JGovernment centres are the “least used” and “least loved” of all public services, a failure at the heart of the economy and contributing to the biggest decline in the workforce since the 1980s. Employment Minister Alison McGovern put the remarks this way: Report She worked closely with the Institute for Employment Research committee, which is a scathing critic of the current system. She packs a punch in rejecting a system that places all the blame on the individual and ignores the social barriers: the millions waiting for NHS care, the lack of childcare, the lack of commuter buses, age discrimination and punitive employment agency mentors who are instructed to shoehorn people into any “old job” no matter how dead-end or precarious it may be.
Prime Minister McGovern promised a radical “culture change” to redefine the government's work as an employment and careers service, open to all. Employment agencies have been stigmatized by only accepting benefit claimants, discouraging both employers and jobseekers. Job coaches will be trained to be advisors and provide universal career guidance. Hot drinks may even be offered, so the service will be based on tea and empathy rather than fear and sanction (stopping benefits). Sure there will always be “conditionalities”, but watch the balance shift rapidly towards support. Look how bad this is. Half a million people currently in employment will have to go to an employment agency every week to prove they have worked 35 hours or looked for a job with longer hours or higher pay. Their partners will also be called to prove their own job search. If we stop forcing it on people who are already employed, 2,500 advisors will be freed up to provide deeper and better consulting – identifying options, mitigating obstacles, providing training – and spend less time monitoring benefits.
At its worst several years ago, this bullying culture was heard to have been instructed by coaches to remove 50.5% of claimants from benefits. In confidential interviews with outraged staff, I reported on the tactics used against people with mental illnesses and learning disabilities in particular. People were told to reapply for Employment and Support Allowance, but employment agencies were forbidden to keep the necessary paperwork. When claimants approached the target deadline of 65 weeks on benefits, advisers were instructed to report them to the fraud department to apply maximum pressure. Letters were sent to vulnerable people who did not legally need to come, but they were vaguely worded and read like an attendance order.
Managers themselves were under pressure and threatened staff for not sanctioning more people. They deliberately made the job search process a horrible hell. Employment agencies are right to blame. But it wasn't always like this. In 1997, the Labour government reformed employment agencies. It removed screening, retrained and upgraded employment staff, and introduced a new system that offered more options and opportunities for young unemployed people. It was an immediate success, especially in helping young people and single mothers get jobs. The carrot was more effective than the stick. Similar reforms are due to be published in a White Paper next month.
about Over 900,000 people Health Minister Wes Streeting announced on Wednesday that more workers are off work than pre-COVID trends, saying it's “more than the number of staff at Tesco, Sainsbury's and Asda combined”. Report from the Institute for Public Policy Studies The economic toll of poverty and ill health. The UK is one of the few wealthy countries to have seen a decline in employment after Covid, costing the economy £16 billion a year. Many of the unemployed are young people with mental illnesses who have never worked before.
How did it come to this? Here are some reasons why. The 2010 government was early on to largely abandon careers services, which are now mainly online. Most of Labour's Connections youth local service was closed. Sure Start was dismantled and no longer supports families through their children's early years. School budgets were cut and the exam system was revised to fail almost half of pupils. Additional tuition fees from post-pandemic recovery funds were refused. 40% of pupils who fail either GCSE English or maths will have to wait until they are 18 to retake them. FE colleges, which offer vocational courses, do not fund pupils who do not retake the exams, unnecessarily alienating many pupils. Only a small proportion of pupils who fail on the first try will pass the miserable re-examinations. Then the government Start deprecating BTecs – hundreds Vocational courses that could open new doors and prospects for students who had failed half their classes at school. These courses, well understood by employers, have been replaced by T-levels, which are too difficult for many. Labour seems determined to bring them back.
In the week that English universities were begging for funding, I visited the London South East College of Further Education in Bromley. The headmaster, Asfa Sohail, could not help but be indignant. While English universities get £9,250 in tuition fees per student, hers are £6,000, and many of her students live in extreme poverty. “Some of us live on one meal a day. Will universities deal with gangs, knives and drug dealers? Yet our teachers, who are also counsellors for mental and financial issues, have more contact hours and are paid 23% less than school teachers.”
Walk through these great FE colleges and you'll see students studying everything from plumbing and carpentry to early childhood education, IT and animation, hair and beauty, alongside their academics. For many, it feels like hope of finding what they want to do. Neglected and downgraded since 2010, these gardens of second chances are not visited by politicians who, according to Sohail, will send their children to university. Despite a desperate need for trained health and social care staff, she is turning students away. How can she recruit and retain staff when, at the end of the summer term, the department's six health and social care teachers are lost to schools with better holidays and paying £6,000 more? The bottleneck means students are being denied entry and thousands of jobs go unfilled.
Labour has pledged to achieve astonishingly ambitious targets. Employment rate: 80%Can it be done? Much will depend on reviving the NHS, with the number of people on disability benefit rising faster in the UK than in any other European country. Report of the Institute for Fiscal StudiesBritish jobseekers are the least likely in Europe to use employment agencies. Transforming employment agencies from places of harassment to places of support, allowing people to try out jobs without immediately losing their benefits, could help halt this worrying unemployment epidemic. It worked last time.
