4. 4. Statement: Employability

Part of the debate – in the Senedd at 3:32 pm on 15 November 2016.

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Photo of Julie James Julie James Labour 3:32, 15 November 2016

Thank you very much for those questions, David Rees. I think, on the point of transportation, it’s true I didn’t mention it in the statement itself, but that’s only because you end up with a big, long shopping list if you put everything in—that’s not to denigrate its importance. Clearly, what we’re looking at is looking to see what barriers each individual faces, and, if there’s a transportation difficulty, then we need to find a way to counter that.

Indeed, I visited a library up in Blaina, in Abertillery, only the other day, and spoke with a number of people there who were in our digital inclusion groups, and a librarian there, who was a really excellent individual. Nearly everybody there said that transportation was one of the biggest problems they had in accessing the jobs that they were looking for as part of their benefits search. So, I’m very familiar with that, and we will certainly be looking at that. My colleague, Ken Skates, and I are very much part of that proposal.

In terms of how it links to the other initiatives we’ve got, you mentioned the steel taskforce, for example, but we also have the Valleys taskforce, and a number of other initiatives, all of which are really working in the same area, but with specific focus on a particular group of people, with particular problems. The whole point about the employability scheme is that it pulls them together and sets them in an overarching policy framework, so that we can ensure that they’re not working against each other, but are, in fact, working in harmony.

If I could just use the steel taskforce as an example of not having cohort-driven policies, obviously, there’ll be ReAct funding available for anybody who’s made redundant, but you’ll know that that only applies to employees, and that a lot of the people who become displaced when an industry starts to downsize are actually supply chain contractors and self-employed people, and so on. So, we’re looking to have a more global system that allows people who are not inside the specific category to also access support. So, that’s a very good example of how that would work.

And then, lastly, in terms of regional skills partnerships, I’ve been going around Wales, I’ve announced the two plans—for the north and for the south-east—and, very shortly, I’ll be announcing the plan for the regional partnership for the south-west, as all three regional skills partnerships go from their pilot year into their first year of operation. In the south-west, for example, they’ve worked very hard with the city region, and, indeed, with the enterprise zones, to ensure that all of the skills for the growth industries we want for the future are reflected in the plan, and then our funding will follow that, so that we can ensure that, when we’re putting funding in place for skills specifically, we’re funding the skills for the future and not skills for the past.