Supporting Employment in Challenging Times

As the Secretariat for the APPG for Entrepreneurship, The Entrepreneurs Network is hosting a series of webinars to bring Parliamentarians and leading business owners together to explore what the future holds for start-ups and scale-ups post-COVID-19. 

In our latest APPG for Entrepreneurship session on Supporting Employment in Challenging Times, we heard from an expert panel of speakers about the latest legislation and schemes designed to support employment and considered whether reform might be necessary in light of COVID-19. 

We heard from Seema Malhotra, Labour MP for Feltham and Heston, and Shadow Minister for Employment. We were also joined by employment experts including Sharon Tan, Partner in the Employment department at Mishcon de Reya and Julia Rouse, Professor of Entrepreneurship in the Centre for Decent Work and Productivity at Manchester Metropolitan University.

Here are some of the most thought-provoking insights from the session.

Highlights & Insights from our Speakers

Seema Malhotra MP noted the importance of supporting individuals who are losing their jobs due to COVID-19 through the crisis to ensure they are not unemployed in the long-term. She suggested that we should learn from previous downturns but stressed the importance of the government having an innovative, thoughtful, and well-researched response to the unique challenges of the COVID-19 pandemic:

“I’m not going to pretend that this is a challenge that we have all the answers from a roadmap from the past.”

She also spoke about how the COVID-19 crisis has disproportionately impacted certain demographics:

“One area that has emerged very evidently is young people being hit harder by this recession, particularly in the first few months where we saw…. under 35’s being almost 50% of those who were registered as job seekers.”

“We have seen women, single parents, young people, ethnic minorities, the self-employed being harder hit statistically then others in the unemployment figures but also in the loss of income”

She raised the need to reform the employment system to support entrepreneurs. 

“I think we need a debate about the advice, legislation, and policy around entrepreneurship so that we are more robust within a social security framework that works in partnership with people and recognises the life cycle that people go through in their employment”

Sharon Tan discussed the important role that entrepreneurs and employers play in avoiding large scale unemployment:

“[The UK] has been at the forefront of innovation and development in recent years and we are going to need to continue in that vein, particularly given Brexit and now the pandemic”

She drew attention to the opportunities that the COVID-19 has created for businesses:

“Disruption inevitably brings with it new opportunities and these new ways of working represent opportunities to develop technical solutions and opportunities in terms of the way employers use their office space”

She also spoke about the ‘red flag’ situations where it may be inappropriate for employers to insist on employees immediately returning to the workplace and the options that fall within the existing employment law framework. 

Julia Rouse covered the disproportionate impact that the COVID-19 pandemic has had on the self-employed, despite the government’s efforts to provide them support:

“In total, we estimate that 756,000 self-employed were excluded from the self-employment income support scheme”

She also mentioned the additional challenges that women on maternity leave faced in applying for the Self-Employment Income Support Scheme and how this informed her decision to bring forward plans to form a Women's Enterprise Policy Group:

“The Self-Employment Income Support Scheme maternity blunder signals to us the need for more gender-aware policy making”

She stressed the importance of solutions for the self-employed which reflect their individual circumstances:

“We will have a severely dented generation of startups and that will have serious social and individual consequences”

Questions & Recommendations

During the Q&A session, we touched on a range of key issues. 

One attendee asked Seema Malhontra MP what kind of policy levers outside of employment needed to be pulled by the Government to support individuals through the pandemic. 

In response, Seema echoed concerns that some groups are receiving generous support while others are being missed by the system. She suggested that reform may be needed:

“[It is] partly a consequence of how tax and economic policy has been developed over generations and how some of that might have to catch up with the changing world of work”

Another attendee asked what more can be done to support entrepreneurs and how we can bridge the skills gap for apprentices. 

In response, Julia Rouse spoke about her reservations about a self-employment led approach to unemployment. 

“I think we need to be cautious and clever in the way we think about self-employment, more as a skill development process… rather than it all being about business startup ignoring the fact that a lot of these businesses do not thrive”

In response, Sharon Tan suggested that an apprenticeship scheme, like the one Mischon de Reya has recently rolled out, has the potential to be an incredible tool for promoting social mobility. 

Seema suggested that there needs to be a more systematic response to supporting entrepreneurship and that LEPs may play an important role in this.

“Employers may have to think a little further than they have before. Where is there an opportunity for them to create more employment opportunities? Because that has got to be a part of making the next period successful for our citizens across the country”

We have a few more APPG for Entrepreneurship webinars coming up in the next few weeks. If you are interested, you can sign up here.