Employment

UK ministers consider worker health checks to tackle labour shortages

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This article provides some interesting insights into the crazy world of labour shortages at the moment. How can we have almost 50% economic inactivity in some of our coastal settlements alongside the need to engage overseas workers???

Ministers are looking at bringing in annual health checks for workers and allowing more hospitality staff to come from abroad in an effort to deal with labour shortages.

The plans could involve giving companies subsidies for occupational health services to prevent workers going off long-term sick, as part of the government’s review of the workforce to be unveiled alongside the budget this month.

Ministers have also asked the Migration Advisory Committee for advice on whether the hospitality, construction and retail industries should be on the list of sectors where there is a shortage of workers, helping them to recruit from overseas.

It is thought hospitality workers are the most likely to be put on the list, which makes it easier for staff to get jobs from abroad.

Jeremy Hunt ordered the workforce review amid concerns the economy is being held back by shortages of workers that have emerged since the pandemic and Brexit.

The health check plans, first reported by the Sunday Times, would form part of the workforce review conducted by the Department for Work and Pensions with input from the Department of Health and Social Care.

It was launched in an attempt to understand why there are about 600,000 more “economically inactive” people of working age than before the pandemic.

Basic income pilot scheme for care leavers to be trialled in Wales

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I love this idea and as with many good approaches in Wales it will impact equally on rural and non-rural people who are eligible to exactly the same degree.

All young people leaving care in Wales at the age of 18 are to be offered the chance to take part in a basic income pilot scheme under which they will receive £1,600 a month for up to two years.

The money will be given unconditionally and participants will be able to earn from paid jobs on top of the basic income with ministers hoping it will help give some of the most vulnerable in society a better chance of thriving.

Officials, who investigated basic income schemes from California to Finland before designing the Welsh pilot, will study whether those who take part do better in the long term, financially, physically and emotionally, than young people who do not.

The scheme, set to launch in the summer, is believed to be one of the most generous of its kind in the world and will cost the Welsh government £20m over three years.

Those taking part will be taxed and will not be able to claim all benefits they would be entitled to if they were not given the money after the UK government refused to allow this. Benefits are not a devolved area.

The move was welcomed by UBI Lab Wales, which campaigns on the concept of universal basic income, under which every citizen, regardless of their means, receives regular sums of money for life to cover the basic cost of living.

Ministers ‘failing jobless young people’ after breaking pledge to recruit 30,000 Whitehall apprentices

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A different story. I am very committed to trying to find meaningful employment opportunities in rural settings for talented young people. As the labour market tightens we all need to see a stronger commitment to the issue of supporting apprentices in rural settings. This article is a wake up call on that score.

Ministers have been accused of failing jobless young people, after falling far short of a promise to recruit 30,000 new apprentices to the civil service.

A senior Conservative said the government had not made achieving the pledge “a priority” – and criticised an attempt to blame the embarrassing shortfall on Covid-19.

In fact, the target was set four years ago – to ensure that Whitehall “leads by example” – and only 16,155 apprentices had been recruited by the time of the lockdown in March.

It follows a wider failure to sign up 3 million apprentices across the economy between 2017 and 2020, with only around 2.2 million recruited.

UK commercial farming can deliver on sustainability pledges if given the chance

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Too few people have a rounded view of the importance of farming and in our experience particularly of its contributions to rural communities. This article profiles a very important contribution to the debate. It tells us:

A new report examining the role of commercial agriculture in the UK says it has the potential to solve sustainability challenges, generate employment and boost the post-pandemic economy.

Yet, the report warns that commercial farmers are being systematically “written out” of emerging policy in the rush to push environmental enhancement above all else.

“Commercial Farming: Delivering the UK’s new Agriculture Policies” has been released today (10 June) by the Commercial Farmers Group to coincide with the second reading of the Agriculture Bill in the House of Lords. As well as laying out the areas farming can impact positively, it argues that UK farmers should be ready and willing to compete with food imports – provided there is clear labelling identifying differences in production standards.

