Back to Work Agenda

Jim Shannon Excerpts

Wednesday 11th May 2011 Commons Chamber

[Chris Ruane (Vale of Clwyd) (Lab)]

Great changes have been introduced in the back to work agenda over the past year and many more will shortly follow. I believe that many of this Government’s decisions have been taken in haste and without a proper assessment of what does and does not work in the back to work agenda.

I have been involved in the back to work agenda in my constituency for the past nine years. In 2002, I noticed that 50% of the unemployed people in my county, Denbighshire, lived in just two of the 34 wards: the west ward of Rhyl, a traditional seaside ward with many houses in multiple occupation, and Rhyl South West, a ward with a large council estate. Indeed, that is the council estate on which I grew up and spent 26 years of my life.

In 2007, after I had convened a back to work agenda in my constituency, we heard that the Labour Government were introducing a national pilot scheme to get people back to work. It was called the city strategy. Along with Gareth Matthews of Working Links, I lobbied Work and Pensions Ministers to include Rhyl in the pilot. Rhyl was not a city—only 27,000 people lived in it—but it did have city-type unemployment problems on a small scale, as thousands of unemployed people had fled the inner cities of Manchester, Liverpool and Birmingham and come to such seaside towns. We have concentrated areas of deprivation and unemployment. I asked whether Rhyl could be the pilot for the unemployment initiatives in seaside towns, and my wishes were granted, with Rhyl becoming one of just 15 areas accepted into the city strategy.

Since 2009 Rhyl City Strategy has gone from strength to strength. It administered one of the most successful future jobs funds in Wales, putting 450 long-term unemployed people back to work, and it won a bid to become a national pilot for the fit for work scheme.

Rhyl City Strategy is supported by a consortium of more than 180 people from 70 different organisations in the public, private and voluntary sectors, and there is a management board of 25 organisations that deals with the nitty-gritty of putting people back to work. Those two parts of the organisation meet four times a year, and the consortium now meets to deal with different themes relating to the back to work agenda. Best practice is swapped, initiatives are shared and support is given. Co-operation is maximised and duplication and ignorance are minimised. It is one of the most successful organisations that I have been involved with in the past 25 years of my public life.

There are a number of reasons for that success. The board is headed by the private sector: the chair is Barry Mellor, the north Wales manager of Arriva buses. The organisation views the issues from the perspective of the employer as well as the employee. Rhyl City Strategy is a community interest company, which gives it tremendous flexibility, and decisions do not have to be referred back for months of county council committee meetings.

There is a good blend of the public, private and voluntary sectors. As the work has been going on for almost 10 years, there are bonds of trust and co-operation between and within all three sectors, each reinforcing the other and often coming together informally, outside set meetings, to help in developing initiatives. There is good feedback from the overseeing bodies at the Department for Work and Pensions and the Welsh Assembly Government, and from within our own organisation. Success is celebrated and failure is fixed.

The strategy has used a number of novel schemes to connect with the unemployed. It is not simply about sending a man or a woman in a grey suit with a big stick from the Government to tell the unemployed that they have to get back to work. In my constituency, the strategy has dealt with those furthest away from the jobs market—unemployed people who may never have succeeded in school, who have lost confidence in themselves and faith in society, who have many problems with drugs and alcohol, and who lead chaotic lives and change address regularly.

In order truly to connect with people who face such multiple barriers, we have developed a number of novel projects in conjunction and co-operation with many diverse local groups. I wish to mention a few of them. Rhyl football club operates football in the community, using unemployed people’s interest in football to sign them up for skills training and job placements in the local sports sector.

Coastal Hawks is a project to train local young people in the art of falconry. They use those skills to keep seagulls and pigeons, which blight town centres and cause damage, away from Rhyl town centre. They dress up in medieval costume while doing this, engage with the public, and are in effect a tourist attraction. They were the subject of a TV programme—but now, because of cuts, they may be disbanded.

