HC Deb 24 November 1952 vol 508 cc216-24

Motion made, and Question proposed, "That this House do now adjourn."—[Mr. T. G. D. Galbraith.]

12.6 a.m.

Mr. Vaughan-Morgan (Reigate)

I feel I owe an apology to my hon. Friend for keeping him so late, but I think it will be worth while if, for a few moments, we cast a searchlight on one of the more obscure departments of the Ministry of Labour—the Appointments Office. This service has three sections—one deals with recruitment for the nursing profession, the second is the technical and scientific register, and the third the appointments office.

It is with the third that I wish to deal, the section that is employed mainly in finding situations of a non-technical and administrative nature. I have been taking an interest in this work for some time as I have endeavoured to try to broaden, as far as I can as a private Member interested in the whole question of the employment of older people, their opportunities of employment.

I have received many letters both from constituents and others on the general theme of the work of this office. The general thread which runs through all the correspondence is that this office is useless. Most of the letters which I receive, and which other hon. Gentleman receive, are from those who have been unsuccessful in obtaining what they wished from this office, and, of course, the unsuccessful usually tend to be disgruntled. None the less, it is clear to me that not all those who write to me are unsuccessful. Many of them have, in fact, obtained employment through other avenues. I have two cases of constituents, and I propose to cite them as being fairly typical of the experience of the public in approaching this office.

A former officer writes to me: I suggested an appointment in the Control Commission for Germany, but was told they only required technical specialists or linguists. However, on the recommendation of a former brother officer who was serving with the Control Commission I obtained an interview in May, 1946, and was given an appointment with the legal branch as an administration officer in June, 1946. There is a case where this department should have been able to place this officer in employment, but failed to do so. Since then he has lost his employment, and has never received a chance of going to the office for interview for employment.

My other constituent writes: In 1948, they sent me a large number of appointments in Civil Defence, but little else. As these appointments were also appearing almost daily in the Press it struck me that the bureau were employing little ingenuity in confining themselves to sending me these appointments only. It indicated that their research failed to find any other type of employment available. Then there is a remark which should be of interest to the Parliamentary Secretary: From a number of interviews with the bureau I gained the impression that they did not show real initiative in finding out what vacancies there were, or likely to be, in industry or anywhere else, and that when they did hear of a vacancy they did not always select and inform the most suitable applicants. Those two are typical of the kind of letters I have received. I want to refer now to the other aspect of the matter, the attitude of the employer. I have a letter here from the secretary of a fairly large company in the London area and I think my hon. Friend will be able to guess the name of the firm. He writes as follows: We long ago gave up using the Ministry of Labour London Appointments Office because it is the last refuge of the hopeless and we have never got anybody we wanted. I think this is fairly general experience in industry. I do not think it is staffed by anybody who has experience in industry from my recollections when I was staff manager, in spite of the care one took in defining the sort of candidates one wanted one never seemed to ring the bell. I doubt very much if such a Government Department could be gingered up and I feel that industry has other and better ways … of getting the sort of people it wants. My friend goes on to say: If it helps you in stimulating Mr. Butler … to cut down wasteful expenditure I shall be glad to vote for you on that score above if I happen to be in residence in your constituency at the time of the next General Election. That is fairly general experience. I have been in touch with other employees who have given up using this service. I appreciate that there are a number of small employers who find the service useful but, nonetheless, of those who are on the list it is the big employers from whom the bulk of opportunities will come. In parenthesis, I might add that one of my hon. Friends told me that, in connection with another organisation, he had applied for an economic research assistant and had been sent a musicologist.

I agree that one cannot indict a Government Department on the basis of a comparatively few examples, but if we look at the figures which I have culled from the Ministry of Labour Annual Report one sees that they are startling. Vacancies notified to the office have fallen, apparently, from 33,000 in 1948 to 13,000 in 1951 and the placings have fallen from 15,000 in 1948 to 5,800 in 1951. Perhaps the Parliamentary Secretary may have more accurate figures than I have. At the same time, it seems that the staff has fallen from 290 to only 213.

I think this service deserves rather more attention than it actually receives in the Annual Report of the Ministry of Labour. It is an important service but gets a scant three or four passages and much of it is matter repeated from previous years. I do not want to indulge in a general indictment of this service, but to make one or two recommendations which I hope the Ministry will find helpful. I do not go so far as some newspapers which have recommended its total abolition. That would be foolish. This department can and should do useful work but from what I have seen of it it seems to have singularly little contact with the outside world of commerce and industry.

