West Fife Enterprise
The final item of business today is a members’ business debate on motion S3M-6708, in the name of John Park, on West Fife Enterprise—making a difference. The debate will be concluded without any question being put.
Motion debated,
That the Parliament welcomes the excellent work of projects such as West Fife Enterprise, a non-governmental organisation focusing on employability inclusion and economic regeneration in Fife; considers that employability inclusion social enterprises in Scotland provide crucial and innovative support for people who are unemployed or find themselves marginalised in the labour market, linking potential employees with local employers; welcomes the work of West Fife Enterprise as a model of excellence in employability practice; notes that many of West Fife Enterprise’s clients are from hard-to-reach groups that face multiple barriers to sustainable employment; applauds the hard work of everyone involved in transforming lives and the labour market for the better at West Fife Enterprise, and looks forward to supporting West Fife Enterprise and initiatives like it in the future.
17:04
I really appreciate this opportunity to speak about and to open the debate on West Fife Enterprise, which is an organisation that I have been aware of for a number of years, although I have only got to know it very well over the past few years, since my election as an MSP in May 2007. I have been very impressed with the work that the organisation has been doing, which is why I say that I really appreciate tonight’s opportunity to talk a bit about the organisation and to highlight some of the major things that it has done to improve the lives of young people in the communities of west Fife.
If members ever get the opportunity to visit West Fife Enterprise, I suggest that they do so. The organisation has breathed life into many young people’s opportunities. I have been really impressed when I have gone around to speak to people there who have been given the opportunity to improve their skills. Some of those young people have been in and out of the workplace after having left school, without ever having the opportunity to get into the sort of work that would enable them to develop a real long-term career. They are getting a level of support from West Fife Enterprise that is all too often unavailable in mainstream work.
I visited the organisation about a year ago and saw the work that was being done in the metalwork class. I also saw the skills that people were developing in the joinery and carpentry classes. That is a normal working environment for many of them—building things that are sometimes sold on to the community. All in all, the types of skills that people get there are valuable and will, I hope, stay with them for the rest of their lives and enable them to go into meaningful, gainful employment.
West Fife Enterprise was established in the early 1980s, as the mining industry in west Fife started to go into severe and serious decline. It was set up and supported by a range of organisations in order to help people who were suffering from the effects of the recession in the early 1980s. The organisation continued to help and support people in fighting the effects of that recession and in working towards the recovery that was needed in the coalfield communities in the 1980s and 1990s, and it continues to provide that support today.
The economic climate that we currently face presents a real danger for young people who have recently been on the fringes of employment, because they could be pushed even further away from employment. The work that West Fife Enterprise pursues with those young people is highly valuable and is vital to ensuring that they get an opportunity that they might not otherwise have to go into the workplace and develop careers.
West Fife Enterprise does not just work with candidates who go into the centre; it also offers a significant amount of employer support by working with more than 200 employers from a range of different backgrounds. It provides opportunities and placements for young people to get new skills, not just in a training centre environment but in a work environment. As everyone knows, the kinds of skills that stay with people and allow them to secure employment are the softer skills such as teamworking—working alongside others—as well as simply getting out of bed on time and the other things that people must do to hold down a job.
The connection that West Fife Enterprise has with employers in the community is vital. If it did not have that, there would not be a conduit for young people to leave the training centre and go on to candidate placements. A number of approaches are used. I am sure that members have heard of the get ready for work programme, which is supported by the Scottish Government, and of the quest for employment programme.
Despite the significant challenges for the economy in west Fife, there are still plenty of opportunities on the horizon. I do not have to tell members about the new aircraft carriers that are to be built at Rosyth—I am sure that a few members have heard me talk about them in the chamber before. There is the new Forth crossing, which will be only a handful of miles along the road. There are also significant potential opportunities for offshore renewables in the Firth of Forth.
Would it not be a shame if those opportunities came to west Fife, but a whole generation of young people did not get them? Would it not be a shame if they did not get the skills and if we had to think about employing people from other parts of the country and perhaps importing labour because we did not have the right skills mix or because we had skills shortages such as we have had in the past?
That is why we have to ensure that there is financial and political support at every level, so that young people not only get the opportunity of a job on the aircraft carriers, in offshore renewables or on the new bridge, but gain the skills that will enable them to stay in employment no matter what happens. Those skills will be marketable as the economy becomes more global, which will present challenges in finding employment opportunities. I hope that West Fife Enterprise will have a bright future in that sense, and that it will provide a pipeline of young people to go and work on those projects as the opportunities arise.
