ILPC 2027

Abstract

Julia Unwin, former chief executive of the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, recently insisted that while there was ‘no silver bullet’ to the problem of low wage work, fronting up to this challenge ‘needs to be in the DNA of all the work we are doing in city-regions.’  There is no doubt that the labour market poses a serious challenge to the Government’s ‘devolution agenda’ in England, with its promise to empower local communities to drive economic growth for the benefit of local people. The challenge of how to make growth inclusive now falls to local stakeholders, including Local Enterprise Partnerships (LEPs) and Combined Authorities, bidding for new responsibilities and powers through ‘city-deals’, ‘growth deals’ and ‘devo-deals’.

At the same time, Government has failed to provide ‘clarity about exactly what decentralisation is for, where it is heading, when, how and with whom’ (Pike et al 2016: 13), along with few clues as to the tools or levers localities might deploy (Bentham et al 2013). However, skills often figure prominently as an area of activity. Critical commentaries on national skills policy over the last three decades have highlighted the limitations of policies focused narrowly on skills supply, and the failure to address problems of weak employer demand for, and usage of, skill, which are deeply wired into the political economy of the UK  (Keep and Mayhew 2014, Keep 2016). These factors, including low wage jobs, feed into the ‘productivity puzzle’, with repeated warnings that simply supplying more skills will not crack the ‘low skills equilibrium’ (UKCES 2015). Some might argue that substantive progress requires a fundamental re-formatting of the UK’s neo-liberal model, and that devolution amounts to little more than ‘devolved cutting’ in a period of austerity and a form of crisis displacement. However, the question remains: could some progress be made within existing constraints?

A key research question is whether local actors might develop more ‘joined-up’ approaches to skills which address supply, demand and utilisation, as part of inclusive local growth strategies (Keep 2016). This begs two sub-questions. First, how do those on the ground conceptualise and understand the ‘skills problem’, and, second, what scope is there within the current devolution settlement(s) to develop ‘local’ strategies which move in this direction. The paper draws on new qualitative research, involving 12 semi-structured interviews with local stakeholders within three LEP areas of the Midlands undertaken in 2016. These included Local Authority economic development and skills leads, LEP officers, FE college principals, and an organisation representing local employers. The findings point to serious problems in terms of continued interference and control exerted by the central state, the ability of some local actors to move beyond traditional supply-side thinking in relation skills, and the lack of resources and capacity to engage in what for many would be a ‘leap in the dark’.