15
Examination of witnesses
Julia Nix, Nick Riddle, Tim Aldridge and Helene Dearn.
Q133 The Chair: Good morning and thank you so much for coming to give evidence to this special committee on social mobility. We have a number of questions for you, and we are very grateful to you for coming.
We are going to start with a question we ask most of our panels, which Lord Hampton is going to kick off with. We do not mind who answers it first, but we would like to hear your differing perspectives, if they indeed differ.
Lord Hampton: Can you outline your work and how your organisation aims to improve the opportunities available to those from lower socioeconomic backgrounds? What barriers do you face and how could these be reduced?
Nick Riddle: Good morning. It might make sense to start with the barriers we see from a DWP perspective and then move on to some interventions that we see. A lack of confidence is certainly something we see from customers who walk into our jobcentres. That can be a big issue irrespective of whether the customer is of a particular age; confidence is something that is a challenge. Equally, certainly for our younger customers who might come from more disadvantaged backgrounds, we often see a lack of tangible work experience. That can be a challenge for some customers who are seeking work but also for some employers in terms of sourcing appropriate support.
For me, it is also about the right opportunity being out there for one of our customers who might walk in from a lower socioeconomic background. For example, when the department ran the Kickstart scheme—some years ago now, during Covid—a key part was building young people’s skills in the workplace. Having that real breadth of opportunity is really important for customers who come in, are perhaps more disadvantaged and potentially less confident around working in certain environments.
At a macro level, in terms of some of our interventions, we have the social mobility apprenticeship scheme. This is a particularly good scheme for customers who come from more disadvantaged backgrounds in that, if you are a customer who might potentially have trouble accessing traditional recruitment methods, it is something that is available directly out of our jobcentres. A work coach can refer a customer to that scheme, which takes 12 to 18 months with a potential opportunity of permanency.
Zooming in a bit more at some local level, from a jobcentre perspective we have a strategic relationship team, which is critical and key in bringing together the right sorts of opportunities, whether that be work experience or tailored jobs for young people to make sure we are supporting customers through their employment journey.
Finally—I will then hand over to my other colleagues in the interests of time—we have the work that our work coaches do every day in the jobcentres. We have a network of employer and disability employer advisers who work locally to make sure opportunities are there for our customers.
The Chair: I failed to ask you, when you start, to briefly say where you come from. I am sorry; I overlooked that. Mr Riddle, could you just recap?
Nick Riddle: I work for the Department for Work and Pensions, and I am an operations director. Broadly speaking, that means I am accountable for all the services delivered out of our jobcentres across the Midlands, Yorkshire and the Humber.
Helene Dearn: Good morning. I am the executive director for employment, skills, health and communities at the West Midlands Combined Authority. In my previous life, I was employed by DWP as an operational delivery manager. A year ago, I moved to work in the combined authority to start to help regional devolvement look at how we could manage and understand the system better and try to bring forward innovation into the journey for young people coming through school, into FE, and beyond that into the world of work.
Richard Parker, as the Mayor of the West Midlands, has been clear in setting out his four goals and aspirations, which really do start with jobs for everyone and making sure opportunities are developed through his growth, transport and home missions.
Our region suffers from some of the highest rates of deprivation within the UK, which restricts access for many of our young people to the range of opportunities that might be available in other parts of the country. Some groups that are currently most affected are our young people; we have some of the highest unemployment rates in the UK and disabled and young people from black and minority-ethnic backgrounds.
For a number of years, we have been working in a skills devolution arena and over £900 million has been invested in the West Midlands since 2019. Through that devolution, we have been able to support over 700,000 citizens in improving their educational attainment levels and gaining access to better job opportunities. However, we still have quite a long way to go to make that impact felt by every community within the West Midlands.
When it comes to the biggest barriers we are currently experiencing, we have moved to an integrated settlement for this year, which means that we have more flexibility in the way some funding is spent. However, it is a new world for some parts of Government, and having a relationship based on partnership as opposed to contractual is a behaviour that we are working through with central government at the moment. We truly believe that partnership is the way to move forward and having a real understanding of the challenges by community.
The other main barrier we are dealing with at the moment in this area is the gap at 18. The powers for the combined authority come in at 19-plus, and the 16 to 19 arena is handled by our colleagues within the Department for Education. We are seeing more and more youngsters falling through at that 18 gap, which means they are too late to access the up-to-19 provision and too young to access the provision that our combined authority would provide. Those are some barriers that we are seeing at the moment.