I recognise the work of Alan Boyle, the chief executive of West Fife Enterprise, and his team. Without the work that they are doing, those young people would not have the opportunities. As we all know, it is very much down to individuals to drive the culture of an organisation and to ensure that it delivers and makes a difference. There is no doubt that the people in West Fife Enterprise are making a difference for the people of west Fife.
The boardroom, which is situated at the rear of the learning establishment, contains a number of awards and certificates. They certainly put Dunfermline Athletic to shame—that is for sure—but they would also put a lot of much better resourced organisations to shame, too, which is an indication of the work that West Fife Enterprise has done over the past 20 years or so.
That work would not happen without support from the likes of Fife Council and the funding that it has made available, and the Coalfields Regeneration Trust. I know that many members really appreciate the work that the trust does throughout Scotland, but it does a fantastic job in Fife in particular.
It has been a pleasure and a privilege for me to highlight the work of West Fife Enterprise. I am proud to say that I am a big supporter of the work that it does, I am proud that it is situated in the part of Fife that I know very well and I am proud to say that I think that it will continue to support young people, to make a difference and to ensure that west Fife has a future.
17:12
I thank my Mid Scotland and Fife colleague, John Park, for securing the debate. He is well known for the interest that he takes in what could be called education for regeneration.
West Fife Enterprise was set up to provide skills and work training for former west Fife coal-mining communities—the “Little Moscows”, as they were known—which were hit hard by the Thatcher Government’s destruction of the deep-mined coal industry. Had the National Union of Mineworkers been led by a native of that place, Lawrence Daly, it might have carried the battle on rather better than it did. It was Daly who, in 1973, rallied the general council of his union against the Heath Government by reciting by heart the whole of act 2, scene 1 of “Julius Caesar” and playing all the roles. The Little Moscows created remarkable men.
It is nearly 30 years since West Fife Enterprise was set up and it has done great work in reaching out to the unemployed, the low skilled and the disadvantaged, including young folk who are not in work or education. It offers skills training, qualifications, employability and confidence training. Those are tailored to the needs of more than 200 employers, who also provide the company with work placements and trials.
West Fife Enterprise has gained numerous awards, including from Scottish Enterprise and the Coalfields Regeneration Trust, as John Park said. It has done much to broaden vocational qualifications and to help clients to enter jobs and further education. West Fife is, after all, not just the country of Lawrence Daly but of Jennie Lee, the founder of the Open University.
West Fife Enterprise’s high-technology facilities at Forthview industrial estate expanded in 2005, with low-cost public transport links drawing in clients from former coal mining communities in central Fife. As the current economic crisis piles pressure on Scotland’s economy and finances, West Fife Enterprise goes back to basics and is even more important than when it was originally founded.
As we look over the economic horizon, we see looming up peak oil—a possible $200 to $300 a barrel—during which we will all have to manoeuvre and adapt to survive. Other skills and training initiatives in Fife deserve mention, such as the Siemens and Carnegie College initiative on offshore technology training. It addresses the challenge of North Sea oil extraction as we enter peak oil and the age of carbon capture. It also addresses the emerging field of marine renewables, which will be crucial—and for good—in the days when the oil runs out.
It is worth concluding with one bizarre anecdote that came my way today about a former Conservative candidate for the area. He is one Jacob Rees-Mogg, who contested the constituency—not with notable success—in 1997 and, interviewed by someone from The Times, contributed this:
“My nanny will come up to campaign for me and look after me. I could not survive without her.”
He is now a Tory MP, even if he makes Boris Johnson look like Dennis Skinner. We have been warned what the alternative to fine organisations such as West Fife Enterprise is likely to be.
17:16
I, too, congratulate John Park for securing tonight’s debate, which praises West Fife Enterprise with the sub-title “Making a Difference”.
Fifers are, by nature, enterprising and talented people, and those from the western part of the kingdom have certainly ticked the “making a difference” box nationally and internationally. I need mention only Dunfermline-born millionaire and philanthropist Andrew Carnegie and Cowdenbeath-educated Nobel prize winner James Black to show what west Fifers are capable of when given half a chance. There is also the best footballer I ever saw pull on a Scottish jersey—Jim Baxter from Hill of Beath—and, from the same village, Donald Findlay. On top of his legendary defending skills as an advocate, he appears now to be shoring up the financial defences of Cowdenbeath Football Club and doing a pretty good job of it since he became chairman of the club at the beginning of the season.