The Hub, a youth project in Rhyl with 1,000 young people on its books, is located in the heart of the poorest community not only in Wales but, probably, in the whole country. It is self-financing, and in the past three years it has had two extensions that have been built by the local unemployed youngsters who use the centre. It has been part-financed by the 10 back to work organisations that want to gain access to those 1,000 young people. They rent office space from the Hub, and the money is then reinvested in the Hub.

A local market has been established in Rhyl town centre, and the organisers are training 10 local unemployed people to take stalls on it. The organisers provide professional training through North Wales Training and give the trainees a stall to turn that theory into practice. Some of the people on the training scheme have multiple problems and are making a valiant attempt to recover from alcoholism. A separate TV programme is being made about that project.

The Government say that they want to encourage enterprise, and I share their goal. We are doing it, and doing it successfully in Rhyl, the home of Albert Gubay’s Kwik Save and also of Iceland—two supermarket chains that changed the face of UK and world trading. We wish to rediscover that spirit of enterprise.

[Jim Shannon (Strangford) (DUP)]

It is important that young people have the opportunity of a job at the end of the day, and the hon. Gentleman says that that is happening. It is also important to instil confidence and to provide opportunities. Is it also important to have a Government who are committed to the public sector, so that the job opportunities in that are there, too, for the young people?

[Chris Ruane]

I entirely agree with the hon. Gentleman, and I shall come to that point shortly.

The Dewi Sant centre in Rhyl works with dozens of people who have massive drug and alcohol problems, some of whom have literally been taken off the streets. Its clients are then given training away from the urban centre on a 7 acre farm donated by a local business man. They are being trained in the art of bee-keeping and other rural skills. They are organising a community harvest collecting unwanted apples, pears and berries from local people and turning the fruit into preserves.

A week on Monday, I will be the master of ceremonies at the opening of a Jamie Oliver-type training restaurant called Taste. The building was empty for five years and has now been refitted to the highest standards by a top-class designer called Jamie Alcock. It will train young people how to cook, wait on tables, and generally run a restaurant. Those young people will then gain work in our local hospitality sector.

Three weeks ago I was at the first presentation night for a back to work scheme aimed at 70 unemployed young men and women to improve their child care skills. This has a double benefit in that those skills will be used by them in bringing up their own children, but will also help to increase the quality and quantity of the child care work force. The presentation evening was highly emotional, as each young person got up to give a brief personal history and then went on to say how the scheme had rebuilt their confidence, returned their pride and helped them to gain employment. Of the first 10 who had been through the scheme, eight had gained employment and two had gone back to college.

The training for many of the initiatives is supplied by a range of private sector trainers and also by Rhyl college, which was established by Labour 10 years ago. This £10 million college has had two extensions in four years—a further £7 million investment—and has won a UK beacon award for widening participation. It is located in the heart of the fifth poorest ward in Wales, and its outreach work, through many of the organisations I have mentioned, has helped virtually to eliminate the category of NEETS—those not in education, employment or training.

Our local schools have also turned themselves round under the political leadership of an independent, Councillor Hugh Evans—I give credit to him—and a new chief executive, Mohammed Mehmet. The private sector, too, has played its full part. Tesco has said that it will take 50% of its new employees from the dole register. Serco, whose Welsh chief executive, Gareth Matthews, has driven our local back to work agenda for nearly 10 years, has located a regional office not in a leafy business park, but in the middle of the street with the greatest social need in the whole of Wales, creating 35 jobs. I am proud of our local back to work agenda.

I now turn to my concerns about the Government’s back to work agenda. I am concerned that their new proposals will not recognise the good practice and progress that has gone before. They want to start from year zero and do away with all that Labour implemented—as much out of political spite as any desire to help the unemployed—and believe that any “lefty-sounding” package, such as the new deal, must be disparaged. The future jobs fund was viewed by seasoned practitioners as the best back to work scheme that has been created, because it recognised the dignity of the individual and dealt with people as individuals. It raised their confidence, gave them meaningful employment and, most of all, gave them a wage at the end of the week. The FJF was not like the skivvy schemes introduced by the Tories in their 18-year reign—but it was ended within weeks of the Government gaining power, without any independent assessment of its contribution to the back to work agenda.

