Place-based Employment Support Programmes

Jamie Stone Excerpts

Tuesday 10th February 2026 Westminster Hall

[Patrick Hurley]

Indeed. I promise Members that I did not give my hon. Friend advance sight of my speech, but I will be talking about JobsPlus in due course. It is an amazing system and an amazing scheme.

I have touched on some of my own experiences as a young man, but it is worth going back to them, because I want to put Members in the shoes of someone who would have really benefited from one of these schemes, had they been running back when I was in my late teens and early 20s. Many families have funny anecdotes about things that children have said, and mine is no different. Perhaps unwisely, I am going to share the funny anecdote that my family tell about something that they say I said back in around 1982, when I was four or five years old—of course, they teased me about it for years afterwards.

Apparently, I asked my parents one day why they watched the news on the telly. In my childhood brain, this made no sense at all. My mum was a dinner lady and my dad worked nights in the local car factory 6 or 7 miles away. I had got it into my head as a little kid that the TV news was only for people who did not have jobs, but my mum and dad had jobs, so what were they doing watching the TV news? It was only about 20 years later that it dawned on me that it was not that TV news in the early 1980s was not for people who did not have jobs, but that it felt like it was only about people who did not have jobs.

Every night on the 6 o’clock news, the headlines were about the unemployment figures—the latest round of lay-offs in some critical industry or other, the factory closures, the countless thousands being put on the sick as a way of keeping the official number of jobseekers off the balance sheet. I grew up in that context in Knowsley, a local authority area that had been drawn up a decade earlier in such a way as to exclude all sixth-form provision. This was an area that was being written off. I was a poorly qualified, unskilled lad in his late teens, living in a town with few opportunities, and suffering with my mental health because I could not see a way out.

By way of contrast, these days my city region is benefiting from the award-winning Cradle to Career scheme, which provides holistic mental health and wellbeing support and focuses on the underlying causes of youth crime and antisocial behaviour. Just as important as the metrics of success that make the headlines in the press are the testimonies of the people whose lives have been turned around.

To return to my broader point, many of the approaches that I have described echo the work done in recent years on fundamentally rethinking employment support. That work has made a compelling case for a more wraparound employment service that links employment with skills, health, housing and local economic conditions, and gives frontline staff the flexibility to respond to individual circumstances.

As my hon. Friend the Member for Leyton and Wanstead (Mr Bailey) said, we have seen that in things such as JobsPlus, which has demonstrated that embedding employment support directly in social housing communities can reach people who have been economically inactive for years. Early evidence shows people do not just move into work, but gain improvements in their confidence, wellbeing, readiness and resilience—the things that actually make employment sustainable for people.

[Jamie Stone (Caithness, Sutherland and Easter Ross) (LD)]

The hon. Gentleman is making a very sincere speech, and I am listening to it with great interest. He talks about youngsters’ confidence. One of the great industries that was run down during the Conservatives’ years of rule was the nuclear industry, but I believe it will be great again one day. Dounreay in my constituency still has an apprenticeship scheme, which gives youngsters great confidence. I hope it will be carbon copied by many industries as we revive the fortunes of what we are good at in this country.

[Patrick Hurley]

That pinpoints exactly why place-based schemes are so important. What is useful and necessary for my part of the country will not be useful elsewhere. That difference can have a positive impact on local people’s lives.

I have talked about the good things that JobsPlus can do, but despite that evidence, too many of the programmes that I have mentioned today exist in a state of uncertainty. Short-term funding and delayed decisions are forcing providers to plan for winding down even when their outcomes are improving. That is not a sensible way to run employment policy, and we risk losing exactly the sort of expertise and relationships that we should be encouraging and building on.

If we are serious about increasing employment and tackling inactivity, we also need to be serious about how the support that is needed is delivered. Central systems have their place, but they cannot do everything; we also need long-term backing for place-based approaches and proper partnership with community organisations. Collectively, we need the confidence to move away from one-size-fits-all solutions.

More than 9 million working-age people in the UK are economically inactive, and long-term sickness is the single largest driver of inactivity among 16 to 64-year-olds. In Southport and across the country, organisations such as The Big Onion and Transform Lives Company, and schemes such as Cradle to Career, are already doing the work that we say we want to see. The question is whether national policy is willing to learn from them and support them properly.