However, I am well aware that John Park is highlighting the excellent work of projects such as West Fife Enterprise in identifying and bringing into the workplace those who were perhaps not born with all the natural talents of Andrew Carnegie, James Black, Jim Baxter or Donald Findlay—or perhaps, more accurately, those whose talents have simply not been recognised or developed.
In our complex modern society, it is a sad fact that no job is for life. That has changed totally since I left high school in the north-east part of the kingdom many years ago. Back then, those of us who wanted to become bankers or schoolteachers knew that once we had climbed onto the bottom rung of our chosen professions, we were there—barring accidents—until we retired. Words such as “recession” and “redundancy” were, thankfully, unknown to us in those days. So it was with Fifers who chose to work on the land or at the fishing, or those who came from the pit villages and followed their forefathers down the mines.
The old certainties are no more. Machines have replaced people on the farms, overfishing and the common fisheries policy have destroyed the fishing industry, and deep mining in Fife and elsewhere in the United Kingdom is a thing of the past. Members’ business debates are supposed to be consensual, so I will not get into battle with Chris Harvie’s version of history, in which Maggie Thatcher destroyed the mining industry. I say to him that he is better than that.
In John Park’s day, there was hope that electronics would replace mining, particularly for those who found themselves unemployed in Fife’s west and central areas but, sadly, large-scale employment in electronics proved to be a mirage. As with other parts of the UK, west Fife has had to look to a more diverse range of job sources to tackle a current unemployment level of about 9 per cent, with parts of the Dunfermline East constituency showing jobless numbers at a grim 17.5 per cent at the end of last year.
As John Park explained, West Fife Enterprise is the longest-established training provider that covers the former mining villages of west Fife. As we heard, the organisation was established in 1983 and quickly identified a lack of relevant skills and qualifications as being the biggest barriers to the workplace. As we have also heard, West Fife Enterprise is supported by Fife Council as well as by, I understand, European structural funds and the Coalfields Regeneration Trust.
With the collapse of deep coal mining, the sad fact is that large numbers of people became marginalised as far as the labour market was concerned. Young people in particular found that their lack of skills or education meant that they had little prospect of employment. If organisations like West Fife Enterprise had not stepped into the breach, the situation would all too quickly have become a generational problem, as it has in other parts of Scotland and the UK. What West Fife Enterprise did was get out into the communities and start to connect directly with potential clients. I understand that its approach has always been informal and community-based. As we have heard, the organisation forged a network of some 200 Fife companies and began the task of equipping its clients with the needs of the workplace. In doing that, it identified not only the skills potential that employers required, but the likely workforce that they would need in the future.
In recent years, that approach has been particularly important for the Fife workforce, given the increasing diversity of the skills that are required. As we have heard, skills are required in a range of workplaces from the fledgling offshore renewables industries to modern shipbuilding at Rosyth. In particular, engineering skills will be very necessary given the new Forth crossing. There are also the high-tech skills that the many new companies that are now moving into the Dunfermline area require. I am delighted to learn that, through the Forthview learning centre, there is also scope to increase significantly the capacity and diversity of the clients and customers with whom West Fife Enterprise deals.
John Park is to be commended for bringing to the chamber an important good news story. I pay tribute to West Fife Enterprise, which is clearly an outstanding example for other organisations and key communities elsewhere in Fife and Scotland.
17:22
I congratulate John Park on securing the debate this evening and on highlighting this super service in my constituency, which I have visited on a number of occasions over the past few years.
Like many West Fife Enterprise clients, I come from west Fife mining stock. Like John Park, I had a formative career at Rosyth dockyard. Although many of the similarities between John and I end there, one other passion that we share is seeing generations of youngsters from the former mining areas of West Fife get every possible opportunity to reach their full potential.
I know that I was lucky enough to get a job when I left school at 16, which is nearly 25 years ago, and then, several years ago, to qualify with an honours degree. I also know that, both then and now, many young people were and are not so lucky. People should not think for a moment that that is because those young people did not stick in at school. More often than not, it is about the lack of opportunities for young people today.
On my visits to West Fife Enterprise, I am always struck by the dedication and hard work of the staff as well as of their clients. You feel the passion for achievement when you walk in the door. Many of the clients, whom West Fife Enterprise’s chief executive has described as the hardest to reach, often face multiple barriers to sustainable employment and have not had the easiest start to life. Despite that, they often come away from their time with West Fife Enterprise with recognised qualifications such as the SVQ2 in areas such as administration and information and communications technology, metalwork and fabrication and woodwork and carpentry. They also gain important life skills such as communication, literacy, numeracy, team building and listening skills that prepare them for the workforce.