Tim Aldridge: I am the executive director for children and learning for the London Borough of Camden. I am responsible for schools and social care services.
Some barriers we are seeing are similar to those that colleagues have already mentioned. Certainly, we understand the impact of child poverty in Camden, which has some of the most affluent wards, but also some of the most deprived areas in London.
We know the barriers for children and young people might include young carers, those who have experience of the criminal justice system and those who have care experience, which we are going to speak more about later. It is also those who have been impacted by poverty including the impact of being in temporary housing, those who have special educational needs, those whose needs have been identified quite late, and those who suffer systemic discrimination including racial discrimination. Those are some barriers young people experience.
In terms of what we are doing, Camden launched a set of missions in 2022, including a youth mission. The youth mission is about trying to provide greater economic opportunities for young people, with the idea that children growing up in the wards with the most deprivation have access to the opportunities and best jobs in the borough. Through that youth mission, we have brought together a range of local and public sector organisations and large employers through the STEAM partnership, which is science, technology, engineering, arts and maths. That provides over 100 apprenticeships a year, 7,000 opportunities for young people to get involved with employers, and nearly 450 opportunities for them to be involved in work experience.
We have also developed four opportunity centres that give young people the chance to engage with employers and learn skills outside school. We have a young talent guarantee which again means that all our 16 and 17 year-olds have access to work experience and can also access T-level work placements. That is a summary of some steps we have taken.
Julia Nix: Good morning, everyone. I work to Nick Riddle in the jobcentres in Norfolk, Suffolk, Peterborough and Cambridgeshire; I am what they call a front-line operational manager.
I will not repeat what Nick said, but my number one priority is to pay benefits, and then we need to be able to move on very quickly to place those young people into work. I want to take those young people and their families out of poverty and into a long and healthy living. Having listened to the previous panel, there are lots of linkages, which is really interesting. However, 25 years ago I worked with Professor Geoff Shepherd, from the Cambridgeshire and Peterborough (Mental Health) Foundation Trust, where—with a number of colleagues—he identified that the best form of recovery for moderate mental health is the right form of work. I have never forgotten that. I drive every day to try to deliver that to those young people who are furthest away from the labour market.
We have seen a rise in young people with mental health issues since Covid. We need to address that and I believe we can do so if we join up with the schools, colleges and partners that were in session number one.
Tim mentioned the facility we need that will allow these young people to have a different type of learning. In King’s Lynn, on the edge of Norfolk, we are delivering in partnership what we call Open Road West Norfolk. It is a voluntary and community sector delivering alternative learning to young people that inspires them. We are looking at motor racing, mechanics and music, whatever it is that sparks that individual to learn differently, and I believe it is making a difference.
Q134 Baroness Garden of Frognal: How does your organisation seek to engage with those who are not in education, employment or training, the growing band of NEETs? What particular challenges do they present and what could be done to better engage with this group? You have all touched a little on this already.
The Chair: The panel will understand that this is a recurring theme of this inquiry and we very much welcome your thoughts on it.
Julia Nix: The previous panel spoke about partnerships, which is massive for me. I have spent 14 years building partnerships within East Anglia. We need local authorities as they have the numbers for children’s services, and that is how we can find out where these young people are sitting.
It is sometimes tricky with data; we could do better, but we are getting there by a multi-agency approach. I am going to give you an example. During Covid, the Bishop of St Edmundsbury and Ipswich developed the youth intervention fund. He wanted to bring senior partners together to make sure that young people from disadvantaged backgrounds were kept safe during Covid. In my opinion, it has developed into something magical and brought the public, private, voluntary and community sectors together. The educationalists who sat here earlier today have the college, university, police and crime commissioners because they all want to stop county lines. We want to do it together through a multi-agency approach. It is early days but we are starting to see a lot come through that.
The high sheriff joins us every year, and last year’s high sheriff has taken the care leavers as her project, which we are going to come on to later. She and I visited a number of care homes to identify what we could do to assist them. If you remember, my remit is to deliver work, and I wanted to understand from the care homes what they were doing about introducing them into the world of work. It was very clear that that experience was not there, whether it was public, private or voluntary sector care homes. We need to be able to support the care homes, to move those seamlessly into the world of work. It is all very possible and is called corporate parenting. Where they do not have a parent, we need to come together multi-agency to be that corporate parent.
