Youth Employment (Wirral)

Esther McVey Excerpts

Tuesday 14th September 2010 Commons Chamber

[Alison McGovern (Wirral South) (Lab)]

Thank you, Mr Speaker, for giving me the opportunity to raise this issue of importance to my constituency in my first Adjournment debate. I should like to say a few words about young people’s employment opportunities in Wirral. Specifically, I will highlight the success of the Wirral apprenticeship scheme, touch on some wider employment issues and finally consider the numbers involved and the problem that we face in the supply of employment opportunities.

I begin by highlighting the great success of the Wirral apprenticeship scheme. Wirral council, in partnership with Connexions and Jobcentre Plus, has done an excellent job of increasing the number of apprenticeships and, most importantly, helping young people to apply for them. It has used working neighbourhood funds to support local businesses in hiring 167 young people in everything from dairy farming to jewellery design. Nearly half those young people were not already in employment, education or training, or were at risk of drifting on to the dole, which none of us wants to see.

There were two elements to the scheme. First, the council committed funding for a member of staff for 18 months if a business would commit to employing them for two years. The second, and I believe more important, part of the scheme related to recruitment support and how the council went about finding the businesses to take part and the young people to be employed by them. I pay tribute to Viv Stafford, Mel Campbell and the team at Wirral council, who worked proactively with young people and employers so that businesses were supported all along the way and young people were able to gain confidence prior to their work interview. Their priority was young people at risk of becoming a burden on the state and businesses with little existing experience of apprenticeships or of hiring young people.

Overall, the scheme resulted in not only more apprenticeships and young people who were work-ready to take up the opportunities available, but in employers gaining the confidence to offer young people more work experience. Rather than just apprenticeships per se, employers also offered work placements. I feel that the programme ought to be replicated across the country. We have real expertise in Wirral, and we can help ensure that this generation of young people does not end up missing out on the chance of success. I ask the Minister whether he supports local government playing such a leading role, and what the Government can do to back up councils that want to take that approach. My lesson from Wirral is that a cross-partnership approach involving all the responsible agencies is needed, no matter which bit of the state they are involved in. I should like to know what he thinks about that approach.

To move on from the Wirral apprenticeship scheme, there are wider issues to consider in young people accessing employment. The future jobs fund, which ensured that young people had continuity on their CVs, is now gone, and young people without work experience face a very tough labour market. My job is not to stand here and whinge on behalf of Merseyside—I will never do that. However, historic facts about our area mean that the employment picture there can be more fragile than elsewhere. It is therefore all the more important for us that Connexions, working with schools, can assist and advise young people on getting good-quality work experience placements, as well as training and mentoring. Young people need independent advice, but teachers do not always have the time to get up to speed with how the labour market has moved on. That independent advice is important.

Businesses, too, have a responsibility. They must show commitment to the next generation. When I became an MP, I went around and talked to lots of businesses in my community on how they felt about that. Thankfully, Wirral businesses told me that they absolutely want to make such a commitment. Invest Wirral has a fantastic business support team that is committed to connecting businesses with all the Government help that is available and with help from other sources. However, that depends on our local authority having the resources to provide that support. It is under great pressure given the budget cuts that are being handed down, as is all state funding.

As a side point, we should not let the media off the hook. Sometimes, there is great pressure on young people to succeed at A-levels and go straight on to a university degree, whether or not that is right for them. I would like the media more often to celebrate successful apprentices and young people who are in business. Academic success is important, but it should not be prioritised for media coverage every year at results time at the expense of all other forms of success among our young people. The more we celebrate the diversity of our young people, the more confident they will be, and we know how important self-esteem and confidence are when it comes to people achieving their hopes.

Will the Minister give me more information on what the Department for Work and Pensions and other Departments plan to do to support young people to gain work opportunities, including, but not only, apprenticeships? Will the Government support the recruitment process? I am sure he will give me a positive answer to this question: will he commit, with all Ministers, to talking up the achievements of our young people?

We know that, in part, this is a numbers game. We had a good opportunity to discuss the national apprenticeships scheme in Westminster Hall, when the fact that there are simply not enough apprenticeships out there for the people who want them was brought to light very clearly.