As both John Park and Ted Brocklebank said, West Fife Enterprise is a multifunded organisation. Fife Council, the Coalfields Regeneration Trust and others input to ensure that projects such as this survive in our communities throughout west and central Fife.
West Fife Enterprise was set up by councillors on Dunfermline District Council in the early 1980s. The councillors included Tom Douglas, who is the current convener of West Fife Enterprise, with whom I served on Dunfermline District Council in the early 1980s. Despite our political differences, I would call Tom a true gentleman, whose passion for our former mining communities is second to none. I am not sure whether he is with us in the public gallery this evening.
One reason why West Fife Enterprise is so successful and sustaining is that it provides the necessary support to ensure that students from the former mining areas of central and west Fife can participate. It does so by providing free or subsidised transport, free child care when registered child minders are used and, importantly, work placements with willing companies in the west Fife area.
John Park has helped to highlight just one of the great services that west Fife has to offer its young people, many of whom would otherwise find it extremely difficult to break out of a cycle of short-term jobs and long-term unemployment. It makes it possible for many young people in the area to achieve beyond their expectations and to contribute to our economy for the future of Fife and of their families. I wish all at West Fife Enterprise well for the future. Keep up the good work!
17:25
I, too, heartily congratulate John Park on securing the debate.
The story of West Fife Enterprise is inspirational, not just because of the position that it is in today, but because of how it started. I do not want to be too harsh in pointing out to Jim Tolson that it was not Dunfermline District Council that set it up; it was people who were unemployed, such as unemployed coal mine managers, unemployed cleaners and unemployed shipbuilders. A range of people who were unemployed in the villages of High Valleyfield, Torryburn and Low Valleyfield came together and formed an association, whose first full-time employee was me—it got £19,000 for that through the Carnegie Unemployed Voluntary Action Fund. The Manpower Services Commission came along and gave it £60,000 and then, to everyone’s astonishment—including my own, as the person who had filled in the application form to the European Union—we got £1 million-worth of funding, which was made up of Fife Regional Council funding that was matched, pound for pound, by EU funding.
It is inspirational that local people created the organisation themselves. I can still see their faces in my mind’s eye. I am thinking of unique social workers such as Maggie Dempster, who was a community development worker—she is still around in west Fife, doing unsung hero’s work—who firmly believed in the premise that people can help themselves. West Fife Enterprise is a classic case of something really good being born in a community. It was the people themselves who made it happen. They got the old Torryburn school for a peppercorn rent and they got the old kitchens up in High Valleyfield. Just getting those premises was hugely inspirational, got everyone in the villages motivated and allowed good meetings to be held. I have nothing but admiration for all the work that they did.
People had to work extremely hard to understand the criteria for getting the funding from the EU. They meant that the enterprise had to be built on the premise of providing training and child care and helping to create co-operatives. People who were long-term unemployed as a result of the decimation of all the local industry, which Christopher Harvie rightly mentioned, went on to learn good skills, but we are talking about more than just the provision of skills—a huge confidence-building exercise went on. That was what was important and made us want to work all the hours that we did to create the organisation.
I think that had it not been for those brave people, who galvanised support politically and professionally to such an extent that district councillors and regional councillors came on board, it just would not have happened. Someone from High Valleyfield once said to me—I know that his name was Tom, but I cannot remember his second name; I think it was Adams but if I have got that wrong and he is in the gallery I hope that he will forgive me—that pigs would fly if we got the European funding. We got it and do you know what? I have a child’s mobile at home, which is made up of pigs flying. I will bring it in and show it to anyone who does not believe me. I believe that pigs can fly; I believe in the impossible.
The local people in West Fife Enterprise believed in the impossible. They have gone on to build a hugely professional organisation. I take my hat off to people such as Alan Boyle who have worked hard to achieve such a high level of professionalism that, as John Park rightly said, the organisation has received awards. The biggest reward that they could ever get is the respect of the Parliament and of all the people across west Fife, for believing in themselves. I heartily congratulate them, and I congratulate John Park on his speech.
17:30
I, too, start by thanking John Park for securing the debate and broadcasting the success of West Fife Enterprise.
I declare an interest, in that my father was a Fifer. Although he was from east Fife, if he was still alive he might migrate to west Fife on the basis of what we have heard today.
