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If Crawley is the "engine room of Sussex", who is going to drive it? There is much talk of full employment, and the effects of full employment, throughout the South-East. CDS Employment Services provides a temporary/contract service, supplying driving and general industrial staff to industry throughout the South-East, from our headquarters in Crawley.
This company is affected by full employment in that we will reach a glass ceiling that will prevent any further growth. If we cannot service our customers by providing drivers, those customers' goods will not be delivered.
The answer is to provide training—not just to get the unemployed back to work but (possibly of greater importance) to develop the employed into better jobs and thus create opportunities lower down.
For example, ,it is passible to drive a 75-tonne lorry with an ordinary car licence. By training the 7.5-tonne driver to drive on an LGV licence the way is clear to train an unemployed person to drive a 7.5-tonne lorry. At CDS we are planning to create a training school. We will offer driver training and development. A key part of the programme will be ongoing assessment and reviews.
That training needs Government support. At present there are schemes to help the unemployed back to work, but I would contest that this has been carried out, by the last administration as a way of affecting statistics—not as a way of solving employment problems. We have the infrastructure, the trainers and the facilities available to create an excellent training centre. Our track record shows that 30% of our staff find fulltime positions with our clients, who then come back for yet more temporary staff. We need Government support to make this project work. Yes, we are going to earn money out of it, but at the end of the day, so are many other people—people who need to have careers and futures.
On a related, yet separate issue, I have talked to various agencies in Sussex about the simple policy of transporting those without jobs in areas of high unemployment to areas of high employment. It has got to be cheaper, especially in terms of overall social cost, to drive someone from, say, Hastings to Crawley every day, than to pay them benefit. Something really has to be done urgently to keep the engine running and the wheels turning.
Jeremy Taylor, Marketing manager, CDS Employment