Clause 12
Welfare Reform Bill
3:00 pm
Natascha Engel (North East Derbyshire, Labour)
I wish to make a general point about clause 12, which I think is the most important clause in the Bill. I draw the Committee’s attention to the explanatory notes, which define work-related activity as
“undertaking activity that increases the likelihood of getting a job. This may include activities such as work trials or training”.
It is the training aspect of work-related activity that I would like to talk about. The training and skills part of the Bill is absolutely fundamental to its success.
It is also important to note that we are discussing the Bill’s detail at the same time as Sandy Leitch is carrying out a general review of skills, examining the matter with a cross-departmental approach. I do not wantto pre-empt what he will say on skills, but I wish to highlight the issue and to encourage the Minister to support a cross-departmental effort involving the Department for Education and Skills, the Department for Work and Pensions, the Department of Trade and Industry and the Treasury in order to ensure that the skills aspect is never forgotten.
The Jobcentre Plus network was designed initially to be a one-stop shop for everything related to being out of work. Jobcentre Plus would be the first to admit that it does not really consider skills and skills training to be its core function, yet basic skills—I mean hard skills such as literacy and numeracy—are one of the serious issues facing the group of people that we hope to help with the Bill.
I would like to introduce the Committee to Derbyshire Dave. Derbyshire Dave used to be a miner in North-East Derbyshire. My constituency is actually not close to Derby at all; it is much closer to Sheffield. We border South Yorkshire. It is one of the coalfields constituencies, but it has a large number of people who used to be steelworkers. Derbyshire Dave could be an ex-miner or ex-steelworker who has lost his job and has been on incapacity benefit for a while, but is keen to get involved in pathways to work. Derbyshire Dave exists. He is so willing that he walked into Jobcentre Plus to demand to be put on the scheme. That is an important aspect in respect of our earlier debate; the people keen to participate who come and ask to be put on pathways to work are the issue, rather than the dragging of people into Jobcentre Plus.
Derbyshire Dave, very keen to get a job, has taken part in all the condition management programmes and retraining. The problem is that North-East Derbyshire, like many other constituencies, is rural; Derbyshire Dave is often not willing to do the kind of work available. In fact, he is being offered work behind the checkout at Morrisons or Tesco; those are the jobs we have in the constituency.
Derbyshire Dave is ready and willing to work and keen to get involved in the labour market. However, the jobs available are not suitable. What happens to him? He is in the ESA group; he goes straight on to the jobseeker’s allowance and all the support available through the personal advisers in the system is withdrawn because he is now a straightforward jobseeker. If he were to find a job, he would still for up to a year have all the in-work support that would be available to anybody who goes on from pathways into work.
Derbyshire Dave has serious issues and I am worried that in this legislation he falls between two stools. This is a problem that affects rural areas. The city strategy is fantastic and very important in bringing together all the different agencies and employers and everybody else who is willing to get people off incapacity benefit and into work. In rural areas, however, we do not have the transport networks of cities, nor their variety of jobs in geographical locations close by.
To address the issue, we have launched a rural pilot similar to the city strategies. One of the ways of doing that is to pull together all the different agencies to ensure that we can identify the issues and overcome them locally ourselves. Making sure that the local delivery is in place will be one of the most important parts of the Bill and the clause; that is the only way in which any of this can be delivered.
One of the issues that we identified in our rural pilot was that nobody was specifically responsible for mapping the local economy—the local labour market now and of the future. For any Committee member who drives up the M1 to their constituency, I should say that we are between junctions 29 and 30. Weare about to have a huge employment zone. In theshort term, that means construction jobs; in the medium term, it means more construction jobs; inthe long term, it means lots of different kinds of businesses. Nobody in my constituency or the surrounding constituencies is identifying the skills needs now, in the medium term and in the future to make sure that the people on incapacity benefit in my constituency are able to have the benefit of the jobs once they come up. We are debating the Bill against the backdrop of the eight accession countries.