Tim Aldridge: I can give a particular example of a group of children we engage with closely, which are those involved in the youth justice service. These are young people who have been arrested, have offended, and we provide them with wraparound support to help them have better outcomes. Whether it is this or other groups of young people who have been NEET for some time, it is about how we build relationships of trust, understand those young people, engage with their families and think about the opportunities that are going to resonate with them.
One example is an employability programme called Honest Grind Coffee, and I have a bag of coffee here. This is an organisation we have set up to provide young people from the youth justice system in Camden with paid work experience, and is paid at London living wage. They learn a range of skills and are supported to move into other forms of training, employment or education going forward. We have worked with 26 young people so far and are seeing some really good outcomes. Of all the young people who are involved in our youth justice system, 71% are in education, employment or training. We are really proud of that work.
To give you one example, a 17 year-old was referred to our Honest Grind Coffee programme by his caseworker after he was arrested, which led to an exclusion from school. Since training with Honest Grind Coffee, he has gained three vocational qualifications, has been described as reliable and conscientious, is now studying for A-levels, and has aspirations to study PPE at university. So this has really helped turn his life around.
Q135 Baroness Hussein-Ece: I want to come in on aspects of NEETs. We are not sure of the exact numbers, but there seems to be a cohort of young people who are leaving care, probably at 18, but local authorities still have a responsibility up to 21. I know Camden very well because I live in Islington, where I was a councillor, and we used to compete with you on poaching social workers. I know the problems of getting the right staff. Do you think the system has improved?
Years ago, when I was a councillor, they said that young people leaving care were more likely to end up in prison or on the streets than in university. Is that improving? Camden is one of our more cutting-edge boroughs, so how embedded do you think that is when you interact with your colleagues around the country? How embedded is that desire to improve the leaving care experience and support them in the right direction so they do not end up being a NEET, homeless, or in the criminal justice system?
Tim Aldridge: That is a good question. The answer is yes, it is improving, but there is a long way to go. We know that children and young people who have been in care have often experienced a lot of trauma, disruption and breakdown of trust in their lives. Some young people are very far away from employment, training or education. Again, I would go back to the idea that it is about showing them love, persistence, building relationships of trust, and really understanding that a route into employment is not a single step. For some young people, it is many steps over a long period of time. There will be a number of setbacks, so it is not linear either.
There are some positive examples—not just in Camden but across the country—where local authorities are going that step further. It is about local partnerships. I know that in the Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill 2024, there is a proposal to make all public bodies responsible for corporate parenting, so a whole system local partnership approach where it is not just the local authority but public bodies and private sector organisations that will see this group of young people as their responsibility and think of innovative and creative ways to give these young people opportunities. We are still in contact with young people who are 26 and 27 years old, care-experienced, and come back to us for support and advice. We have to be more flexible. It has to be based on love, care and relationships rather than protocol.
The Chair: Ms Dearn and Mr Riddle, do you want to add anything?
Helene Dearn: I would add that partnership is absolutely critical in this space, as is the ability to exchange data and intelligence between those key partners. Within the West Midlands, we very much base our decision-making on evidence and work extensively with think tanks and experts in the field of NEET, et cetera, to understand what the real challenges are.
We have done extensive work to hear the voices of young people across the region to help build solutions going forward. We are also part of the national NEET commission that is under way from across Whitehall and have been asked to be part one of the commissioners on that group. It will all be based on what the evidence is telling us and what those solutions might look like.
Within the West Midlands, we work extensively in partnership and DWP is one of our key partners there. Clearly, we represent and are part of that wider combined authority set-up with our seven local authorities. We are making sure that each of the component parts of the system comes together, understands the challenges and brings forward solutions together. That is definitely the way we see this improving going forward.
Nick Riddle: I would endorse everything that all my colleagues have said, particularly Tim. I absolutely agree: care and love really matter for young people in the care experience. I am conscious of time and do not want to repeat. I would just pull out a couple of things we have seen work really well, and something we are trying in DWP, along with our colleagues in the combined authorities.
Increasingly, we are looking at providing our services in the community rather than just out of a jobcentre network on the basis that we appreciate young people—especially when coming into a jobcentre—might find that environment quite challenging, particularly if they have complex needs. They can be quite noisy places, feel a bit imposing, and there may be security present.
