11 hours ago
The government adviser who says everyone should work less for the same pay
The number of people of working age who are not working – currently 9.3 million, or 21.6 per cent of 16-to-64-year-olds – is a crucial issue for the UK's economic growth and our productivity.
There has been a rash of policy solutions from government and business in recent years, but little direct engagement with those out of work about what they feel would help.
This is where Hilary Cottam comes in. She is the expert called in by Labour and Conservative governments over the past quarter century to provide new thinking on intractable social problems – or how to make David Cameron 's vague promise of a 'Big Society' into something real and practical. In 2019, she received the OBE for her achievements.
She has spent the last five years travelling around 'left-behind' areas both in Britain and the United States, meeting communities and listening to their suggestions to improve their lot. It is their voices that shape the arguments in her new book, The Work We Need: A 21st Century Reimagining (£22, Telegraph Books).
Its focus is on reimagining a workforce for the future where everyone has access to what she refers to as 'good work' rather than languishing on benefits.
'I'm a social change maker'
Cottam, 60, is keen to make clear what she isn't: not an economist (her degree was in history); not from a privileged, metropolitan background (she was the first in her Herefordshire family to go to university when she landed a place at Oxford); and emphatically not part of the think tank elite.
'I've never worked for a think tank,' she says. So what is she? 'I'm a social change-maker, I am a community worker, I am a public servant who uses business principles to try and start social organisations.'
She may not be a familiar name to many, and some of her ideas can be hard to pin down, yet she steadfastly refuses to be cast as a blue-sky thinker. In the 2010s, David Cameron, with his 'Big Society' hat on, backed her blueprint for a radical makeover of the welfare state, to set up community concierge services called 'Circles' to help older residents with hospital visits and a range of everyday challenges. A decade later, she is currently advising the Labour Government on how to bring together farmers and environmentalists.
Another current project is advising the Danish government on the policy shifts required to address an ageing population. And former German chancellor Angela Merkel is an enthusiast for Cottam's previous book, the 2018 international bestseller, Radical Help (£12.99, Telegraph Books), which argued for a reinvention of the welfare state.
She sees herself as someone grounded in her own experience of being the first in her family to go to university. 'All my work depends on people collaborating with me,' she explains. 'So the ideas in my new book on work are people's ideas.'
But she has, she insists, been doing the legwork by putting in the miles to listen to first-hand experience of work and worklessness. Like that of Jonny, a gravedigger in post-industrial Kilmarnock, where suicide rates are high. He told her: 'I don't want to work until I'm broken without a chance to travel or really learn. I don't want to try and care for my family in the gaps in between. Why can't we just rethink [work] top to bottom?'
She found similar reservations being expressed in other places around the UK, including Grimsby, once home to Britain's fishing industry, which have received targeted investment to create green energy jobs. And in Peckham, south London, on the doorstep of the family home she has shared for 20 years with her husband Nigel, a psychotherapist whom she met when both were working on a prison project, and their student daughter, Mabel.
Top-down initiatives, whether they are called regional development boards or levelling-up projects, have drawbacks when it comes to the nitty gritty detail, she warns. 'Having an industrial policy that just decides, 'we'll invest in this region and they'll have jobs', is like sprinkling seeds from a plane and not watering the ground. Nothing is going to grow.'
In her book, she sets out six criteria that those she spoke to felt were important for the creation of 'good work' that will get Britain back to work. The first is a decent salary.
But who is going to stump up extra cash with businesses cutting back after hikes in the minimum wage and employer National Insurance contributions? 'The data universally shows,' she replies, 'that if you pay workers well, you retain them and they are productive. Any productive business is going to pay for it.'
There is also a larger macroeconomic argument, she adds, where the figures tell their own story. 'It is about how skewed our economy is. Because people are not paid decent wages at the lower end, we have 18 million people on benefits while they are in work. It is a massive transfer of wealth from the state [and the taxpayer] to businesses.'
Another on the list of six is 'time'. She wants to see more flexible working hours, not the four-day-week promised by Jeremy Corbyn in his 2019 election manifesto, but the opportunity to work a focused, more effective 32-hour-week (rather than the standard 40) over five days for a full-time salary, that will appeal to those with caring and other responsibilities.
'I'm saying a 32-hour week [for the same wages now paid for five full days] because women don't want a four-day week. If they are doing the caring, which many still are, having flexibility over five days around child and other caring responsibilities is really important.'
It is what is keeping people like Julie in the workforce. She met Cottam in Barnsley, where jobs in mining have been replaced by roles in assembly and distribution warehouses.
'When I clock out here,' she says of her flexible-hours role, 'that's me done. Until last year I cared for my mum – she lived with me and had dementia – and my brother. I do his medication. He's got epilepsy. Here, I can work and take the time to care: that's revolutionary.'
Again, though, such flexibility will surely push up employer costs, and we could end up with more people unemployed? 'The data shows you are more productive on 32 hours. Why don't we believe the data? Because the data doesn't go with our politics.'
'Left-behind is an insulting term'
As part of the research for her book, she tells me that she encountered a wide range of companies who have tried out flexible working.
'Seventy in the UK, from a small chippy in Norfolk, to a Sheffield robotics company and London-based blue chip corporates. They piloted a shorter working week, and it was so productive they are sticking with it. There are 60 doing the same in the US.'
Did she hear different things when travelling around left-behind towns in the States?
'I heard the same growing demands for social justice, the same wish to live in a different world where their children would have good work, a house and time to be with their family. But there is less experience of social organisations there that can cross divides in society like the NHS.'
What exactly is a social organisation? The NHS has enough on its plate right now to be helping find people jobs.
'It is social infrastructure, libraries, youth clubs, sports clubs, churches, anywhere that people from different groups, different parts of society, can gather and get to know each other.'
'Place' is the final of her six criteria for 'good work'. 'Place is absolutely at the core. We are not going to have functioning democracies without people having their places in the world, and that requires functioning local economies with good work.'
She prefers not to use 'left-behind'. 'It is very insulting, because people there are choosing to stay. They have pride, they have imaginative ideas about how to do things differently that are just not being heard.'
Is that sense of being ignored by policy-makers, contributing in the areas she visited, to disillusionment with the main parties and the switch towards Reform?
'Because I have been working in Brexit-voting places, I wasn't surprised by the Brexit result. There are people in my book saying, 'do they [the elite] even realise we are here?'.'
Right now, she is also working with Steve Reed, the Environment Secretary, on a project working with upland communities in Cumbria, trying to find common ground between upland farmers and rewilders who want to banish sheep from the fells.
Cottam is clearly effective at listening and identifying deeper-rooted causes. But what bigger solutions can she offer to the national problem of worklessness?
'We need a new social contract in which business, the state, unions and intellectuals [like her] have a role to play. We need to build 21st-century work organisations to see the economy grow.'
The Work We Need by Hilary Cottam is published by Virago.
