Work Experience

Debate between Marcus Jones and Sheila Gilmore

Tuesday 13th March 2012 Westminster Hall

[Mr Jones]

I thank the hon. Lady for her comments. There is a distinction. With work experience, we are talking about a short-term opportunity for young people; they can be given some short-term experience of work to allow them to get into mainstream employment, often with employers who are keen to take on a certain number of those who have been on work experience and to put them into proper employment. There is a distinction from internships, which have traditionally been used as a method of giving people experience in this place, but also in law firms and all sorts of other professions. There is a distinction, and we need to be alive to that.

Over recent weeks, I have been pretty dismayed by the response to the current Work Experience scheme offered by the Government in partnership with many of our best companies in this country. I have been dismayed by the vitriol towards employers, who have not sought to create a free supply of labour but, on the contrary, have shown a genuine will to give experience and a chance to young people who, for whatever reason, have not been given that chance elsewhere.

[Sheila Gilmore (Edinburgh East) (Lab)]

I was open to the hon. Gentleman’s comments about not being ideological, so I hoped that he would rebut some of the interventions that he has already had, which were extremely ideological. On the specific question of the Work Experience scheme, does he agree that the work experience must be relevant to the needs and previous experience of the participants?

[Mr Jones]

It does have to be experience, but I hope that the hon. Lady is not taking us down the route of demeaning certain types of employment—I will come on to this in a moment—or of being what I call a job snob. I am sure that she is not seeking to do that at all. Over recent weeks, however, we have seen a small cohort of people who have been willing to show a great deal of vitriol towards some of those companies which were willing to give young people an opportunity. In the debate today and over the past few weeks, we have seen what I consider to be the huge red herring of whether work experience is compulsory or voluntary, and that has been a huge distraction from the real issue.

--- Later in debate ---

[Sheila Gilmore (Edinburgh East) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Howarth. I congratulate the hon. Member for Nuneaton (Mr Jones) on securing this debate, although despite his claims that he would not be ideological, I think that he was ideological throughout.

Last Friday, I met a young man in a local community café that is run entirely by volunteers and opens for two hours a week. It is quite new, but it has been very successful. The young man started to volunteer in that café through an arrangement with his school, as he was soon to be a school leaver and had some learning difficulties. He has since left school, although he has continued to volunteer. He told me that as a result of that volunteering experience, Debenhams had offered him the opportunity for paid work in its city café for four hours a day. I thought that that was a great story and a wonderful example of what work experience can do.

When I served on Edinburgh council, we started a scheme called JET—jobs, education and training—first in one high school, although it was subsequently rolled out to others. It was for a cohort of pupils who were in their final year at school but who were likely to emerge with very little to show for it, probably because they hardly ever attended. The pupils and their families were approached and asked to sign up for the scheme. They had a reduced school timetable; they spent one day a week doing work experience and one day a week at a college doing training that was related to that work experience. There were about 20 of those pupils in each school, and although I cannot say that they all came out with jobs at the end of the scheme—we discovered that a lot of them had deep-rooted personal problems—it was a good programme that involved a period of work experience and, importantly, was related to training.

I therefore refute absolutely the allegations that Labour Members are somehow against work experience or even—this is the allegation repeated by the hon. Member for Nuneaton—that we are content to leave people stuck in unemployment. That is totally wrong.

[Mr Marcus Jones]

Will the hon. Lady say whether she supports the Government’s work experience programme that I spent about 20 minutes outlining?

[Sheila Gilmore]

I was about to come on to that, but I wanted to establish the importance of correctly managed work experience.

What is wrong with the current scheme? To me, the most important thing is that work experience moves people away from their current situation and towards employability, whether or not that involves a job right away. As Ministers and others have said, it is essential to get people away from lying in bed or watching daytime TV—anyone who has been the parent of a teenager, particularly a teenage boy, will say amen to that. However, there is no one-size-fits-all solution.

The first, but by no means that last, example of the scheme was related to me by a constituent. She was still quite young and had worked in the past. She had qualifications and had done holiday jobs, but she had then become unemployed. Her complaint was that she was expected to do eight-weeks’ work experience—the shelf stacking that everybody goes on about—and wondered how that related to moving her to where she wanted to be or make her more employable. I do not think that that is being a job snob. We are mixing up two things.