Place-based Employment Support Programmes

I beg to move,

That this House has considered place-based employment support programmes.

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairship, Dr Murrison. I am very pleased to have secured this debate. Discussions of employment policy can sometimes feel very abstract in this place; we talk about things like rates, targets and programmes, but for the people we represent, employment can be intensely personal. It is about confidence, dignity, routine and feeling that they have something to contribute.

I know all that from personal experience. The depression that I fell into in the mid-’90s, at the end of the Tories’ previous disastrous spell in government when I could not get a job, had a long-lasting effect on my life. Growing up in what was then and by many measures still is one of the poorest boroughs in the country, the pressure to find a job—any job, to be honest—was immense, but the availability of jobs did not match that pressure. The local factory had closed down in 1991. My home town had barely any industry left to speak of, and most of the low-paid, temporary jobs I could find were in the next town along. It was almost a two-hour walk away for a lad who wanted to work but could not afford the bus fare to get to the factory. That is why I want to make the case today for place-based employment support—support that is rooted in communities, shaped by local need and delivered by people who understand the realities of the lives that they are working with.

In my Southport constituency, I see it time and again: the people furthest from the labour market are not those who do not want to work, but people with caring responsibilities, health issues or gaps in their work history, or people who, for whatever reason, just cannot get a break. In my local authority area alone, that equates to over 26,000 people. What they need is not another box-ticking exercise, but someone who knows their area and knows what the local jobs are, and has the time to treat them as a person.

I want to put on the record my thanks for the work of several place-based employment support programmes across the north of England. The Big Onion in Southport does things differently, and that is precisely why it is effective. Its work is rooted in trust. It helps people to rebuild confidence, develop skills and, in many cases, explore things such as self-employment or community enterprise as a route back into work. It does not rush people. Its approach recognises that, for many people, the first step towards employment is simply believing that they have something to offer. That kind of progress does not always show up immediately in headline figures, but it is essential if we want to make sustainable outcomes for the long term.

Zink is a charity based in Buxton that started out as a food bank but, once it investigated the drivers of local food bank demand, soon branched out into offering employment support and debt advice. Its most innovative programme, microjobs, offers small, paid roles tailored to people who are far from the jobs market—often people who have been affected by homelessness or past substance abuse. Three quarters of those with a microjob subsequently move into part-time or full-time work within six months.

Does the hon. Gentleman agree that place-based employment schemes are a vital way of converting local strengths into local jobs, and that sector-specific initiatives can and should be tailored to the circumstances of individual constituencies? In North Down, there is particular potential in tourism, hospitality and the wider marine and coastal economy.

That is one in a long line of things that place-based employment initiatives can do well, so I thank the hon. Member for his intervention.

The Recruitment Junction, which works up in the north-east, mainly in Newcastle, places people with criminal convictions into paid work. It works with local employers to identify skills shortages and then identifies suitable candidates, meets them and helps them to renew their qualifications, write their CVs and prepare for interviews. So far, it has placed almost 900 people with criminal convictions into paid work, with a 66% retention rate. Fewer than 5% of those that it places reoffend, compared with around 24% nationally.

I also want to commend the work of Transform Lives Company. Its model deliberately breaks away from what many people expect employment support to look like. It is welcoming, informal and feels safe, and for many participants in its schemes, that alone is transformative. People who go to Transform Lives Company are supported not just with job search, but with things like confidence, wellbeing and life skills. They are listened to, rather than lectured at. As a result, people who would never normally engage with employment services do so willingly. I think that should make us stop and think about how our national system is experienced on the ground.

I am reminded of the JobsPlus scheme that is being run on one of our council estates in Leyton, where L&Q has been going out and actively knocking on doors. We have seen not only the young people who were the target of the scheme coming back into the work environment, but their parents. Does my hon. Friend agree that that type of scheme needs to continue to be funded, and to be extended, so that other people can be brought back into the working environment?

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.

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.

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.

My hon. Friend is making a powerful point about place-based intervention. Last week, I welcomed the Minister for Industry, my hon. Friend the Member for Stockton North (Chris McDonald), to Build Academy in Wanstead, an incredible scheme that is providing accessible training in construction skills to local people. My hon. Friend the Member for Southport (Patrick Hurley) was making the point that we need to focus on these fantastic young learners to ensure that they are site ready and capable of going directly into full-time local employment or apprenticeships. Does he agree that such learning programmes need to be shared, so that they can permanently address the issues that he raises and be scaled up and rolled out around the country?

I agree wholeheartedly with my hon. Friend. Not only can we scale and roll out those programmes, but we can do peer-to-peer learning, so that the best of what works in one part of the country might be applied elsewhere.

I hope the Minister will reflect on some of what I have mentioned this afternoon and on how future employment policy can better embed place-based delivery of these schemes, giving local providers the certainty they need and ensuring that employment support is something people feel genuinely helped by, not just processed through.

Order. I am going to begin calling the Front Benchers at 5.08 pm—do the maths.

