficult to reach. Does my noble friend agree that a lot of those voluntary and community groups are pushed out of this space because they are small and cannot bid for the contracts put forward by the DWP? That is an area she could look at, to ensure that groups such as the Just for Women Centre in County Durham, which does great work, can actually get those contracts.

[Baroness Sherlock (Lab)]

My noble friend knows that the way to my heart is to mention County Durham. I should probably declare an interest, although it is so old that it is not an interest. Once upon a time I contracted with the then DWP to run employment programmes for single parents. That was about 100 years ago, so it is probably too old to be there now.

In response to my noble friend’s question, he is absolutely right that it is very hard for small voluntary organisations to bid for national contracts, yet they can often reach people that central government will never be able to. We have heard examples from around the House today. One of my hopes is that the more we can localise things, the easier it will be to involve a range of partners from an area, and people will know who the good players in their area are. Furthermore, the issues are different in different areas; as the noble Baroness, Lady Gohir, explained, some areas may have a large Muslim or Bangladeshi community, and in other areas there may be large numbers of young people and single parents. Under this system, each area will have a better sense of what its problems are and which partners can be worked with. The aim of the trailblazer areas is to see what difference that system can make.

[Lord Sikka (Lab)]

My Lords, I have received a message from a person in Birmingham with 20 years’ engineering experience who has been unemployed and is now a zero-hours contract worker. He says that engineering has been decimated by high energy costs and that our energy costs are more than double those of the French and four times those of the Chinese. When are the Government going to control energy costs and save skilled jobs? Over to you, Minister.

[Baroness Sherlock (Lab)]

I never like to say that something is outside my range but sometimes it really is. The Government have a very clear strategy on green energy and building green jobs, and on building pathways to secure British energy. The creation of Great British Energy and the strategies around it will all make a difference. I am afraid that is the limit of my knowledge.

[Lord Sterling of Plaistow (Con)]

My Lords, not that many years ago, I had the pleasure of being chairman of the National Maritime Museum and got to know that area very well—it had a lot of unemployment. One day I was introduced to somebody who came along to the museum who was fourth generation on the dole. He said that it was not worth his while, considering the size of his house, to consider a job unless it paid somewhere near £48,000. I bring it up because everybody here, I would suggest, was born with a work ethic and was proud to get a job, but so many people now find all the ways possible to avoid doing so. I know how much this means to the Minister and my question is: how are we going to get people off the dole? There are millions of people who should not be on it at all.

[Baroness Sherlock (Lab)]

This is such a hard one. I have no doubt that there are some people out there who really do not want to work and cannot be bothered. They would not get £48,000 in benefits—they would not be able to—but I am sure there are such people out there. However, I have been around this game a long time and my experience is that most people do want to work; there are just huge problems and the figures back that up. We do not have a massive unemployment problem; we have a massive inactivity problem. We have a physical health problem, a mental health problem and a crisis of sickness, disability and an ageing population.

The challenge of years gone by may have been to make sure that everybody wanted to work. The challenge of today’s economy is to make sure that everybody is able to work, and that they are able to get the job they need to help transform our economy. If we do not do that, businesses cannot fill vacancies, the economy cannot grow and nothing can happen. We are going to do it.