How Do You Engage Economically Inactive Residents?

“It’s easier to get a job when you already have a job.”?This phrase is used so often by employment advisers that it has become a cliché.?But it is so fundamental to economic inclusion that it remains a useful maxim.??Employment programmes are rooted in preaching about presentation, attitude, dependability, motivation, vocational and functional skills and network.?There are lots of good programmes out there, past and present, whose participants have developed these six attributes and progressed.?But the employment rate in London stubbornly remains well below the Government’s target of 80%.

At June 2019, the London Borough of Enfield had an employment rate of 66.8%, second in London only to Kensington & Chelsea (61.8%) and substantially lower than the next lowest borough, Tower Hamlets (69.8%) (NOMIS).?In Enfield, there are 11,790 claims for Universal Credit and Job Seekers Allowance not in employment (DWP, Nov-19).?That’s 5.52% of the working age population “unemployed”.?A further 9,635 residents are claiming the disability- and health-related Employment Support Allowance (DWP, May-18), 4.51 percentage points, and 2,637 are claiming Income Support (DWP, Nov-19); assuming no cross-over with the out-of-work benefits and all IS claimants are out of work (very unlikely), a further 1.23 percentage points.?That makes a maximum of 11.26% of residents not in employment accounted for by the DWP.?So where are the remaining 22% of Enfield’s working age population not in employment but not accounted for by the welfare state?

The ONS’s annual population survey estimates that 17,400 are students and 5,600 are retired.?That totals 10.77%.?Most 16 to 18-year-olds since Raising the Participation Age are in education and, although they can work, most would agree they should be at school or college.?Many young people are also in higher education.?But many of the 17,400 are counted as adults in “education” because they enrolled, but that doesn't mean they are.?And what’s the difference between “working-age-but-retired” and “unemployed” other than being rich enough to do so voluntarily??The reality is that about a fifth of the working age population of Enfield, an unremarkable outer London borough, are not accounted for (literally) in our economy.?So, where are they?

We can guess.?Firstly, just because they live here, there is no reason to think that residents have a right to work in the UK.?Many residents of Enfield were born outside of the EU with a prominent Turkish community across the borough.?The Government’s “hostile environment” has successfully excluded many people from legitimate and secure employment, many of whom arguably have a right to work.?The Windrush scandal eventually showed us the flawed and unintended consequences of asserting that everyone with a right to work (or remain) will have evidence of it.?Many households in more deprived neighbourhoods, regardless of nationality or ethnicity, do not have the “right” paperwork to prove to fearful employers that they can work.?Many people do not even know what evidence they need.?Other than a British passport, many employers do not know what paperwork they need.?Working for Haringey in 2010, pre-Hostile Environment, our programme helped a young man who was offered a job at the Council.?However, HR didn’t let him start because the right-to-work evidence he had was a Belgian National ID Card and this didn’t meet the highest requirements of Home Office security with which the Council’s HR department had chosen to comply.

At the same time as the Government has been trying to regulate and enforce that people can legitimately work, employment legislation is going the other way; increasingly being deregulated, unenforceable and unenforced.?Precarious employment opportunities are on the increase with technology-based employment platforms creating gig opportunities, a growing grey market as well as a black market with the continued illegalisation of class C drugs sucking many young people from poor neighbourhoods into lucrative gang crime.?These, too, exacerbate the precariousness of the welfare benefit system with sanctions increasing for claimants not “employing” themselves full-time in finding a legitimate job and attending meetings at the Jobcentre.?With how long a claim takes, for many, it is not worth waiting or trying to make the time to meet the demands, or even paying for a passport, when alternative sources of income are available.?Our definition of “unemployed” has become more precise and simultaneously less meaningful as the welfare state and employment rights have been rolled back.

Different ethnicities and nationalities, particularly those forced to live on the edges of the economy, often do not have the luxury of the same family dynamics of many Londoners.?Women are more likely to remain at home and are responsible for childcare.?The Benefit Cap has significantly affected women more than men.?Stuck at home, not only do they not speak English very well, many never have the opportunity to learn and practise it in their community.?Benefit Cap claimants and single mum households are often dependent on the welfare state.?Stay-at-home mums with a partner working precariously and, therefore, long hours, have less stable home lives.

