Some things move on depressingly slowly. We seem to have been reading books and articles in the press as well as listening to political speeches on this topic for most of my lifetime. I have unearthed an article of mine which the FT published in 1985. The opening paragraph describes a character called Alfonso who grew up in inner London and was highly numerate and alert. His friends said he could make a price instantly, off the top of his head, for the delivery of any quantity of cocaine. He has, I observed, because it was the world I had come from, the same skills as the sharpest dealer in commodities or financial futures in the Square Mile. But he was destined for the criminal justice system because nobody gave him a break and the personal support he needed.
For all the discussion and hand wringing around the early deaths of so many young men in London every year, and all the support offered by a small number of wonderful charities, we still fail Alfonso’s successors today and look like continuing to do so. The difference between Alfonzo and a successful and well paid dealer in financial services is that nobody gave him a real chance. I suggest that employers, and employers alone, can break this cycle.
There is nothing new in this: the Rowntree, Wedgewood and Cadbury families and many of our Victorian business leaders had strongly developed ideas about caring for their workforces. Behind their thinking often lay a religious (and specifically non-conformist) Christian faith. It matched the energy and creativity of contemporary social pioneers like Lord Shaftesbury. This extraordinary reforming aristocratic had come to see that there could be no route out of deep working- class poverty without education and without a reduction in the legally permitted working hours of children to ten hours a day. There is a wonderful re-creation of Lord Shaftesbury’s Ragged Schools, as they became known, in a museum in Copperfield Road, Tower Hamlets. In reality, it took another century, and the Butler Act of 1944, to provide education of a breath and standard which we can recognise today. But it remains unequal and patchy in its outcomes. Around 40 per cent of all youngsters growing up in Local Authority care today end up homeless or in the criminal justice system. Trading in drugs is often perceived to be a quick route to break out of a deeply depressing introduction to life.
There are still visionary business leaders in our midst today and they are the successors of Lord Shaftesbury and those Victorian families. Much more recently, the last decades of the twentieth century saw an explosion of corporate engagement in the community at the same time as so many of the traditional large employers, in ship building, steel and coal mining, declined and decimated their local communities. Heirs of the Victorians, like Sir Alastair Pilkington, Chairman of the Lancashire family firm of glass makers, found that they were forced to lay off large numbers of vulnerable employees.
Sir Alastair thought that ‘something had to be done’ and this something turned out to be the creation of a national network of Local Enterprise Agencies supporting redundant employees to create their own small businesses. This was real leadership, and it changed our attitude to the creation and development of small business. This led, in turn, to the realisation that strengthening the local community was good for business because you would sell more of your goods or services into communities which were prospering.
Those business leaders of the 1980s have left us now, and their successors have mostly delegated their community support efforts to specialist departments managing a mixture of charitable giving and corporate social responsibility (CSR). Sir James Timpson provides a wonderful exception. He has built his whole business model around offering an opportunity to those who in practice have fallen out of our system but, when given a chance and a sense of purpose, have grasped the opportunity.
Our current business leaders, encouraged by governments, have grasped the point that they are in pole position to help avert all the looming horrors of global warming: indeed, if they don’t do so, there is no real prospect of a sustainable future for our planet. We now need to widen this out so that business leaders are addressing other long time unresolved issues.
As the technology entrepreneur and charismatic Lord Lieutenant of London, Sir Ken Olisa, puts it: ‘There is huge talent just waiting to be harnessed and trained to build dynamic businesses and make existing businesses more profitable – we neglect this to our own disadvantage.’
So, the call is for leaders of business, and indeed all employers, to see that they could transform and enhance the life prospects and career satisfaction of our care leavers. There is nothing very new in this. Sonia Blandford in her excellent book called “Born to Fail?” quotes the CBI as saying a generation ago ‘Business can and must do more to ensure that someone’s background or postcode does not define their life chances’. To do this they will need to look carefully at, and be prepared to change, some of their recruitment practises while offering on-going support, encouragement and mentoring to their recruits.
Ciaran Thapar, himself a very effective youth worker in Lambeth writes in his hugely relevant recent book ‘Cut Short’ ‘The fact that young black males are disproportionately represented in school exclusions and prison, let alone fatal stabbings in London should be considered a social injustice for which we are all responsible’. There is much current talk about the need for a ‘public health’ approach to this with reference to work in Glasgow. This means that all of us who care about our future society should be engaged in the struggle to provide effective support and care for our young people, especially at this time of severe cut back to all public services for young people.
Thapar goes on to say, ‘What is universal about young people who become involved in violence -especially perpetrators – is that they are typically poor, socially and educationally excluded’. Businesses need not be on their own in this.
A characteristic of so many youngsters emerging from care is a lack of personal confidence and a network to support them. It is not for everyone, but we know that involvement in sport and the arts can build confidence and teamwork like almost nothing else. Working with Leadership Through Sport and some of our great London sports clubs like West Ham United, Tottenham Hotspur, The Boxing Academy, Saracens Rugby Club, Essex County Cricket Club, Water City Music, and really effective youth clubs like Onside and the Osmani Centre, would transform prospects for demoralised youngsters almost overnight. We know that all would be delighted to work with employers to build a new generation of confident young care leavers. It won’t happen if left to the public sector on its own. But surely the task of offering fulfilling work opportunities to Care leavers, most of whom would be real assets if given the chance, cannot be beyond the leadership of employers.
So what could be the specific role of employers in this frightening environment? Here are four suggestions:
1. Proactively support, train and recruit youngsters from difficult backgrounds into their organisations. Specifically, support a new initiative, called Breaking Barriers, being piloted in the London Borough of Haringey. It is aimed at the smaller end of the fast- growing IT sector. There is a shortage of young people in this sector now and local employers, through a Salesforce training scheme can recruit highly resilient local youngsters to help build their own organisations.
2. Support London Bids (Business Improvement Districts) to train their local workforces to deal with knife crime emergencies at or near their premises.
3. Ensure that a growing proportion of their charity and social programmes are directly focussed on the hardest to help young people.
4. Work with the many other organisations in this space committed to bringing positive change and reducing the terrible misery and wastage of gang warfare and knife crime. A first step could be through getting a free subscription to this magazine straight to your inbox. You can do this here, www.fightingknifecrime.london/subscription.
You can also of course donate here, www.fightingknifecrime.london/donate. Finally, if employers begin to shout out publicly about their work in this area, they will build the argument that business has a genuine social purpose and is driven by so much more than earnings per share. This would go a long way to reverse the erosion of public trust in the business sector.
Sir Stephen O’Brien, Vice Chair, Business in The Community
