PRIME Initiative

On Wednesday 24th June some forty people drawn from civil servants and government agency staff (from BIS, DWP, Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales), business support organisations and industry met together to look at harnessing the enterprise, experience and skills of the 50+ to the labour market. It was chaired by Luke Johnson, chair of the RSA, and facilitated by Tony Robinson of SFEDI.

To bring people from across the UK to such an event was itself an amazing step forward, but this was also the first rung of the ladder in a 50+ enterprise manifesto.

Let’s get some of the gripes over.

Between the ages of 50 and 65 almost one person in three is workless and almost sixty per cent have no pension other than the state pension to look forward to. People of this age who are out of work for more than six months after being made redundant stand a one in ten chance of ever working as an employee again. Despite this, there is still an inclination to say we should be concentrating on getting them jobs - stacking shelves or whatever. The unspoken implication is that this “enterprise and self-employment thing” is for the few and a bit of an irrelevance for mass 50+ unemployment.

On the other side there is an increasing number of people who are beginning to say that the opportunity for self-employment should be a right, and that implies the entitlement to an opportunity to gain the knowledge, skills and support needed to start a business.

Widening the 50+ enterprise opportunity entitlement is particularly important now that the government is making threats and promises about welfare and work to those aged under 25. Just how many jobs will there be left for the over 50s once this policy is fulfilled?

It seems to me that the economic case is undeniable. We cannot afford to keep a growing number of over 50s on welfare and pensions: forget tax cuts and paying off the cost of government borrowing. This is an escalating burden on the state coffers.

But what about industry? Someone said that the airbus creates tens of thousands of jobs but is dependent on 400 small and medium enterprises. Each of these “SMEs” is dependent on a large number of micro-businesses. Without these micro-businesses there would be no airbus.

But industry does not seem to be worried about the future of micro-businesses that are at the bottom of the supply-chain and are suffering most in the recession. You would think that with enlightened self-interest they would want to ensure there was a bigger pool of micro-businesses. They could easily do this by ensuring that all their experienced staff had an opportunity to think self-employment rather than think redundancy.

So, never was there a time riper for a 50+ enterprise manifesto than now.

PRIME’s £2 million corporate partnership with Bank of America has received a great deal of publicity in the last few days. And quite right too. Bank of America is the first major corporation to stand up and say “We believe in the potential of people aged over 50: we are going to invest in PRIME so that the entrepreneurial spirit of older people can be realised”.

We anticipate that Bank of America will be the first of many corporates to get it -  that in an ageing society olderpreneurship is vital for global competitiveness.

But what are we spending the money on?

First of all we are appointing two mentor coordinators, one in the South and one in the North, to recruit, train and manage volunteer mentors. Many of our clients want a mentor who can help them make that jump from thinking whether self-employment is something they can do, to getting their business underway. Having someone to turn to at that time is something PRIME’s clients have really appreciated where we have been able to offer a mentoring service.

Then we are appointing two trainers. We want to provide a range of introductory road shows across the country as well as more detailed workshops. At the end of November we ran a beginners roadshow in Belfast and some more detailed seminars and we were able to help over 130 people. How marvellous if we could emulate that in 20 more cities in the UK in 2009!

Bank of America is putting £0.5 million into our new Prince of Wales Enterprise Endowment. We are looking to see this grow as other corporates and individuals donate to the fund. The Enterprise Endowment will eventually provide a range of financial help to olderpreneurs. We intend to start with a micro-loan scheme for those who cannot raise money from traditional banks. This will be launched around Easter 2009. In the meanwhile we are appointing a loans officer to put everything in place.

STOP PRESS. The Zopa-PRIME Olderpreneur Loan scheme is now available - more details on our client-support site.

Hectic but exciting times. PRIME is making progress - but offers of help are always welcome. Please see SUPPORT US.

When Enterprise Week was first invented a few years back PRIME was vociferous in pointing out that enterprise was not just for the young. Finally our lobbying paid off. In March 2008 “Enterprise: unlocking the UK’s talent“, the government’s new strategy on enterprise appeared. In it there was a small paragraph with major ramifications:

“Given the ageing population and the lower aspirations around enterprise amongst older age groups, it is important for the UK’s future growth prospects to encourage more people over 50 to become enterprising. The Government will work with Enterprise Insight, PRIME and SEEDA to develop and a campaign to encourage older people to realise the benefits of unlocking their talent and exploiting their skills and knowledge to be active in enterprise”.

So this year a number of special events designed for the over 50s will feature during Enterprise Week. Some of these are highlighted on www.primebusinessclub.com under “Up-coming events”.

Enterprise Insight has commissioned research on the thorny question of marketing enterprise to the over 50s. You might think that marketeers would have cracked this long ago - but they were too busy concentrating on the youth market!

It has been a very small start, but it is a beginning. There is a slow dawning of realisation that soon there will be more people over fifty than under fifty. The number of young people is dropping fast. Ignoring the needs of those aged over fifty is becoming a nonsense.

Why?

Well first of all nearly one person in three aged between fifty and state pension age is workless. These are people who have one-third of their lives in front of them. They need to finance this.

If we are to have a robust and competitive economy, we need a thriving start-up market. Given that the number of younger people is falling (and the under 30s start-up market was never that strong anyway), we need to invest in people with skills and experience if we are, as a country, to remain competitive in the global economy.

The sad thing is that too many people just have not got it yet.

Let us make sure that this year Enterprise Week is also Breakthrough Week for olderpreneurs.

The Prince of Wales is 60 on the 14th of November 2008. PRIME itself was born around ten years ago, as a direct result of the approach of the Prince’s 50th birthday. He realised that for most people getting a job gets increasingly difficult with age. His post bag was full of letters from people desperate to work but unable to find anyone to employ them - because they were “too old”. PRIME and its sister charity in Wales PRIME-Cymru were the result - two of the 18 charities the Prince has personally founded.

The two PRIMEs help people over the age of 50 get round the problem of finding someone to employ them by setting up in business for themselves - self-employment as a means of getting back into the fray and earning a livelihood.

In addition to his charities, Prince Charles has also founded six social enterprises whose trading activities help fund them. The best known is the highly successful organic brand Duchy Originals, the most recent The Highgrove Shop. These activities are substantial - the charities alone raise over £100 million a year from all sources.

It would tempting to apply an American term like “social entrepreneur” to the Prince. But this would fail to do justice to the real roots of his commitment. This side of the Prince’s life gets well-deserved attention in an hour-and-a-half long BBC documentary two day’s before his 60th birthday.

“Charles At 60: the Passionate Prince” transmits at 8.30pm on BBC One on the 12th of November. The BBC has had unprecedented access over the course of a year to observe the Prince at work in the UK and abroad, at home at Clarence House in London, at Highgrove in Gloucestershire and Birkhall in Aberdeenshire.

“This important documentary sheds new light on the Prince of Wales”, says Nick Vaughan-Barratt, its Executive Producer. “It shows the Prince using his substantial influence to further a wide variety of causes – some of them unfashionable, some controversial – and it provides a rare opportunity to hear him speaking directly, not just about what he does but why he is so passionate about the many causes he espouses.”

UPDATE: Missed the programme?
Watch on BBC iPlayer.

More about the programme at the BBC web site

Full list of Prince’s charities and social enterprises