So, how do employment and skills programmes engage this large population of Londoners unaccounted for by the DWP??The go-to place for engagement is frontline services.?The Greater London Authority’s and Local London’s Work and Health Programme is a good example of how the welfare state is trying to integrate an employment and fit-for-work programme with frontline services such as council benefits, housing, care services, customer service centres, libraries and both primary and secondary health services.?However, these still rely on residents approaching the service and then have the head space to deal with the reason they approached the service in first place as well as the life-changing opportunity of entering the labour market.?What councils and health services still largely fail to do is proactively refer service-users for employment and skills support.?I attended a market warming event at the GLA last week for the new round of ESF for NEET SEND.?In layman’s terms, the GLA is using European funding to commission employment and skills programmes for young people 16-24 Not in Employment, Education or Training and with Special Educational Needs or Disabled.

Councils’ Looked After Children, Leaving Care teams and schools services hold the data on NEETs and SEND.?But they do not give that information to third party providers for data protection reasons.?A learner’s Education and Health Care Plan may expire before he or she is 24 but this is often because there is not a learning provider in the plan for there to be a plan for this long.?At the same time, a council will not let providers engage with learners or their parents to discuss including their provision in their Plan.

So, what is the answer??There probably isn’t one and providers probably have to chip away at getting support to those most in need.?Community outreach is a good, well-tested yet often frustrating way to do this.?But things are always improving.?Changes to the benefit system including the introduction of the Benefit Cap and the rollout of Universal Credit forced councils (paying Housing Benefit), the DWP (paying out-of-work benefits) and HMRC (paying tax credits) to integrate their systems to cap those households jointly claiming too much.?It showed, where there is a will, data can be shared without breaching data protection rules.?To have the same resolve to do this for helping people as much as penalising them would be a breakthrough.

There are programmes that support the most severely disabled to get the vocational skills and experience to eventually secure paid employment.?But these programmes take time and ESF, which only pays when a participant sustains employment, is not the right model.?I witnessed a programme for disabled learners at Southgate college campus run jointly by Barnet & Southgate College and Tottenham Hotspur Foundation that tailored classroom and sports facilities to meet the needs of severely disabled learners.?But funding is ephemeral and new funding streams always ask for “innovation”, doing away with the tried and tested.

I have encountered programmes that have alternatively tried to simply engage residents.?A project based on Broadwater Farm and funded by Haringey Council, called Sew Tottenham, was a fashion design and production project with the aim of giving residents the skills and confidence to return to work.?But it didn’t do what it set out to do.?Instead, when asked, women from the estate who participated told the Council that they attended because they never had a reason to leave their flat and interact with their neighbours before.?Many were lonely and bound to their caring duties and couldn’t venture far, even if they knew to where.?Between them, they spoke many different languages, but conversed, often stutteringly, in English.?They made new friends.?They learned new, albeit possibly arbitrary, skills but it didn’t matter because they were trying something new.?And that is always the first step to trying something new again.

A project funded by Waltham Forest Council, the Forestry Recycling Project, recycles construction waste such as paint, scaffolding boards and fabrics, to be used by volunteers to create.?Like Sew Tottenham, it is a safe place to try something new, learn new skills and talk to your neighbours.?There are no outcomes.

The elite London football clubs all have foundations to engage people of all ages through football, multi-sports and healthy living activities.?Funding from the Premier League is not loaded with job outcomes but is about engaging the clubs’ communities.?The foundations make up London United and work together.

Jobs are important.?But I hope that the new Shared Prosperity Fund has greater flexibility than ESF to engage those on the periphery of our society and economy first.?Once you have employment: paid, unpaid, useful, healthy, arbitrary, social or otherwise, it then gets easier to stay engaged.?Similarly, once you are employed in something grey, illegal, unhealthy or lonely, it is too easy to stay there without help.?We don’t need more programmes about personal presentation, attitude, dependability and hard skills, we need more programmes about simply engaging people in their communities.