8. 7. Statement: Employability

Part of the debate – in the Senedd at 6:36 pm on 11 July 2017.

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Photo of Julie James Julie James Labour 6:36, 11 July 2017

Thank you for that series of questions. I think I have actually addressed almost all of them already, but I’ll just reiterate. The Valleys taskforce is just mentioned as being the pilot test bed for some of the pieces of work that we’re doing. As I already indicated to other Members, it’s not the only place that we’ll be doing it and we have to start somewhere. Obviously, the communities of north Wales also have similar problems, and we will of course be addressing employability across the whole of Wales.

In terms of zero hours and so on, I’ve very much addressed that in terms of what we’re doing on the Fair Work Commission. That has representation from the Confederation of British Industry, the Federation of Small Businesses, trade unions and a whole series of other people and the Government on it, and WESB is, for example, currently chaired by Scott Waddington, who is the chair of Brains. So, I don’t think that we can accept any criticism that we’re looking only at the public sector—far from it. In fact, the regional skills partnerships are all chaired by employers as well, and they all sit on it, and they have three seats each—the chair of the regional skills partnership and two of the primary employers that they bring with them. So, that’s just not the situation at all. And, actually, I wasn’t talking about creating jobs in the public sector. The Member will realise that, in my statement, we’re talking about supporting the firms, for example, that have the highest growth potential and also, of course, we are extending our business offer in terms of indigenous companies to help them with their supply chains in Wales and so on. So, I’m not too sure where that impression was created.

In terms of the wider group of stakeholders, of course, we have a whole series of stakeholders. We have business organisations and SMEs from all over Wales, we have big business from all over Wales, we also have a number of delivery partners and stakeholders in terms of third sector partners who deliver employability programmes on our behalf and support small businesses on our behalf, and we have a range of advisers in terms of businesses right across Wales.

I think the last point was about whether the programme is new or not. There are a number of new programmes, but what we’re really talking about is making sure, as I explained to Llyr Gruffydd earlier, that this jigsaw fits together, that we don’t have overlapping pieces, that there aren’t any gaps and that it makes a coherent picture that everybody can understand.