In our first LED Confidential Espresso Shot of December, Mike and David give an initial LEDC perspective on the Get Britain Working White Paper (GBWWP). What is its major significance for local and regional leadership teams in general, and for those of us developing Local Growth Plans (LGPs) in England in particular? Delivering the White Paper’s ambitions and targets well must be tailored to widely disparate labour market performance across the UK’s local economies. Balancing national mission-based goals with enabling highly varied solutions shaped by local context will be a major challenge.
The Get Britain Working White Paper (GBWWP) highlights for local and regional institutions
The Get Britain Working White Paper was published on November 26th. It sets an 80% national employment participation target (from a 74.6% starting point currently) and focuses on the employment support pillar of achieving this. It has major implications, expectations, and requirements (mainly in England but with some measures and funding intended for Wales) for sub-national leadership teams.
Alongside £240m of investment, the GBWWP announces policies to tackle economic inactivity through a major revamp of Job Centre Plus’ roles, purposes, and ways of working; a national careers service; changing the Apprenticeship Levy into a Growth and Skills Levy; increasing integration of health, work, and skills support locally; and a youth guarantee for either ‘earning or learning’. The WP suggests these changes should be co-designed and co-produced locally.
Among local highlights, eight pilots will enable Mayoral Combined Authorities (MCAs) and local authorities (LAs) in England and one in Wales integrate Health, Work and Skills support – with three ‘NHS Accelerators’ to stop people falling out of work completely in the North East, West and South Yorkshire. Eight Youth Guarantee trailblazers in England (Liverpool, West Midlands, Tees Valley, East Midlands, West of England, Cambridgeshire & Peterborough, and two areas in London) will receive funding and support to create opportunities for education, training, and work for young people most at risk of being not in education, employment or training (NEET). Areas in England are expected to produce GBW Plans alongside their Local Growth Plans (LGPs).
Definitions and local baselines matter
Mike and I are generally positive about the GBWWP but discuss several nuances that need further development and local tailoring. The 80% employment participation national target has in-built tensions on existing definitions.
First - Working Age Population (WAP) is defined as Adults from 16-64, but this reflects neither the normal student learning age nor the reality of working post national retirement age. There has to be a case for local areas to evidence and define their local labour market’s WAP, its specific challenges and define targets and strategies accordingly.
Second - the baselines locally for meeting the national target vary enormously and could have perverse consequences. The latest ONS employment participation data (for the 12 months to June 2024 at LA level) shows, for instance, five LAs with employment participation rates over 90%, a further 25 in the 85%-90% range – so all significantly exceeding the national target. At the other end of the scale, ten LAs have participation rates below 65% with a further 46 in the 65%-70% range. The proposed GBW plans will need to address highly differing starting points, targets, and strategic priorities.
Balancing national priorities with locally shaped delivery
This last point directly relates to our major concerns with the GBWWP.
Large national bodies like the big three sponsoring departments (Work & Pensions, Education, Health and Social Care) and their arms-length bodies (e.g. NHS, Job Centre Plus) have major roles in the WP goals and reforms. But local and regional leadership teams are being asked to deliver a lot of the variation necessary for solutions. Will national universalism and budgetary power enable and support this level of local shaping in practice?
We discuss the need for efforts to be put into resolving this tension, for big changes in the policy and practice of multi-tier, multi-agency ways of working, and mechanisms for scaling up and out excellence in local innovation that can be seen in our work around the country.
The obsession with pilots and trailblazers continues
With at least sixteen area-based pilots to be resourced, we despair of the misuse and abuse of experimental, pilot, and demonstrator stages of the policy development cycle with trailblazer designations. There is a lot of innovation going on locally and at MCA level. The UK government could better support local innovation in all sub-national GBW plans with experimental and innovation funding guidance and perhaps a dedicated funding line
Concluding remarks
This is a very quick look at some of the principal issues that local and regional teams are likely to confront in delivering the GBWWP in ways appropriate for their local labour markets.
The shot picks up several of the economic inactivity themes LEDC has covered in recent episodes – and especially this shot earlier in the year, It also serves as a good potboiler for our impending special guest episode discussing, among others, the health-related dimensions of economic inactivity in LED. Look out for that one – coming very soon.
And please tell us more about how the GBWWP has landed in your geography; how you are going to deliver its expectations; and perhaps share the types of local innovation in how you are addressing economic inactivity that we celebrate in the shot.
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