Dispatches - The Big Job Hunt

Channel 4 ran a documentary about welfare-to-work services in the recession on 16th February. They also have a small accompanying website here in case you missed it. I've put together a summary of the programme's content below which hopefully captures the major points.

Lord Digby Jones, the former CBI Director-General and Trade Minister, toured the Midlands meeting unemployed people and comparing their experience of government help to the promises made by Gordon Brown at the start of this year*. His main findings included:

• Not enough support to successful companies to minimise redundancies - Digby was particularly animated by the prospect of car and tractor companies making skilled staff redundant. He wasn't particularly impressed by the 'green' funding being discussed by the government as a way to support businesses. Nor was he keen on the government's plans to spend lots of money on public works projects, as they would take years to get off the drawing board.
• The jobs market is not healthy - Digby spoke to various people, include Dave Simmond of CESI, who blew holes in the figure of 500,000 vacancies by pointing out that a quarter of them were for low hours work and 46% were for low-skilled jobs that may not pay enough to make employment worthwhile.
• Jobcentres are under strain - Digby spoke to a family with two children whose claim for JSA took five weeks to process, and who had no access to crisis loans or other facilities in the meantime. Will Hutton pointed out that the huge staffing cuts at Jobcentre Plus and the highly personalised service it was designed to provide meant it couldn't cope with the trebling or quadrupling in the number of new claimants. The PCS also admitted that advisers were unable to provide the level of service they should.
• Unemployed executives don't get suitable help - Recently redundant professionals were interviewed talking about feeling patronised by Jobcentre staff, and about the lack of any support for their needs.
• The mortgage support scheme isn't much good - Stories of Jobcentre staff not knowing anything about the mortgage support scheme, and about a lack of understanding on what was being offered, didn't inspire huge confidence. Nor did the news that any money from the scheme is used to help repay the mortgage lender in the event of repossession.
• Graduate recruitment is slowing down - Perhaps not surprisingly, the possibility of only half of this year's graduates finding employment was mooted. The government's proposed internship scheme to tackle this was not given a good review.
• Apprenticeships may not be up to the job - Digby didn't seem entirely happy with the government's Apprenticeships scheme, and contrasted it with the German model where training payments are made directly to industry. Interviews with companies that were dropping their apprenticeship recruitment made the wider point that apprentices still need work coming in to justify their recruitment in the first place.
• Redundancy support wasn't up to much - A former Nissan worker went to a special jobs fair at the Nissan factory, only to find that it consisted of stalls with fliers for self-employment and other programmes but nothing actually useful.

Also of interest were the predominance of former property, construction and automotive jobs among the programme's subjects. This tied in with a running theme of a lack of proper skills training for unemployed people to move into a new career, although as with much of the programme this wasn't developed into concrete suggestions on the best way forward. Tony McNulty was given a chance to respond to some of the criticisms made in the show, and pointed to the forthcoming FND Gateway and the success of LEPs as positive counterexamples.

As a general interest TV programme, it was of necessity somewhat light on deeper analysis of the situation. It also seemed to be unremittingly bleak about the state of welfare-to-work support in the UK, and didn't cover the welfare reforms currently rolling through Parliament.

* - As an aside, one of the main points to emerge from the programme is that either Lord Digby or the programme-makers really don't like Gordon Brown. The entire structure was based around taking each of Gordon Brown's claims in a key speech on the topic, filtering the video to make him look like an alien, and then demolishing them.