Coronavirus: Time to match jobs to people in national crusade – Jayne Dowle

Not the answer any daddy – or mummy – will want to give. As we face the second week of the coronavirus pandemic, we need a far more robust government response to the employment situation.

Millions of us – and I’m not exaggerating – will no longer be able to carry on working in the jobs we are used to, in the short to medium-term at least. Not only in the catering and hospitality trades, which are taking a massive blow, but builders, butchers, factory workers and certainly the self-employed.

So far, the Government response has been woefully inadequate and scrambled. Just look at the confusion caused by the ‘key worker’ debacle, sending schools, colleges and nurseries into chaos, piling anxiety upon anxiety for parents, children and young people. There has been a complete failure of Cabinet government – remember that? – imagination and understanding.

I have an idea, however. I’m so convinced it would work that I’ve even written to Lord Bethell, Minister of Innovation at the Department of Health and Social Care, to share it with him. I’m still awaiting a response.

As a matter of urgency, the UK needs a centralised, government-backed employment agency which can immediately match up individuals with jobs that need filling.

People would register their personal details, National Insurance number, skills and experience and be given immediate access to apply. How else are we going find out if we can swap from sales to driving a delivery van, or bring our IT experience to bear in a power station?

Yes, there might be issues of confidentiality and matters such as DBS (Disclosure and Barring Service) to consider, but surely these would be surmountable. This is a national emergency after all.

The Prime Minister likes to remind us that his hero is Sir Winston Churchill.

Do you think that this wartime leader stuck fast? Of course not. Everyone will have heard what grandparents and great-grandparents were prevailed upon to undertake. Millions of women, for instance, worked in munitions factories or on the land. Young people training for professional careers or studying at universities found themselves digging coal or working as bus conductors.

My dear friend Betty, who died last year, was sent – as a 15-year-old secretarial student – to accompany child refugees arriving on trains from Hull to rural Yorkshire. If such a level of mobilisation could be achieved 80 years ago, without the internet, mobile phones or mass vehicle ownership, it should be easy today.

Whitehall needs to set up a department to run things forthwith. It must put people in charge of co-ordinating job vacancies and organising a register of workers. Perhaps office staff at HMRC and the DVLA, well-versed in complex systems and dealing with the public, could be diverted onto this pressing task.

It’s a simple balance of supply and demand. On one side, we have huge swathes of the British workforce with no guaranteed work. The vast majority will still want to work, will need to work and are used to working. These are not long-term benefit claimants who can’t get up in the morning.

On the other side, we have a desperate need for workers in key industries. These include food supply and distribution, social care, the NHS, emergency services, and dare I say it, security. The farming industry alone says it needs 70,000 workers for British farms this year and all the big supermarkets are calling out urgently for thousands of shelf-stackers and order pickers.

And most of us want to do something, anything, to help. On Thursday lunchtime, a post went out on local social media sites from Asda, calling for temporary staff immediately. Turn up with ID and National Insurance number, it said, and it’s likely you might start tomorrow. Shelves can’t be refilled fast enough as it is. And soon, supermarket managers will have to contend with mass absence because of childcare responsibilities and workers with coronavirus symptoms self-isolating.

By 7pm, our village store had taken on 11 new colleagues. One shop. One village. It’s happening all over the UK, but it’s hard to see from Westminster. Prime Minister, your country really needs you to take this seriously.