Across the UK, DWP has established around 111 Youth Hubs with our local partners and they are really positive; young people really like them. Shrewsbury Town Football Club is a particular one in my patch that is excellent. In essence, a Youth Hub brings together local partners with experience that we may not have in DWP because our work coaches are not clinicians, despite the training we provide. They are not mental health experts or social workers, all of which might be required in terms of helping that young person through. Youth Hubs are really positive experiences where we try to provide a more holistic journey for our young customers. For example, at some we will run sports activities in the morning and then job-seeking activities in the afternoon. It is much more of an attractive pull than just coming into a jobcentre.
The only other thing I will add—conscious of time for the committee—is that DWP is also working with a lot of our combined authority partners to trial youth trailblazers in eight mayoral combined authority areas. That is part of the Government’s approach to devolution which, in essence, is a test and learn approach where DWP provides funding for our combined authority partners to do innovative and different things with direct government funding but not out of a jobcentre. Helene might talk about that later but certainly that community-based approach is something we find works really well.
The Chair: That is very interesting, and thank you for your awareness of time. The committee is very rarely aware of time and I have difficulty keeping to it. Did you want to add something, Helene?
Helene Dearn: Just to add one more thing: we work extensively with an organisation called Youth Futures Foundation. All their research tells us that if you are in a family where there is no work, a history of no work, or you have siblings who are already NEET, then you are more likely to follow that same path.
Working closely under the public service reform, the West Midlands is reaching out to try to understand how we look at the pathway for young people differently and learn from colleagues—such as those in Camden—who have trailblazed this approach. The more we can do to try to look at the public system to understand whether it is meeting the needs of the citizen, whether they are a young person or not, and how we make sure that the system from end to end is delivering at the right time for that person, as Julia said, with the right love and attention, the better.
Lord Hampton: Mr Aldridge mentioned the Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill 2024. Just to make the point, we have day three on Monday. There is a lot about corporate parenting, care leavers and kinship care in there, so the picture is changing and will hopefully get a lot better after this.
The Chair: The next question is from Lord Evans about young people who have experienced care; we have already touched on it a certain amount. Lord Evans, do you want to ask any aspect of that again or is there something on this subject that other people have not mentioned that they would like to contribute?
Q136 Lord Evans of Rainow: Yes, you have answered quite a bit. Ms Nix, you are from a beautiful part of the country, East Anglia. Ms Dearn and Mr Riddle, are from the Midlands, and Mr Aldridge is from Camden. One thing the committee noticed when we went on our trip to Blackpool was the local authority, and your point about partnerships is key. You have a one-hat-fits-all approach. You sit in the Department for Work and Pensions in Whitehall and talk about regions. I come from the north-west; the region is Cumbria in the north and Cheshire in the south. There is absolutely no cultural connectivity between them. You have Greater Liverpool, Merseyside and Manchester.
My question to you is: if the Government and the department set the overall framework, what is the outcome we want? We want more people to go into higher education, and we have focused on NEETs, which is a growing worry. The state has had data on them from the day they were born through to this big group going into the workforce who are undereducated with low skills. Using your local knowledge—we saw in Blackpool how the partnership worked together—of examples in East Anglia, Camden and the West Midlands, what do you think the silver bullet is that we could recommend to the Government?
The Chair: If there is one; I think the evidence is that there is not.
Lord Evans of Rainow: It might help the committee, because we are getting an underlying theme that one hat does not fit all. There are urban, rural and seaside community peculiarities.
Helene Dearn: My ask—I am sure others on this side of the table would say the same—is a better ability to exchange data between Government departments into local authorities and then into the education system and beyond. So while we may feel that there is an ability to track young people and know those that are NEET, exchanging that information from the DfE to college to DWP is not that straightforward.
Lord Evans of Rainow: We saw that evidenced in Blackpool. They gave us evidence of how they bent the rules to share the data within government departments. You are nodding your head, Julia. How can we change the rules to make it easier for the various agencies to work together?
The Chair: We are very happy to hear from you on this question and the related one on care.
Tim Aldridge: On that question, it is right. It is about forming local partnerships with employers and agencies in the local area. In Camden, we have an annual summit called We Make Camden, and we bring in the community residents and lots of big local employers. We had it at the British Library this year. We have two mission ambassadors for the youth missions: the Roundhouse and the British Museum. Both have committed to supporting internships for priority group young people, so those with care experience, youth justice service experience, or those who have special educational needs.
