Part of the debate – in the Senedd at 6:25 pm on 11 July 2017.
Thank you very much for that, Llyr. In terms of the governance issues, I’ll just address that first. I appreciate that I did mention a large number of boards and so on, but we’ll be providing Members with a sort of pictogram of what we’re talking about, and you’ll see that actually it’s a lot simpler. Because what we’re really talking about is a single board across Government for the employability programmes, with a ministerial board to match that, and the external Wales employment and skills board as the external reference, and then we’ll have an engagement plan for stakeholders. So, actually, it’s a simpler framework, really, although there’s a bewildering number of boards and so on, I quite agree. So, we’ll set that out. The statement doesn’t say this, but I’ll just say for clarity that the Wales employment and skills board will then report into the council for economic development, so that you complete the circle of responsibility.
In terms of the delivery, therefore, that’s the governance structure. That’s how we’ll hold it to account. We’ve deliberately made it cross-Government. It will be delivered as it’s delivered now, but with people reporting through a cross-Government structure. The purpose of the officials’ group is to look at impact, budget, structure, what programmes work, what don’t, and so on, and make recommendations accordingly to both the ministerial cross-Government board and to the external partners as appropriate.
The idea of that, obviously, is, if you think of it as a jigsaw, we think that some of the pieces are probably overlapping. We think that there are probably gaps. The picture is not as clear as we’d like it to be—if you follow my analogy that far. The idea is to actually make the jigsaw join together in a more coherent fashion. Then, just to mix my metaphors, for an individual, what we’re looking for is a clear and consistent pathway on their journey through. So, no matter where you start on that pathway, and people obviously will start in very different places—so, if you’re young, you will start at the end of compulsory schooling; if you’re older and retraining or you’ve been out of work for some time, you’ll start at different places, but, actually, the programmes make a coherent pathway. So, if, for example, colleagues in my colleague Rebecca Evans’s department are looking to help somebody with substance misuse or ill-health problems that are preventing their employment, once those problems are sorted or on the way to being sorted, they can be appropriately passed on to the next part of their journey, rather than completing that and then looking themselves for something else to go on to.
So that’s—. So, I’m building up to the reason why it’s taking so long, because these things are easy to say but actually very complex to deliver. We also deliver these programmes through a number of other partners like local authorities and third sector organisations and so on, and the idea is to corral them into a seamless organisation. We’re starting with the Welsh Government programmes directly funded first, and then moving on. Colleagues have been most helpful around the Cabinet table in assisting with that.
Then, what we’re looking at is also running the ESF-funded and the RDF-funded programmes to their end. We’ve worked very hard with WEFO to widen the edges of those programmes, but nevertheless there are strict lines within which you have to operate. So, the ultimate vision, if you like, is that an individual requiring help or a business requiring help will have a single portal to go to—the skills gateway for individuals or businesses—and that the wiring of the system behind there will not be visible to those people, they will simply get the support they need. However, we do want to make the most of our European funding, so we want to run those programmes to the end, and April 2019 is therefore the point at which that funding ceases. That’s not to say that we won’t start the integration of the programmes on the way, but the final end of those programmes will see the full launch of the new programme. However, there will be bridge funding in between to make sure that people don’t fall into the gaps. So, it’s a sort of staggered start, which is why I’m saying that in the autumn we’ll be bringing back an actual delivery plan for Members to actually see the timeline associated with that, because I do appreciate that that’s quite complex.
I think the last thing you talked about was just this aligning skills issue. As I said to Mohammad Asghar, that’s very much centred around our strategy for regional skills—that’s regional support to businesses and regional support to get the skills they need. So, we are expecting employers to contribute to that in terms of making it transparent what those needs are. Again, if you’re aware of specific instances where you think that isn’t happening, I’d be very grateful to know about it.