The Settlement

From the co-chair

A million young people out of work, and a sector that cannot fill its posts

Two problems have been sitting next to each other for a year, and nobody has built the road between them. In the spring, the number of 16 to 24-year-olds not in education, employment or training passed one million for the first time since 2013. It has since edged back below that mark, to 981,000 in April to June, though that is still 30,000 higher than a year earlier. Alan Milburn's interim review, published in May, called it a "generational fault line" and warned the figure could reach 1.25 million within five years, a rise from one in eight young people to one in six.

Our sector, meanwhile, has around 96,450 unfilled posts and a vacancy rate roughly three times the wider economy's. Only 8 per cent of the adult social care workforce is aged 18 to 24, against 13 per cent in retail and half of all waiting staff. We are one of the most obvious answers to the government's most urgent labour market problem.

Government has reached the same conclusion, and has been genuinely responsive. The Youth Guarantee names health and social care as one of only three priority sectors for its 350,000 training and work experience placements, so the link between youth unemployment and our vacancies is already written into the policy. On 26 August the first young people started paid work under the Jobs Guarantee, six months of government-funded employment for 18 to 24-year-olds who have been looking for work for 18 months. Officials are asking the sector for input on workforce coordination, and Milburn's recommendations follow this autumn with the next stage of the Youth Guarantee expected behind them. The question is no longer whether these two problems belong together. It is how a scheme designed in Whitehall actually reaches a care employer.

We tested the obvious idea before we proposed it. Match the areas with the most young people out of work to the areas with the most unfilled care posts, and you have a scheme that looks efficient on a ministerial slide. Across 149 English local authorities, the correlation between youth NEET rates and care vacancy rates is minus 0.24, and once London's boroughs come out it falls to minus 0.10, which is not distinguishable from zero. Run it again on a different measure of youth worklessness across all 152 authorities and you get minus 0.04. A council's youth unemployment rate tells you almost nothing about its care vacancy rate.

That does not kill the idea. It shapes it. The scheme has to be national in design, because the two problems are not co-located, and local only in delivery. Our new Care Workforce Mismatch Index identifies the 37 authorities that sit above the median on both measures at once, led by Croydon, Halton, Blackburn with Darwen, Barking and Dagenham and Doncaster. Those are the places to start, because they have the young people and the empty posts in the same borough.

One warning, and it is the important one. Recruitment has never been this sector's real problem, retention has. More than half of care workers under 20 leave within their first year, and the pay premium for five or more years' experience has collapsed from 33p an hour in 2016 to somewhere between 6p and 10p today. Eighty-four per cent of the young people Milburn's reviewers spoke to said they want work or training. They are not the obstacle. A pathway that pours them into a sector that cannot show them a career will leak them straight back out.

There is a practical point that the scheme's designers should hear from us too. Offering a young person work experience in care is a little more complicated than offering it in a shop. Our members are responsible for people who depend on them, so a placement means checks, safeguarding, an induction and a supervisor with time to give before anyone is useful on a shift. A retailer can put a school leaver on the floor on Monday morning. A care provider cannot, and should not. That is why we have done the work on this ourselves, rather than waiting to be handed a scheme built for a different sector.

So our ask is narrow, and it does not need new money. The Alliance has already built a Pathway into Care programme, which takes the Youth Guarantee's components and adds what a young person's first weeks in a care setting actually require, namely structured supervision, honest preparation for the emotional content of the work, and a defined route from placement into a job, and from that job into a career. It offers young people careers, not just jobs. We are asking government to adopt it as the care-sector route within the Youth Guarantee, rather than commissioning the design of something the sector has already built.

The Pathway is one strand of the wider case for workforce reform that the Alliance makes in Towards a National Workforce Settlement, our second policy paper, alongside nationally recognised Professional Levels, a national framework for delegated healthcare, a fully funded Fair Pay Agreement and a ten-year workforce plan. The order matters. A route into the sector is only worth building if there is a career structure at the other end of it, and that structure is what the rest of the paper sets out.

Melanie Weatherley MBECo-Chair, Care Association Alliance