Case study: joining up skills and health support in Wales

In remote areas of Wales, people are often forced to travel long distances for minimum wage jobs. In the town of Caerphilly, near Cardiff, one man was even “bought trainers” by the council for his commute.

“Because of poor bus links, it was faster for him to walk over the mountain to work,” explains Tammy Boyce, senior consultant at the Institute of Health Equity. “These are not conditions for people who are on the edge of good mental or poor physical health.”

In Wales, this is a growing problem. Since the Covid pandemic, it has been an outlier within the UK in experiencing increased levels of sickness absence and economic inactivity. This has prompted local authorities and training providers to join up their skills and health support.

Just north of Caerphilly is Blaenau Gwent, the former coal-mining borough once represented by Aneurin Bevan, a minister in the postwar Labour government and the main architect of the UK’s NHS. Now, 40 years after its deindustrialisation, the area is at the sharp end of a broader labour market malaise in Wales, where the proportion of people neither working nor seeking work remains stubbornly above 2019 levels. 

About 44 per cent of Blaenau Gwent’s economically inactive population cite long-term sickness as their reason for leaving the workforce, compared with the 33.4 per cent average in Wales and 27.5 per cent in the UK, according to the latest annual population survey. “Residents are — and should be — angry there hasn’t been more done,” says Boyce. 

This is particularly concerning because people who are inactive due to sickness tend to have extended periods of worklessness, according to research by the Resolution Foundation — hampering the Wales’ attempts to boost productivity after decades of lagging the wider UK employment rate. One of the Welsh government’s targets is to close the 1.7 percentage point gap by 2050.

Victoria Winckler, director of the Welsh think-tank Bevan Foundation, says: “This is not about people’s behaviour or individual choices, this is about the structural problems in Wales’s economy. There isn’t a range of well-paid jobs suitable for people with health conditions. The alternative to being ‘on the sick’ is a very physically demanding job,” she says. Two of her staff members work a four-day week in order to care for their fathers, both former miners who had contracted industrial diseases. 

“Coming up with a way to motivate and support people is a real policy conundrum,” says Nick Smith, the Labour MP for Blaenau Gwent. “Access to local employment can be challenging in somewhere like Gwent, which is geographically distant from other employment markets.” There are only two trains an hour from Ebbw Vale to Newport and Cardiff.

“Some people move into other sectors or retrain,” notes Smith. “But it’s a hard thing to do if you’ve been working down the pit or in the steelworks for a long time, it’s a big change.”

So, in recent years, skills programmes have sprung up locally that are geared towards both helping people navigate these barriers and fulfilling skills shortages.

For example, Smith helped launch a new cyber security course at Ebbw Vale college Coleg Gwent. “The cyber sector is more permeable to residents just getting started in it, because you don’t need to have a degree,” Smith says. “The course has gone from success to success.” Companies including Welsh Water and Admiral, the insurer, have hired people straight from this course.  

Other initiatives are combining wellbeing and employment support, in a bid to reverse the rising levels of economic inactivity, particularly among young people.

About a quarter of the customers of ITEC Training, which supports school leavers in 15 sites across Wales into work, have some kind of disability.

“Post-Covid, we are now seeing very low levels of maturity, low confidence, and a high prevalence of mental health issues,” says Gareth Matthews, director of ITEC, which is one of the providers contracted to deliver Jobs Growth Wales+, a Welsh government skills programme for 16-19 year olds. “An average 16 year old is presenting as a 13 year old,” he says.

ITEC seeks to move them from being “locked away in their bedrooms” to work placements, by teaching numeracy, digital, and presentation skills, through exercises similar to those in TV show Dragons’ Den.

“The economically inactive cohort used to be predominantly older workers but, increasingly, we are seeing this among younger people,” explains Matthews.

He says ITEC completely “overhauled” its delivery model during Covid to adjust to the pandemic-related decline in confidence and maturity. It co-designed a wellbeing assessment tool, which fed back data about the learners’ biggest social or health barriers, and introduced new staff roles in counselling. ITEC also negotiated with the government to add wraparound wellbeing support to the existing programme.

Julie Dyer, ITEC’s head of operations, says: “It is absolutely pointless looking just at academic employability skills when their wellbeing is so, so bad.” Since April 2022, Jobs Growth Wales+ has helped 10,000 learners, 60 per cent of whom leave with employment or an apprenticeship, or go into higher education.

“You can just sense the increase in confidence and self-belief and pride in what they’re doing,” says Matthews. “. Given the background they came from, it’s remarkable.” But the government funding for these projects is being outpaced by soaring demand.

Training providers emphasise that engaging out-of-work people and benefits claimants can be challenging — and requires the Department for Work and Pensions to promote such opportunities. According to the Learning and Work Institute (LWI), a think-tank, only one in 10 out-of-work disabled people in the UK are currently getting help to find work through support programmes run by the DWP and other agencies.

“Those problems are massively compounded in Wales, where you have a higher disability rate and higher disability employment gap than the UK average,” says Joshua Miles, LWI’s director of Wales. This year, LWI partnered with Merthyr Valley Homes, in another deprived part of south Wales, to upskill tenants on one of their housing estates.

“In Wales the big levers to address economic inactivity are reserved to Westminster,” points out Miles, adding that regional policy in Denmark and Germany — with some industry similarities to Wales — better reflects local needs. After Brexit, EU funding for Wales’ employability schemes was replaced by the Shared Prosperity Fund, which Westminster administers.

Boosting Wales’ employment rate (74.1 per cent) to that of Denmark’s (80.1 per cent, its record high in 2022) would require an extra 115,000 people to find work.

And the benefits of achieving this are clear to Boyce, at the Institute of Health Equity: “Helping people into jobs is what changes someone’s life — getting out of the house, having that regular contact with people, a regular income.”