James Black from the group, who runs the family farming business producing pigs and arable crops in Suffolk, explains that commercial farming is important as fewer than 10 percent of farming businesses currently produce over half the UK’s agricultural output.

“These businesses are also ideally-placed to stimulate local economies, support wider industries and address pressing problems such as use of finite resources, greenhouse gas emissions, climate change and biodiversity decline. However, they can only do this if allowed the chance,” he says.

“Unfortunately, UK history is littered with the results of so many great aspirational concepts which have been poorly delivered – because policy makers have not fully engaged with the people most involved in the implementation. We must avoid food and farming becoming a casualty of this too.”

Growers relieved after Home Office revises immigration rules

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The ever moving drama that surrounds Brexit is causing ongoing, unhelpful uncertainty for horticulture businesses. In that context this article suggests at least a ray of light! It tells us:

EU nationals will be allowed to live and work in the UK after 31 October even under a no-deal Brexit, the government has announced.

The Home Office announcement contradicts previous Brexit position statements which said the EU freedom of movement policy would end immediately after 31 October under a no-deal.

That position would have meant EU citizens could only enter Britain from November onwards on short-term visits, sparking concern over farm labour supplies.

However, the Home Office’s latest announcement sets out a range of measures termed ‘leave to remain’ that will replace the EU freedom of movement policy.

Leave to remain proposal

The policy will allow EU and Swiss workers, along with close family members, to enter Britain, even if they have not applied for settled or pre-settled status.

This initial free movement will only be possible for a transition period of 14 months until 31 December 2020.

After this date, any worker wishing to remain in the UK must have applied to stay under a new temporary leave to remain scheme.

Fears for new mothers as Suffolk slashes health visitor numbers

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Here is the first of two stories about service cuts notwithstanding the generally received wisdom that money is less tight in the NJS than some other public services.

Health visitors will be made redundant by a local council, sparking fears that new mothers will get less help with mental health problems, breastfeeding and babies’ sleep.

Suffolk County Council – the area in which health secretary Matt Hancock is an MP – plans to cut as many as 31 full-time posts from its 120-strong health visitor workforce, through a combination of redundancies and not filling vacancies, despite the team’s key role in family health.

Internal council documents seen by the Observer show that the Conservative-controlled authority intends to push through the controversial plan by September in order to save £1m from its health visiting, school nursing and family nurse partnership services.

The council is being forced to change the way it provides health services for children and young people because the public health grant it receives from central government has been slashed by £5.47m (16.7%) since 2015/16.

The council wants to drastically reduce the role of health visitors so they no longer undertake three of the five checks of mother-and-baby health that all should receive by the time the infant is two-and-a-half years old. In future they will focus on the most vulnerable families – with nurses, who health visitors say have not had the same training, taking on the other three checks.

High rents in English cities forcing young to stay in small towns

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Every cloud has a silver lining. We know that there are more business per head of population in rural places. One of the ongoing challenges has been a lack of a workforce. The in some ways regrettable trend of young people finding it harder to move to the City does provide rural businesses with a richer range of workforce opportunities.

One of the defining patterns of English life in which young people move from small towns with limited prospects to bigger cities to seek their fortune is in dramatic decline, research has revealed.

More young people are getting stuck where they grew up or went to university because they cannot afford rents in places where they can earn more money, according to the Resolution Foundation thinktank. It found the number of people aged 25 to 34 starting a new job and moving home in the last year had fallen 40% over the last two decades.

Whereas previous generations were able to move to big cities such as London and Manchester or regional hubs like Leeds and Bristol to develop their careers, the current millennial generation is enduring a slump in mobility caused by rising rents, which can wipe out the financial gains of a move.

Even moves over short distances were barely worth making, the data showed. A person on average earnings in Scarborough paying average rent would have been 29% better off if they had moved to Leeds in 1997 and paid average rent and earned average money. In 2018, rising rents and stagnant wages means the benefit after taking into account rent was just 4%.