There used to be an advisory committee, but I can trace no reference to it in the Report in the last three or four years. I think that it has been scrapped. I understand that from one who has served on it. It may be that that committee was revised for a particular purpose, but I think it ought to be revived. I go further and suggest that this service ought to be re-organised under the chairmanship of someone who has knowledge of industry and commerce, one who comes from that world and has contact with it and can "sell" this service to the world of industry and commerce. The best parallel I can suggest is that of the National Savings movement, staffed by civil servants but under the dynamic leadership of Lord Mackintosh and his predecessor. He has contacts with the world at large which seem to be lacking in this Government department.

I think that the Appointments Office can do a useful work, and I would also suggest to my hon. Friend that where there are, as there happens to be, many thousands still waiting on the registers with not much likelihood of employment, he might use his powers under the Employment and Training Act, 1948, to retrain them in the new skills which may be needed in the outside world. I think that this can be a useful service and, as I have said, I hope that my hon. Friend will be able to tell us that he can start it off with a new lease of valuable life.

12.14 a.m.

The Parliamentary Secretary to the Ministry of Labour (Mr. Harold Watkinson)

I am grateful to my hon. Friend the Member for Reigate (Mr. Vaughan-Morgan) for having raised this subject because it is a fact that we have not, as may be suggested, a closed mind on it. We are only too anxious for the Appointments Office to do as good a job as is possible, within the scope of the finances available and I am glad that my hon. Friend did not take the line that some sections of the daily Press have taken, namely, that it should be closed altogether and done away with completely.

Under the Act of 1948, to which he has referred, there does arise the obligation for my Ministry to provide a service for secretarial and managerial groups which cannot, we think, be dealt with properly through the employment exchanges. We appreciate the need for this service, and would like to make it more widely used and more efficient; and, to that end, I hope my hon. Friend will give me the pleasure of showing him around the premises at Tavistock Square. More people are coming to look at that office, and the greater the number who come who are potential users of the service, the better we shall be pleased. Their advice on how to make the service all the more useful will be only too welcome.

I will try first to make two points, and then to answer my hon. Friend. I know it was no criticism on the part of my hon. Friend, but we have tried to make improvements in the Appointments Office as a whole. Last June, the eight provincial offices were closed, and apart from the London headquarters, we have only two branches—one at Manchester, and the other at Glasgow. There were about 6,000 people on the registers when the offices closed, and of that number, about 4,500 chose to renew their registrations, of which about 2,000 re-registered in London. We have accepted that extra burden in London without any extra staff, and about 10,500 are on the register. About half of that total represents people who are unemployed.

I should like to say something about the amount of work which the office gets through; and it does get through a lot. There have been about 21,000 registrations in 12 months and out of those only some 2,000 have been placed. One of our difficulties is that we have to make 10 placings for every one person we can place through the Appointments Office; in other words, 10 submissions for every job we can fill.

Now I will turn to some of the detailed points which have been raised. Most of it can be summed up in the statement that we are not sufficiently in touch with employers, and that employers are not approaching the Appointments Office; that it is not being projected into the minds of employers, and that it is not keeping in touch with the outside world. We have tried to do that in the past by having what we call development officers going round the country and keeping in touch with employers.

But in the last month we have developed a new technique, which represents a much more sensible approach. We have re-organised the work of the London office entirely and have opened what we call an employers' section. The old conception was that when a vacancy came in it was bandied about the whole Department; sometimes one officer would deal with an employer, sometimes another. Now all vacancies go to the employers' section, and, therefore, there is a much closer touch—particularly as the system develops—between these experienced officers and the employer, and the officers will be able to follow through an employer's needs much more carefully and match them better than before. That re-organisation took place only in August and we are only just beginning to see the results. I hope that it will bring closer contact between the Appointments Office and employers.

It is not quite fair to say that the Appointments Office is not used by large employers. If, as I hope, my hon. Friend pays a visit I shall be able to prove this by showing the facts. A large number of employers use the service.