It is about how those local organisations lead the way and publicly show their support for giving opportunities to those children with the greatest disadvantage. We also work with Google, which has a local AI campus. Again, it is about giving local children—particularly those from disadvantaged backgrounds—the opportunity to learn AI skills. So there is a lot that every area can do with its local organisations in terms of care leavers specifically. Could I go on to that?
The Chair: I just observe that Camden is in a very privileged position in the access you are able to describe compared to some areas of the country. That will come out in our recommendations in some form. We will let Mr Aldridge finish, then we will go to Mr Riddle.
Tim Aldridge: Thank you. In terms of care leavers, we are also involved in a Youth Guarantee trailblazer, working with the Drive Forward Foundation. We are seeing great benefits to supporting care leavers or people with care experience access internships. We offer eight internships within the council and are working with the Inner Circle Educational Trust to fund a navigator to support young people who come from care going into higher education. We provide quite a lot of support for those at university: a laptop, free Wi-Fi, and support for holiday accommodation.
There is a lot you need to do to wrap around young people who are furthest away from employment and education. The results are that 71% of our 17 to 18 year-olds and 68% of 19 to 21 year-olds with care experience are in education, employment or training. We still have a way to go but it compares quite favourably to some other parts of the country.
My last point is the approach of the family business—seeing the council as the family business. If you owned a family business, you would want your children to have the advantages and opportunities of being part of it. We see that from the council in terms of that extension of corporate parenting responsibility to public bodies. Beyond that, we would say local big institutions should also share that desire to give children from the most disadvantaged places an opportunity to be part of a family business.
The Chair: Mr Riddle, do you have anything to add?
Nick Riddle: Only very briefly, Chair, because I am afraid I do not think there is a silver bullet. But if I had to have a stab at a couple of things, I would certainly say time and patience, which is something my colleague Tim said. Obviously, in a publicly funded environment, funding time can be quite challenging, to be honest.
There is also something about the consistency of the support. Within the jobcentre network, it works best when a customer sees the same work coach because they build up a relationship. The work coach is then more able to tease out from that young person any particular complex needs they have and understand their experience.
There is also a key point for me about the fact that I am immensely proud that, whenever I walk into one of my jobcentres, all my work coaches come from the community and have lived experience. That matters. A young person sitting across the table from someone who has been in care themselves, has had mental health challenges, a disability or other complex needs really matters. It comes directly to your point that every community is different. That is why a place-based approach is really strong, and I am incredibly proud of the relationship we have built with colleagues in the combined authority over the years.
It is by working in a community that you will recognise that a young person from Islington is fundamentally different to a young person from Washwood Heath, and therefore their needs and the support you need to wrap around them will be different. You only get that in a partnership-based approach, not by DWP doing this, or DfE doing this, or the CA doing that.
Julia Nix: The family business we have in Suffolk we do not have in Norfolk, Cambridgeshire or Peterborough. I always think it is such an amazing thing and it is absolutely crucial that we try to roll the family business out across the country. The question actually asked was: what challenges do you face? I would like to talk to you about a serious challenge I have faced now for all these working years.
When a young person is in care, they have what is called supported housing. It can be in a private, public or voluntary organisation. Let us just pick on a voluntary organisation: the YMCA. They are in supported accommodation. We work with them and the YMCA by putting in a work coach and supporting them to get closer to the world of work. We get them a job. They have to return to the home to be told that if they take the job they must leave their accommodation because of the charge for the supported accommodation. It is nobody’s fault; it is the system that is broken. The system charges them an enormous amount of rent; it is something like £1,000 plus a month. So they have a choice: do they take the job and make themselves homeless, or do they remain in their home and not take the job?
Lord Timpson across the way will tell you that you need a job to have a home and you need a home to have a job. So, effectively, the system is imprisoning these young people in these homes because we cannot get them to have affordable housing. I have worked really hard on it, and I have some models that I found that can work. Cambridge calls it “It Takes a City”. It takes a city to support that young person into work and out of supported accommodation.
FutureIN is an amazing employer-led initiative. They visited the YMCA many years ago, and the landowners and property owners of Cambridge now offer an apprenticeship where they provide a home as well as a job. It is a minority of people. I have helped and persuaded partners and friends to give the person a home when they get a job, but I am doing it for a very small number. We need to do something across the country to address this system that is broken.
Tim Aldridge: Can I add something to that? I absolutely recognise the point that Julia makes. We have eight internships in Camden Council for young people with care experience. In the latest group, we have had to add an additional £1,500 cost of living allowance just because of the high cost of housing and associated costs when you are in employment. So yes, I really recognise that.
