Changing London. David Robinson
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that responsible businesses would do three things for young people starting out in their careers.
(1) Provide meaningful work experience in non-entry-level jobs for young people from local schools. The number of placements could be a fixed proportion of their number of employees, or could be related to their turnover.
(2) Offer apprenticeships in an ambitious range of roles for young people, particularly those local to the area where the employer is based. Again, the number could be in proportion to the size of the organisation.
(3) Only offer internships that are fairly recruited, with fair remuneration of at least the minimum wage, and clear contracts, and sign up to Intern Aware’s Fair Internship Charter.53
A driven mayor would have a range of tools at their disposal. Direct influence over parts of the public sector would mean the police and Transport for London could blaze the trail. Other public services, including the NHS and local authorities, could be quickly signed up, particularly because many meet these criteria already. They could be extended to companies contracted to provide public services.
Writing on Changing London, Jake Hayman and Amir Jabarivasal suggested that every college and secondary school have a staff member dedicated to supporting former students in finding a career: ‘Their job would be to source opportunities for work experience, insight days, internships and even jobs, to organise CV/interview clinics and have drop-in careers counselling services.’ Many students maintain strong connections to their school or college, and even those who haven’t done so might be more likely to return there for the support than seek it at the Jobcentre. £100,000 would be enough for the initial scoping, with a further £750,000 needed to pilot it.
As for private sector employers, Chapter 4 covers the mayor’s relationship with business. We argue that a thoughtful mayor with a campaigning mindset and a willingness to engage provocatively with businesses could skilfully convene and cajole around some core themes. A Mayor’s Pledge would set out our expectations of a good London employer. It would include the opportunity to take those vital first steps into a decent career.
If necessary, institutions could be built to help promote these aims, including, for example, a London Interns Service advertising decent opportunities and allowing participants to rate employers, or an Ofsted-style mechanism for holding employers to account in how they support young people into work, as suggested by Jamie Audsley and Emily Benn.
In addition, local control of the BIS training and skills budget would help to ensure that this important resource is directed towards the areas of deepest need and greatest potential, not least, perhaps, helping with this locally specific institution building.
(5) For Every Child’s Family: A Decent Income and a Good Home
An astonishing 37 per cent of London’s children live in poverty: their parents trapped by low wages, insecure and insufficient jobs and high prices.54 Our status as ‘child poverty capital of the UK’ should be a source of acute shame for a city that has much else to be proud of.
For a mayor who has little direct influence over wages or benefit and tax rates that directly affect income this can seem at first glance a hard problem to tackle. One approach is to make income matter less. Opening up public space, banning advertising near schools or increasing access to the arts means that a child’s experiences are less dependent on their parents’ income. Kate Bell has called this a process of ‘de-commodifying’ the experience of childhood: narrowing the spheres in which family income determines a child’s life chances.55
But a visionary leader does more than mitigate the effect of gross inequality. New York’s Bill de Blasio won his mayoral election by exposing the pernicious effect of the gap between rich and poor on one of the world’s few other Western mega-cities; it will surely feature equally prominently in London’s upcoming vote. We touch on some ideas below and develop more in Chapter 4.
A London Child Trust Fund
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