[Esther McVey (Wirral West) (Con)]

The hon. Lady and I are on opposite sides of the House, but our constituencies are next to each other, and on this matter we stand side by side. We both talk very passionately about youth unemployment and apprenticeships, and she will no doubt know that I am taking on an apprentice. However, Labour’s legacy is dire. Labour brought about the highest number of young people aged between 18 and 24 not earning or learning—the proportion is nearly 20%. Although I agree with her rhetoric, the evidence of what Labour did in reality is somewhat lacking. Will she join me in welcoming the new Government’s allocation of £600 million for programmes to support unemployed young people and £150 million for 50,000 apprenticeships?

--- Later in debate ---

[Chris Grayling]

The big problem that we had with the new deals was that they were effectively programmes designed in Whitehall. The standard new deal format was 13 weeks in a classroom, with relatively little financial focus on outcomes or whether people got into work at the end. It was very much about the Government paying for placements. The placements happened, but as for the outcomes of the different new deals—yes, they got some people into work, but the number who stayed in work was disappointingly low. One of the big differences with the Work programme is that it will not simply be about getting people into work, but will be about sustaining them in employment.

In particular, where young people come from the kind of difficult background that the hon. Member for North Tyneside described, the programme will not be about just getting them through the first days of work; it will be about helping them to stay there and overcome some of the hurdles that they face in the workplace, including some of the cultural aspects of working life that they do not expect. Having mentors sitting alongside them in the workplace is an extremely important part of what we are seeking to do.

I am expecting to have specialist providers serving the Wirral and Merseyside whose job it will be to work with unemployed young people, as well as those of other ages, not only helping them to find those first opportunities to gain work experience, develop interview skills and understand how to put together a CV, but going out and working with employers, match-making young people with the opportunities that are out there. As the hon. Lady will know, there are quite a large number of vacancies out there, but often a jobseeker will not know how to go about finding those opportunities. The skills brought by professional providers working with people with the potential to get into work, so that we match them with the right opportunities, are fundamental.

We should set that against our plans for the skills system. We are currently consulting on how the further education and skills system can be developed to respond effectively to the skills gaps that we need to address. We want to give training providers greater freedom to target provision to meet local needs, alongside giving colleges and other providers greater local autonomy to say, “This is what we need in our area,” ensuring greater provision of apprenticeships and putting in place the Work programme, which will be both local and national. The programme will be a national scheme, but the responsibility for delivery in each area will be devolved to a provider in a local community who will be specifically mandated to work with organisations in the voluntary sector and organisations such as Wirral council.

Indeed, I very much want to see local authorities participating locally in the work that is done, working with the providers and sometimes doing the work themselves. What we will end up with is local partnerships collaborating to match individuals with employment opportunities and to overcome the hurdles that often exist between the two. Although we face tough and straitened times—I will be absolutely frank and say that, as an Administration, we will not be able to do all the things that we would like to do—we need to make that investment in skills development and deliver those apprenticeships.

[Esther McVey]

As my right hon. Friend would like to see that work, let me invite him, as a good friend of Merseyside, to come up to Wirral and see our apprenticeship scheme in action.

[Chris Grayling]

I would be very happy to do that at some point. I am always happy to revisit Merseyside. There are some great people there, and it is a great community. Liverpool is a magnificent city. I know that my hon. Friend the Member for Wirral West and the hon. Member for Wirral South represent important constituencies that are also nice places to live in and to represent, and I would be delighted to come and see some of the work being done there at some point.

I share the aspiration of the hon. Member for Wirral South to ensure that as many young people as possible can find work, although there will undoubtedly be times when she and her colleagues disagree with me and my colleagues about the means that we are using to try to achieve that. We certainly face tough and challenging times financially, and that will make it more difficult to do all the things that we would like to do. At the end of the day, however, we all share that aspiration. I do not want to see large numbers of people whose lives are wasting away while they are stranded at home on benefits, doing nothing.

We need to make changes to the welfare state to improve the incentives to work. We also need to give people an extra push, particularly when they have been out of the workplace for a long time or have never worked. Such people can build up problems with their confidence, and they are often uncertain about how to get into the workplace and how to go about getting a job. We have to help them to overcome that. We all want the same thing. I want to see as many people as possible of all ages, but particularly young people, in work in thriving businesses in an enterprise culture that we have created, in which businesses are growing and developing, and emerging from our universities, and in which companies are coming into the UK to invest and create jobs. If we can create that dynamic business environment, provide investment in skills and deliver really effective back-to-work support for those who are struggling to get work, we shall be able to achieve the goals that the hon. Lady rightly sets for her constituents and for those of all right hon. and hon. Members across the House.

Question put and agreed to.