Q137 Lord Young of Cookham: I want to drill down a little on what we have been talking about on local partnerships. There is general agreement that a place-based approach is right, and we have heard evidence from universities and employers. We have been to Blackpool and seen some good examples of local partnerships. What is not clear in my mind is who is in charge? Who is going to take the initiative and set up these partnerships?
In some cases, it has been the universities. In Blackpool, it was the local authority, and the employers got together in other areas. So, without imposing a giant bureaucratic structure, how do we ensure that we get these partnerships up and running?
There may be parts of the country where they do not exist at all and none of the good work we have heard about this morning is happening. What light can you shed on a recommendation we might make to ensure that the good practice we have heard about today and elsewhere exists and there is some form of responsibility, accountability and targets to make sure we make substantive progress? Julia, could you say a little about the partnership in East Anglia, which you talked about a few moments ago?
Julia Nix: I will talk about a partnership that works amazingly well and we would like to replicate the model across the country.
It was called the Margate Task Force when I went to visit it. It is now called the Thanet Multi-agency Task Force, and it is everybody that the committee spoke about before. It actually starts with the fire service, and you wonder, “Why the fire service?” The fire service is the safe pair of hands that works with the family and the house to make sure they have their fire alarms, and then every other agency comes in behind. It includes health, housing, tax, the police, ourselves and anybody that you could honestly imagine. It is about that holistic, multi-agency approach to making sure that the family or people living in that home have everything that works.
It has been working for a number of years. I went to see it because I wanted to do the same in Great Yarmouth—there is a link between Margate and Great Yarmouth—but I could not do it. We need somebody more senior to join up all the agencies and government departments, and it was one of my asks at the end to give us shared and joint objectives that allow us to come together to deliver that through a system that creates those funding streams and does not put us in silos. It was amazing and we have done similar in East Anglia.
Lord Young of Cookham: Was the fire service initiative focused on NEETs?
Julia Nix: No, it is what it calls a street clean; it focuses on the street. It works on a street with those families and homes and then delivers for them, but in Margate, lots of them are NEET and there are all sorts of issues.
Lord Young of Cookham: If one is looking for a model for NEETs, would that model work?
Julia Nix: Yes, it would because they need a home.
Lord Young of Cookham: Not one run by the fire service.
Julia Nix: It is only that it led the partnership, so it is there because people are comfortable—
Lord Evans of Rainow: It opens the door.
The Chair: If nobody initiates a partnership in an area, how can the committee recommend and encourage them to initiate one? Speaking for my colleagues, we find the evidence on the value of partnerships compelling, but in their absence, how can we generate them?
Helene Dearn: Within the expanding mayoral combined authority network—obviously we are more mature along with our partners in Greater Manchester—we know that over the last few months more combined authorities have been set up. There is a convening accountability that could come through the combined authorities to work with each of their constituent members to make sure that they have a NEET forum and are working together across the system within that local authority. However, the standard and convening power should be set at combined authority level.
Lord Young of Cookham: Can I put the question to Nick Riddle? If you look at the DWP’s missions, it is the DWP that has the responsibility for getting people into work, reducing economic activity and enabling individuals to realise their full potential, and actually, it is you that has all the money. Given that the prime responsibility for finding jobs for NEETs rests with the DWP, how would you interface with the sort of model we have been talking about, where the combined authorities or the mayor would be in the lead? You are a government department which is central, so how would you interface with basically the local autonomous bodies: the employers, local authorities and universities?
Nick Riddle: We can draw on the evidence that is happening at the moment. As a reflection on your earlier point, part of this is having the skill within government, local authorities and other partners to navigate very complex systems where potentially no one person has that power. Trying to have a model that covered everywhere and was consistent would probably be quite difficult given some challenges we were talking about earlier. The challenges of tackling youth unemployment in Birmingham will be very different to other areas, and therefore saying that partner A should be in charge over partner B could be quite difficult.
However, we have evidence around the Get Britain Working plans that we are leading along with our combined authority partners—Helene might want to say a bit more about that—which is where every area has to have a plan about how they will get people working or get Britain working. Helene might want to come in on that because we have just done that jointly.
Helene Dearn: We have just convened a stakeholder network right across the West Midlands to build that plan, which actually brings in our local care boards, DWP, employers, third parties, voluntary sector and faith groups—everything from within our system—to try to understand what the key things are that will make a difference for us in the West Midlands.
