Wednesday 1st August 2007, 12:22Big stick? World of opportunity.The recent Green paper has focused lots of discussion on people being forced into work and the role of the private, public and voluntary sector.
At A4e, we help thousands of people every year find work. We work with lone parents, the ill, disabled and long-term unemployed, and succeed in placing someone in employment every ten minutes of every working day. People are not forced into work and we customise the services for each individual who participates in the services we offer. On a daily basis we see people’s lives being truly transformed by getting a job and in many cases these people didn’t believe they could work until they were given one-to-one support and coaching from us.
The best way to make these points are to focus on the people whose lives are improved and changed by the opportunity to participate on tailored and customised programmes to help them into work.
For example, 34 year old Kevin King was left with his left arm permanently paralysed after a car accident when he was 12. He struggled to find and keep work and before he came to A4e was unemployed for 6 years. His worry was that ‘nothing could help him’ but our starting point was to ask ‘what do you really want to do?’. Kevin wanted to be a bus driver - a competitive job market. By designing the services we offered around his aspirations for a career, our adviser and partner organisations worked tirelessly to support Kevin and negotiate the training, insurance and design the equipment to allow him to drive a bus safely. Kevin passed his test and now works as a bus driver in Liverpool.
Similarly, many of the lone parents that we work with talk about feeling a confidence they haven’t felt in years, along with a renewed desire to learn and develop a career they can be proud of. In less than six weeks Tina has succeed in transforming herself from being withdrawn, quiet and reluctant to participate on one of our Pathways to Work programmes, into a confident, employed individual who is now planning her next career move. Tina, from Northern Ireland, has one child and struggled to find meaningful work for years. We helped Tina by providing close one-to-one guidance and support, helping to develop her work skills and confidence and secured her a work placement at a counselling service. Tina now has a permanent, paid position as a counselling supervisor and has now started her training to be a drug awareness officer. She is using her own life experience to help others tackle their barriers and challenges.
With more freedom, suppliers can better tailor provision and the movement to a unified benefit removes the artificial divides of ‘labels’ and perceptions associated with the current benefit regime, often a barrier to people’s personal self belief as well as prejudice from those who can offer employment.
Often people are not aware of the services they could access. By encouraging rights and responsibilities in the Green Paper we are opening up opportunity to benefit from services, not forcing people to participate. The Green Paper is an opportunity but this opportunity could be lost in spurious debates about form, structure and protectionism. Let’s talk about the customer first.
Yes, it will mean big changes for lone parents and people on incapacity benefit but we believe these changes will be for the better. From a providers point of view the Green Paper offers us the opportunity to be more innovative, to offer better support and help more people like Kevin achieve their dreams and aspirations. Partnerships between the private, public and voluntary sectors are crucial and only then can we succeed in breaking down the barriers to employment.
In making welfare services work, it is never a question of one or other of these organisations delivering the service but each of them providing services to ensure a customer’s broad range of needs can be addressed - no one organisation can do this. We need a rich tapestry of suppliers to help deliver the services to many people who face multiple barriers to work.
Finally, we need to remember that employment is one piece of the jigsaw – tackling other social issues such as child poverty, skills and financial exclusion are all equally important and it’s time a wider holistic approach was taken. We join up services at the front line because more work still needs to be done joining up strategies at government level. Leitch, Freud, Wanless, Harker – the challenge for government is more coherence but in the meantime we’ll get on putting the customer first. We want to give people a chance to build their confidence and self-esteem and re-shape their lives the way they want to. In our experience people jump at the chance and embrace it with enthusiasm.
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