Jobseeker’s Allowance (Work Experience) (Amendment) Regulations 2011

Baroness Thomas of Winchester Excerpts

Wednesday 2nd March 2011 Grand Committee

[Lord German]

My Lords, I thank the Minister for introducing the regulations. My noble friend has outlined some of the key issues relating to why these amendments and changes are necessary. I certainly welcome them.

I shall start by explaining why, in my view, work experience is so valuable. If experience is the key word, then what is the most valuable experience that anybody looking for a job can have? It is surely the experience of real work. I shall come back to mandation, or the mandatory element, in a moment because, in any real work there is an element of mandatoriness—you turn up in the morning and, if you do not turn up very regularly, the employer does not wish to have your services for much longer. Even if the employer who gives you a work placement is not hiring, the job that you do will help you to get the key skills that are so valuable to boost employability in the future and to raise the chances of getting a job somewhere else.

When these amendments to the existing regulations were laid, I looked up the criticisms at the time of the previous set of regulations relating to this matter. I turned to the editorial of Personnel Today issued in September 2009. It seems to me that I can do no better than to quote a couple of key sentences in this editorial, written by the deputy editor. He said:

“It seems completely illogical that young people who show initiative and arrange work experience placements off their own back should be ineligible for jobseeker’s allowance”.

That is certainly the case. Why would you want to engage in this great experience if you are losing money? I echo the noble Lord’s sentiment: if you are going to lose money, why would you want to take on an experience of that sort? The editorial continued:

“The current set-up makes the presumption that if an individual is undertaking work experience then they are not actively seeking a job”.

This is, indeed, nonsense. We need to ensure that people who are getting the experience are on that ladder and pathway towards a job.

“And it also risks creating a two-tier system, where unpaid opportunities are only enjoyed by the more affluent”.

There are certainly examples of people trading off an opportunity to get their son or daughter into a form of work experience, where the jobseeker’s allowance does not matter to the jobseeker. However, there is a quid pro quo. The last sentence of the editorial says:

“But employers also need to look at their own policies and not use young people on work experience as a ready source of cheap or unpaid labour”.

That raises some key issues. First, as the editorial says, if the experience is to reflect what is in fact a real work opportunity and to give people an opportunity to see work in every aspect, are these regulations either too heavy or too lean on the mandation? I think that the Minister has got it just about right. If you turn up and find on day one or two that the job is not really what you have an interest in or is totally alien to you—in which case someone has failed to help you further down the line—you can turn away from it without penalty. However, when you stick it out for your first week and carry on with it, if you fail to undertake the normal aspects of being at work, you will clearly be subject to the same relationship as if you were at work. I think that that brings just about the right level of flexibility into mandation.

I have a number of questions about what constitutes work, where the work is placed and what a workplace is. Clearly, it is important that we place people in the best experience, which will help them to seek employment. This Government are particularly anxious that we should encourage the voluntary or third sector to engage. Do placements inside the voluntary or third sector constitute a place of work?

I also welcome but would like a bit more explanation of the flexibility of Jobcentre Plus in helping people to arrange work experience. The ability of the person to arrange their own work experience, to work with Jobcentre Plus to come to it together or for Jobcentre Plus to make the appropriate placement at a local level is crucial. Do we have the sort of experience and guidance for Jobcentre Plus employees to work in partnership with jobseekers and not simply to find them a place? The difficulty is also that, if the target for Jobcentre Plus is to get as many people into work experience as possible, you choose those who are easiest to get into placement. I have represented Merthyr Tydfil and Ebbw Vale, which compete with each other to be the most difficult places in the country to get people into work; these are places where long-term unemployment is a feature. My experience is that it is often the low-hanging fruit that makes these things difficult to achieve. I like to think that Jobcentre Plus will not focus only on those who are easy to get into these placements. We need rather to encourage this to work on a wholesale basis. Perhaps the Minister could reflect on that.

Finally, I go back to the editorial and the issue of whether employers will truly use the opportunity to give experience of work rather than simply finding someone who is an extra pair of hands to do a job that does not necessarily provide the right level of experience. I am talking about quality assurance. Will the Minister reflect on the nature of quality assurance that we will need to get from Jobcentre Plus staff when they seek to carry out these placements? These are a worthy set of amendment regulations and I trust that, with the appropriate guidance, the Minister will see success with their implementation.

[Baroness Thomas of Winchester]

My Lords, I shall add one or two comments. I, too, very much welcome these regulations. I was interested that the Minister said that they were aimed primarily at 18 to 21 year-olds. That presumably means that the Jobcentre Plus advisers have some discretion and that the only thing that is absolutely laid down is that the person must be over 18. Will that be known by all the Jobcentre Plus advisers so that they do not prevent anyone from getting a work experience placement if they are, say, 25? Someone may have had a very chequered career and may have been in and out of work; they might quite like to be involved in this scheme but may be over 21. Can the Minister clarify that? Furthermore, why did the Minister alight on the time span of two months? I would rather like one of these work experience people myself, but I suppose that the House of Lords is not an employer. It is a pity—maybe we should be.

[Lord Freud]

My Lords, we have had an interesting debate and, as usual, some snappy questions. One of the things that this short debate has clearly demonstrated is the concern that we all share for the plight of young unemployed people. Their plight is why it is so important to develop this scheme and other schemes like it. I shall try to work through some of the questions.

I start by making the point that we have effectively built something of a Catch-22 for young people in that employers require work experience, or are much more comfortable with people who have demonstrated an ability to hold down some good work experience, whereas the support system for poorer youngsters on JSA has been loath to let them do it. The previous Administration carried out some experiments and programmes on this, as the noble Lord, Lord Knight, pointed out, and I fully and absolutely acknowledge that we are building on previous experience. The noble Lord referred to the contract with Reed. I was interested to read the report on the Reed work experience and some of the interesting lessons there. One of the most interesting lessons was that the switch from going off JSA, which was a kind of bureaucratic requirement, on to a training allowance led to the loss of many youngsters, some simply because they could not transfer smoothly. The other factor that made that programme improvable—I will express it like that in the interest of consensus—is that the youngsters lost the link with jobseeking in that period. It was called a training allowance but they did not feel that they were still linked in. They lost the link with their Jobcentre Plus adviser.

This is a very different approach, which we incorporate within the mainstream JSA offer. The question “Why mandation?” was asked. I think that this is one of the things that starts to pull it together. We are saying to people, “You remain on the conditionality that JSA requires—you have to go on job searching. We will be more flexible about how you do that, working with the employers, but mandation remains in your JSA requirement and that carries forward into your work experience. Also”—as the noble Lord, Lord German, pointed out—“we have balanced it so that you have a week to work out whether this is really completely intolerable, and you can get out without a sanction. But once you have committed, you are like any other employee and you cannot bunk off without some repercussions”. In that way, the JCP regime is replicating what an ordinary employer would do to an ordinary employee where there is a set of mutual obligations. We cannot have a situation where employers, for whom we will want to make a lot of effort to ensure that this work experience is of great value, feel that they waste those resources because somebody can just stop turning up. That is the reasoning behind that.