There are also some pieces about the English Devolution White Paper that could support some of this. Where there is devolution, how do we ensure that the opportunity is right for each of those partners to be part of that devolution?
Nick is right: the challenge is different. Even in the seven local authorities that I represent, each has a different set of far-reaching responsibilities and problems. The only way I see to do that is through overarching convened power but bringing together the key players within that geography.
The Chair: I am going to move us on, if I may. Lord Ravensdale—who is online—has a question for you, which again we have covered some of already.
Q138 Lord Ravensdale: As the Chair has said, we have covered a lot of what my question was going to ask already, and it follows on from what Lord Young asked. I would like to focus on something a bit more specific, particularly to you, Helene. You have talked quite a bit about the combined authority model and the effectiveness of that in flowing down to the local authorities within the combined authority and setting up broader NEET forums, for example.
In terms of the system join-up piece that we have been talking about—which came up in the last panel as well—I would be interested to get your views on how that model should work more broadly. If we take the Midlands and all the areas which do not fall under a combined authority—which is still quite a big chunk of the Midlands geography—how should this work for areas that do not fall under a combined authority? How can we get that model working for those areas as well as the combined authority areas?
Helene Dearn: Something we have done quite well in the West Midlands is to understand that our boundaries might be around seven local authorities, but actually our citizens, employers and services all overarch not just those seven but lots of others that border us. For example, Warwickshire is one of our key partners in everything that we do, even though it is not part of the combined authority. We run a network for our college principals that focuses on the colleges across our seven METs but also brings in the college principals from all the bordering authorities. So we are working together and building a map of the offer, making sure that that opportunity is there where we have specialisms and can learn from each other.
I agree we have different levels of experience to offer, and you see that in the difference between a place like the West Midlands compared to Cambridgeshire & Peterborough, which is a very new combined authority. We also work very inclusively across the country, so all the MSAs meet on a regular basis to talk about challenges and understand and learn from each other. We do that not just in the skills arena but in all the other devolved responsibilities that we have, such as economy, housing, et cetera. So there are networks across the country as well as networks top to bottom within each geography.
Q139 The Chair: That is very reassuring. Unless other members of the panel want to add to that, I would like to come on to our final question, which we have already had some answers to: what would you like to see in our recommendation? I have written down Helene’s point on making the exchange of data easier and Ms Nix’s comment on supported accommodation to work. There are probably others that my colleagues have written down that I have missed. There are some general themes. Here is an opportunity for you each to give us some recommendations you would like to see in our report. We do not promise to put them in, but we would like to hear what you think. Who would like to start? Mr Aldridge?
Tim Aldridge: I may have mentioned one of these already, but the two asks would be, first, for local employers and public bodies to have a responsibility to provide ring-fenced internships for young people who are perhaps furthest away from employment: those with care experience, those who have been involved in the youth justice system, and those with special educational needs or disabilities. The second ask would be that each local area adopt this local family business approach—again particularly for those with care experience—so there is a corporate parenting duty to offer more for those young people in their local area.
Nick Riddle: You have probably captured mine, Chair, but to briefly cover them, I endorse what my colleague, Helene, said about data sharing. We have already talked about the danger of young people falling through the cracks, so the ability to share data with appropriate control is a really important one. I cannot think of a particularly elegant way of saying this, but we have talked a lot about that partnership approach, and everything has to be about that for me. A one-size-fits-all model does not work in this; you need a proper place-based approach.
Julia Nix: We have not mentioned employers, so I would like to see a mechanism that supports those employers that want to go into schools and colleges, and care workers with internships. They cannot do it on their own; it is just too complicated, so there needs to be a system that will organise it, produce it and make it work. It is not a huge thing, but I know employers would welcome it and young people would benefit from it.
The Chair: We saw that working in the partnership they have in Blackpool.
Helene Dearn: Can I just add one in relation to the Social Mobility Commission round table that is taking place across the country at the moment? We held one in the West Midlands last week. It was really well represented by employers right the way through the system, and we are expecting a number of recommendations to come out of those conversations. It is important that that work alongside everything you are establishing through this is brought together.
The Chair: If any of you think when you leave here, “I should have said that, or they should read this, or we forgot to mention that”, please do not hesitate to get in touch because we are working towards the end of our evidence taking and getting to the stage of drafting recommendations. This has been extremely helpful. Thank you all very much.