Half of job growth to be limited to London, inequality inquiry finds

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In addition to a north south divide you’ll find if you look at take home wages even in the most affluent rural areas, from the jobs based in those areas, not their surrounding cities, are very often below the national average. We really need to think about how we can address this challenge by renewing the link between where people live and where they work.  Does anyone remember Living Working Countryside by Matthew Taylor?  In the meantime this article tells us:

London and the south-east will see more than half of the UK’s future job growth if the government does not address the massive gulf between the capital and everywhere else, an independent inquiry into the UK’s deep–rooted inequalities has warned.

Bob Kerslake, the former head of the civil service and chair of the UK2070commission on regional inequality, said the UK was going “materially in the wrong direction”. He urged the government to take lessons from Germany in reunifying the country by setting up a £250bn “national renewal fund”.

Londoners as well as people elsewhere will suffer if the imbalance is not addressed, the commission warned, as housing becomes ever more unaffordable and a growing population puts pressure on transport infrastructure, with increasing need for long-distance commuting.

The capital’s taps could also run dry as water supplies come under pressure from the climate crisis. The Environment Agency estimates there will be serious water shortages by 2050, particularly in the south, as the amount of water available is reduced by 10%-15%, with some rivers having 50%-80% less water during summer.

It will also become even more expensive to build in the capital, which is already costly by international standards because of the challenge of engineering through the crowded urban fabric. Despite this, researchers for the 2070 commission estimated that London and the south-east would gain 2.26m extra jobs by 2015, 55% of the UK whole.

Poverty increases among children and pensioners across UK

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It’s not easy to be a vulnerable person in the countryside. We know it costs more to live in rural England due to distance from services. We know there are limited job opportunities for young people. We know once you lose the ability to drive its hard to retain a stake in rural places. This story is I suspect bad news for rural dwellers who fall into such categories of people. It tells us:

A household is considered to be in relative poverty if their income is below 60% of median income of £507 a week in 2017-18, while they are in absolute poverty if their income is below 60% of the 2010-11 median income, adjusted for inflation.

The latest figures show the number of children living in absolute poverty increased by 200,000 in 2017-18. Relative child poverty also increased before housing costs, and fell slightly after housing costs.

As a result, 30% of children, or 4.1 million, were living in relative poverty (after housing costs) in 2017-18 in the UK and 70% of children living in poverty were in working families.

The percentage of pensioners in relative poverty before housing costs rose from 17% to 18% between 2016/17 and 2017/18.

The Resolution Foundation thinktank said the recent increase in child poverty had been primarily driven by the freeze in the value of working-age benefits, made worse by a spike in inflation to 3% in late 2017.

Employment rights for foster carers are essential to give children stability

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I’m 100% behind the sentiment here but in our broken system of Local Government finance who is going to meet the additional costs? I hope central Government will find some extra resource. The story, written by a foster carer tells us:


The Fostering Network’s bleak State of the Nation report therefore came as no surprise, bar one comment: “a crisis is looming”. To those of us working as foster care workers, it is all too clear that this crisis is already here.


We established the foster care workers branch of Independent Workers’ Union of Great Britain (IWGB) two-and-a-half years ago to provide a voice for foster carers, something we have never had before. One of our aims has been to provide foster carers with individual representation, which has put me in touch with carers across the country.


The story is the same everywhere. We are an exhausted, undervalued and disposable workforce. The system is simply not working. Not for us, and not for the children in our care. That’s why we launched our all-party parliamentary group on foster care work in Westminster. We recently presented the foster care workers bill, which we hope will bring a series of proposals into law. Now is the time for real solutions to this real crisis.


The solutions have come from our members. The message of the Fostering Network report was loud and clear: the majority of foster care workers are unhappy with their employment status. We are denied all employment rights because we are not legally recognised as workers.


Employment rights are badly needed by foster care workers, to support our children and ourselves. Without whistleblowing protection, we cannot challenge actions that we know are not in the interests of the children without fearing for ourselves. Without a minimum wage, many of us live on the edge of poverty, paying for extracurricular activities for children out of our savings. Without sick pay, carers often continue through serious illness.

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