Originally published by Institute for Employment Studies (IES)
By Becci Newton, Director, Public Policy Research at Institute for Employment Studies (IES)
The much-anticipated White Paper, Get Britain Working, has been published today and brings a welcome focus on strategies to support people to move closer to, and into work. It aims to balance the right to receive benefits and support, with a responsibility to comply with conditions, which centre on the agreements made with a Work Coach. It also resonates strongly with the recommendations in our report for the Commission on the Future of Employment Support.
While conditionality and the ability to sanction people is being maintained, and as far as we know, will utilise existing protocols, what is changing is bringing support to where people are, and feel comfortable being, and tailoring that support so it becomes more personalised and supportive.
This necessitates building genuine and sustained integration between employment and careers services. It involves moving to place-based, devolved delivery so that people can engage with support, information and advice about opportunities within the labour markets local to them, understanding priorities for growth and connecting to training options relevant to these.
We know that too many people have been left behind – both young and adults. People feel that their physical and mental health impairs the work they can consider and don’t think there is the understanding in the system about their needs to support them into employment. The new approach aims to build this understanding, to draw out people’s potential and how that matches to employers’ skills needs. To achieve this, it will be necessary to build trust so it would be wise to move away from the branding of Jobcentre Plus and benefits administration if this is to be truly perceived as something new, different and more supportive.
There are also aims to engage more effectively with employers, handling and brokering their vacancies and to potentially consider job design and job carving. Time will tell and this work will be starting with a concerted review. It could and should lead to increased job matching opportunities, more personalised to the needs of individuals and employers – if the right balance can be struck.
The White Paper opens-up multiple lines of support – the improved integration and local delivery of the current Jobcentre Plus employment service being central, as well as more detailed and differentiated supported employment for people who need it through Connect to Work. It embeds new Trailblazers – local initiatives to test how the new service can be achieved, some targeting workless young people and some workless adults to test innovative new approaches so that messages can be rolled out more widely.
These trailblazers could learn lessons from some Labour forerunners and some current practices. For example, the New Deal provisions for various groups were effective, and for young people achieved impact, particularly the short-term subsidised employment offer to get them working with employers. In terms of rights and responsibilities, this calls to mind the Activity and Learning Agreements for 16–17-year-olds when the Raised Participation Age was being prepared for. These place-based pilots used financial and other incentives for young people who had no access to benefits, to take part in coaching support that helped them identify goals and move into education, training and employment outcomes.
A further consideration – potentially covering the needs of young people and adults – is the Advancement Network Prototypes that hyper-localised support to where people are – to ensure they could be engaged. Our current Jobs Plus project does a similar thing. And for young people, some of the recent Youth Hubs provide excellent models of how to integrate holistic support into spaces where young people want to be.
In terms of meeting young people’s needs, it is great to see apprenticeships gaining ground. As with any job, this does require employer engagement and vacancy creation. A key trick is going to be moving employers from the concerns they have over the National Insurance contributions to make opportunities available in their workforce. In terms of the Foundation Apprenticeships this might need government recognition of wage and overhead as well as training costs.
At IES, we are proponents of the good work agenda and firmly believe the changes already made by this government to improving pay and terms and conditions will improve the quality of work people can experience, and through that, see better returns to their health and social outcomes. This has the benefit of increasing productivity in our economy. Getting the match between people’s capabilities and skills and the employment they can access is a crucial aspect to make work a determinant of health and wellbeing.
The plan in the White Paper is ambitious but achievable. It has great potential, but systems design to ensure targeted connection and engagement should be at the forefront of implementation.