Mr. W. Nally (Bilston)

What large employers? Although there are only five of us present, this debate is being recorded. Would he give us a sample of what type of employers and their employing potential? I do not mean that he should give names.

Mr. Watkinson

I do not think it would be fair to name them. Let us take our accountancy service—and we place a lot of trained accountants through the Appointments Office. Accountants who come to us want to get into trade and industry, where there is larger scope. There are very few large firms who employ a number of accountants who have not at some time used the Appointments Office. Take sales and export managers. There are many large firms in the export trade with whom we have placed people recently. If the hon. Member would like at any time to visit the Appointments Office, I should be delighted. Then he could see the actual letters and get a clear idea of the work we are doing.

It is fair to say that while the number of placings is down and the number on the register also, that is what we expected, because the big mass of work for the Appointments Office—perhaps the work it was originally designed to do—was the resettlement of a large number of people. Now we are getting down to day-to-day work—to try and perform an employment exchange service spread over the whole country from people who cannot be best fitted into jobs through our employment exchanges.

On the question of the advisory committee, I think that my hon. Friend the Member for Reigate is right. It has lapsed, and I promise to look into that, because it might prove a good way of getting contact between the office and the outside world. But I want to be fair to more than 200 members of the staff who work there and explain that there are one or two other jobs they do for which they get very little credit. Apart from the live register of some 10,000, they see at least 2,000 people a month.

Mr. Vaughan-Morgan

My hon. Friend refers to the live register of 10,000. Surely it is actually 20,000 on the books. Or are there 10,000 dead?

Mr. Watkinson

No, 21,000 is a 12-monthly number of registrations. Approximately 5,000 of the 10,000 I mentioned are out of employment and 5,000 are seeking different or better jobs.

In addition to that work there are some 2,000 people coming every month for interview to our advisory service and we get a very large number of young people, such as National Service men and young graduates leaving the universities, anxious to know what work in industry may be available to them. It means an immense amount of interview work, and I think that some of that interviewing work is done extremely well. It means that an immense amount of work is done to advise these people where their talents and abilities may be best placed. That very often does not lead to jobs at all. In fact, it is not intended to do so and we cannot produce statistical proof of the result of that work. I think, however, that it is very undesirable that it should stop.

We have a special responsibility to ex-officers and ex-Regulars who are sometimes not the easiest people for whom to find jobs. They represent nearly 14 per cent. of the register. We have a special section to try and meet their problems. It is a difficult job. Then we have the special job put on us—which we have been delighted to undertake—of trying to place men recently dismissed in Egypt. I am glad to say that we have placed quite a number of them and I think that it is the duty of the office to try to meet the special needs of people like that who come back to this country and try to find a job.

There are some things which the office does which cannot be statistically measured, but which would be a great loss to the community if they were terminated. I do not disagree with my hon. Friend the Member for Reigate that perhaps by looking at this matter again we can do better. That is why I am very grateful to him for having raised it. As he says, this is quite an obscure department of my Ministry, but I am sure that its work is not obscure. It is very valuable and necessary, particularly at this time when we should be making the most of the ability and skill of people who can work; and perhaps we should pay more attention to the fit, older people by means of the Appointments Office.

My right hon. and learned Friend and myself have been very glad that this opportunity has occurred to have another look at the work of the Appointments Office. As I have indicated, we have already made one or two changes and we should like to do more if there are changes which will increase efficiency. I hope that before long I shall be able to go round the office with my hon. Friend the Member for Reigate and other hon. Members who are interested and that we may have the benefit of their ideas. I hope too that we can ask them to say a good word for the Appointments Office to the employers. That is the crux of the thing. If we do not have appointments notified then, try as we will, we cannot help.

It is not my experience that employers are fighting shy of the services of the office. Rather the contrary is the case. We notice now a quite considerable pickup, bearing in mind that we have lost the chance of placing people in many Government jobs, probably rightly. Notwithstanding that, we are still placing a very large number of people compared with the previous figure in relation to the number on the register. That means that we are placing more in industry than were placed in the past.

I think that we can continue that service and I hope that I shall have the assistance of hon. Members on both sides of the House to that end. Any criticism, and, particularly any helpful advice that they can offer to try to make this service work really efficiently will be most welcome both to my right hon. and learned Friend and myself.

Adjourned accordingly at Half-past Twelve o'Clock a.m.