I am worried by the language, tone and philosophy of the Government. They look on unemployed people as feckless scroungers who should be chased back to work with a big stick even when no work is available—even when it is the Government themselves who are laying off those people. They are putting 500,000 workers on the dole and then stigmatising them. The voluntary sector and the public sector will walk away from Government initiatives that stigmatise people. The voluntary sector has no interest in that approach.

I am worried about the directives coming from the DWP instructing local benefit advisers to trick people out of their benefits. They give advisers targets of two to three clients a week to punish by taking away their benefits. The Minister described those allegations made in The Guardian as claptrap—until he was shown the e-mail evidence that it was happening.

I am worried that the Government have no policy for dealing with areas such as mine, with nearly 50% of its workers—13,000—in the public sector. The Government want to sack between 10% and 27% of these workers, pushing them on to the dole queue. Seaside towns such as mine, with many public sector workers, could end up like the coal and steel towns of the 1980s—the towns the Tories decimated. The Government say they want private enterprise to take on those workers. But when I tabled a parliamentary question on the budgets that the Government have allocated for enterprise clubs, the answer came back that £3 million had been allocated—£3 million for 3 million workers, or £1 each.

My biggest worry is that nationally there is no growth strategy and no jobs strategy. Recent emergency meetings have been held in government to try, belatedly, to correct that, but the comprehensive spending review and the Budget did nothing to help create jobs and growth. As a result the economy, which was recovering under Labour, has flatlined for the past six months.

It is not just me, a Labour Back Bencher, who is making these points; this is also what the experts are saying. The director of the National Institute of Economic and Social Research said that we should be seeing quite a sharp recovery, but that looking back over the past six months we have had no growth in output at all, and it is very disappointing. The chief economist at the Office for National Statistics said:

“we have an economy on a plateau”.

The Office for Budget Responsibility has revised down its growth forecast for 2011 from 2.6% to just 1.7%. That will have a devastating impact on jobs and growth.

The gains in the private sector proclaimed by the Government were achieved largely as a result of what was done in the dying days of the Labour Government. The Government boast of an extra 350,000 jobs in the private sector, but most of those were created in the first quarter of their Administration.

Unemployment in my constituency was 4.7% in December 2009. It fell dramatically, to 3.9%, in the six months to June 2010 under Labour. Under the Tories it has gone back up to 4.4%—and that is before the Government sack thousands of public sector workers in my constituency. I fear particularly for the unemployed young people in my constituency. There were 735 in December 2009, and that went down by nearly 30% in the six months to June 2010, to just 530, under Labour. Under the Tories, youth unemployment in my constituency has shot back up to 730. That happened as my local FJF took 450 young people off the dole. If those people were added on, the figure would be nearly 1,200 young people on the dole. Political spite has its price.

“Panorama” is making a programme on the back to work agenda in seaside towns. It came to my town and presented me with a stick of rock, through which is written, “A JOB TO GET WORK”. It is a job to get work, because of many of the policies that the Government have introduced. The intricate web of employment opportunities that we have created in Rhyl over the past 10 years is in danger of being swamped if the Government’s plans are not properly introduced.

The Government need to end their targets to force and trick people off benefits. They need to work co-operatively with the public and voluntary sector, especially where there is a proven track record. They need to change the language through which the back to work debate is being conducted. They need to ensure that those who are furthest from the jobs market are not left behind while the more able are cherry-picked by private sector companies. They need to put aside party politics, accept what was good practice under the previous Government and carry it on. They need to develop a strategy to deal with areas with huge numbers of public sector workers, so that we do not have coal and steel town-type unemployment in the next decade. If they are serious about the private sector providing jobs for sacked public sector workers, they need to give specific help to promote enterprise among the unemployed; £3 million is not enough. Most of all, the Government need to develop a coherent strategy to promote growth and jobs across the board, not as an afterthought but as a key component of getting the country back to full employment.