I am heartened by what is happening with West Fife Enterprise. The practical and economic skills, training, confidence, and the livelihood-building and community-building skills are all in place there. Helen Eadie gave us the provenance of the people who started the company, and that was exceedingly heartening. I am a great fan of Professor Mark Moore of the Kennedy school of government at Harvard University. He talks about public value outcomes and the other side of the coin—active citizens. We need to broadcast the audit trail through to the active citizens, and then to the network of 200 companies, and how that is working for work placements, soft skills, discipline and allowing people to learn by doing. The reality of it is that that is the only way to learn properly. Junior doctors see one, do one and, to really learn it, teach one.
The key thing that strikes me about West Fife Enterprise is that it is a mechanism that other parts of Scotland could learn from. I am a great fan of John Seddon, who says that the job of the centre is to keep pulling around to find out what is working, and when it finds that out, to broadcast it, but without the mandatory push. We need to leave space to allow people to have their own ideas, to augment and develop them, and to take them to a new level.
I was interested in Christopher Harvie’s contribution, invoking the memory of Lawrence Daly and Jennie Lee, among many other people. Ted Brocklebank invoked the memory of Andrew Carnegie. I have just been reading Carnegie’s autobiography and he was doing a lot of things right back then in Dunfermline. His dad got together with other working guys to get 60 books to form a library, which is why, later on when he was monied, Carnegie went down the library path. If he was around just now, West Fife Enterprise is the sort of project that he would have supported.
Last week, we were at the Scottish Council Foundation, which was running an event on philanthropy. There were a lot of high-net-worth people in the audience who were beginning to consider what they could do that would be purposeful, successful and might gain momentum. Perhaps tonight we can have a conversation about what can be done to connect West Fife Enterprise with that.
I am also inclined to ask what we can do to help connect West Fife Enterprise even further. Last Monday, we ran an interesting session on business gateway in Glasgow. We worked on the basic theory that business gateway is not just itself het; there is more involved in starting up businesses. There are the business organisations, professions such as accountants and lawyers, the regulators, utilities, schools and colleges, and the West Fife Enterprises of this world. It was heartening to have a really good brainstorming session about how we could augment business gateway’s role of helping business to get up and running, and helping young, successful businesses to continue to grow, evolve and be all that they can be. We also talked about how to handle the difficulty that so many family business die at the point of generational change. They need to organise and build into their DNA the potential to be successful and grow over the piece.
On Wednesday, I was at a Federation of Small Businesses event in Edinburgh. A young lady from Fife came up to me and said, “That was a really good session in Glasgow. We are going to do the same in Fife.” There might be a dynamic there, and West Fife Enterprise could be a key part of that. We need to bring people together in common cause. The provenance of the organisation has that common cause and that means that there is less resistance to the idea of getting folk together. It would give us better outcomes in the future. I am keen to do that, particularly when we see in Fife, and elsewhere in Scotland, pockets of high unemployment, and we are still having to face that lagging indicator of unemployment in our society.
In essence, in communities where there is a strong sense of community, such as those in Fife and in my constituency, the more we bring people together, the more the ingenuity and self-ordering capability comes through and the more we can develop the interconnectedness, rope in other people and play to the strength and diversity that is there and that maybe not all of us see. That is an asset-based recovery.
If we can come together with a strong sense of community, which Fife has, and develop round organisations such as West Fife Enterprise that have the clear goal of maximising the life chances of young people, constantly keeping in touch with the constituency of people who work in West Fife Enterprise and the candidates coming through in that fantastic network of 200 businesses; if we have a mechanism to bring in the many people who could and should help in that process—I have a mega list here of potential partners; and if we also bring in those who would benefit from the success of the organisation, we can move it to a different level. Along with the community planning partnership and elected members in Fife, I am keen to come across and run a session at which we brainstorm what might be done and, in essence, try to get something happening so that we elevate even further the profile of West Fife Enterprise in Fife and give it a mechanism to continue the debate and dialogue and its great work.
I am a great fan of a guy called Feuerstein, who, in Israel in 1948, faced the difficult problem of kids being out of control. People had come out of the concentration camps, the economy was on the ropes and terrorism was on the go. It was a terrible time. Schools were not functioning and kids had language difficulties and were out of control. Feuerstein got involved, taking the same approach as West Fife Enterprise, involving skills training, confidence and discipline. He found out something that the kids were good at and made a real meal of that. He let them know that they were important, that they had an important role to play and that they had big options. The success of that country owes a lot to Feuerstein. Let us see what we can do with West Fife Enterprise to help it be successful and perform a similar function at the kingdom’s level.
Meeting closed at 17:37.