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Dr Murrison. I thank the hon. Member for Southport (Patrick Hurley) for securing this important debate.

In my constituency, the scale of youth unemployment is stark and deeply concerning. We are among the worst-affected areas in the country, with one in every six eligible adults—16.1%—currently not working. Those are not just statistics; they represent thousands of young people whose talents are being wasted and whose futures are being put on hold. Across the west midlands, around 29,000 young people are classed as unemployed, with youth unemployment rates in parts of Birmingham, Wolverhampton and Walsall running at double the national average. The sheer scale of the challenge facing our region underlines the urgent need for growth and genuine job creation.

Young people are not short of ambition or willingness to work; what they are short of is real opportunities, secure jobs, quality training, and pathways into employment that offer dignity and progression. Too many are stuck in a cycle of rejection or short-term work, or being shut out altogether. I hope the Minister will detail how young people are being actively supported into large infrastructure projects such as HS2 and the large housing programmes. As the former Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, the right hon. Member for Leicester West (Liz Kendall), said:

“To get Britain growing, we need to get Britain working again.”

I wholly agree with that sentiment, but I cannot agree with the Government’s approach of removing universal credit from young people if they do not take up a job—there could be a whole host of reasons why they cannot do so. Punitive policies do not create jobs or address the structural barriers that young people face, and they risk pushing already vulnerable people into further hardship.

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairship, Dr Murrison, and I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Southport (Patrick Hurley) for bringing forward what I consider to be a truly vital discussion. Colleagues will not be surprised to hear me talk about towns today—I am the proud product of one, and I proudly represent two towns, Stafford and Eccleshall. It is important to be in this Chamber today discussing them, because I want to use this debate to make a simple but important point about place.

Far too often, towns such as Stafford are described in relation to somewhere else. We are labelled a commuter town because we have excellent rail connections—and we do: a person can get to London, Birmingham or Manchester really quickly from Stafford, but Stafford should not be defined by its neighbouring cities, and a child growing up in Stafford should not be told, “Just go to a city to access better employment opportunities.” If our policy only sees us as part of someone else’s labour market, it will misunderstand us and the brilliant talent that we have in my constituency.

Our young people deserve to build happy, successful lives in the town they call home, and there is so much potential for that. We are home to GE Vernova, whose Stafford site produces the only high-voltage direct current transformers manufactured in this country, which are absolutely key to our national energy security. We have Bostik’s UK headquarters, where world-leading adhesives are made. We have Arco Professional Safety Services keeping those working in risky roles safe, including on Big Ben—or the Elizabeth Tower, I should say—and we have so many wonderful small and medium enterprises. We are supported by Stafford college, widely acknowledged to be the best college in the country, with back-to-back outstanding Ofsted ratings, which works closely with local employers to build the technical and vocational skills that our industries require.

Stafford is a county town where people are proud to live, but people feel its potential is not yet being fulfilled. Research from the University of Southampton shows that that is a pattern repeated across the country, and a pattern that we must address as a Government. We must provide the tools for every community to ensure that their town flourishes. Let us be frank: there is no one-size-fits-all approach to this. When we talk about designing employment programmes around place, we are talking about a massive opportunity for promoting our towns, and building secure jobs and futures for residents that cater to our national diversity.

I commend the hon. Lady. In Northern Ireland, we are doing a collaborative, localised model through the Ards community network. We have done there what the hon. Lady is referring to in Stafford: identifying job opportunities. HGV training is one—it costs about £3,500 to do that—and there is also security training. The local Ards community network, the Government in the Northern Ireland Assembly and others have come together to ensure that those job opportunities are available for people in my constituency. Many of those people are now driving HGV lorries, and lots of them are in security jobs and training. That inspires people from deprived areas, and I think that is what she was talking about in Stafford.

I completely agree with the hon. Member. Recognising the talent that we have in our towns, and making sure that all our Government programmes are working to support that, is integral. I welcome the Government’s investment in growth and opportunity, and we are seeing a revised investment in towns. Pride in Place and town of culture are really good examples; those are not necessarily employment programmes, but they lay the foundations of our commitment to regeneration across the country. The upcoming high street strategy also has a lot of potential to help with that investment.

Although investment into UK cities is undoubtedly important, it is vital to remember that most of our population live in towns, and many of those people are feeling left behind, frustrated by the decline on their high streets under the Conservative Government and sceptical that politicians in Westminster understand them or the places that they call home. This is a chance to show that we do, and that is exactly what Labour Governments do better than anyone else. Time and again, we see that working with communities and using their local knowledge and experience is how we can best regenerate our areas.

I ask the Minister what conversations she is having with colleagues to ensure that towns have a voice in designing their local employment strategies, and what steps the Government are taking to ensure that young people who grow up in towns including Stafford can secure well paid jobs in the towns they call home. Towns such as Stafford are central to our Government’s plan for growth, and I welcome employment programmes that recognise that reality.