He wants to know whether the problem lies with the pay and terms, our education system, or differences in work ethic.

I think this is something that as HR professionals we could all give him some views. Personally I'd be saying to him that the problem is so deeply rooted in the history of this country since 1945 that I don't envy the challenge he has set himself.

It seems to me that nobody in power has been able to face up to the fact that the total dismantling of tripartism in the education system from the 1960s was a mistake. Out of this evolved a general understanding that any kind of work with a blue collar connotation is to be despised, and that governments must judge their success by the amount of young people that stay on in education for as long as possible, however divorced most of the programmes of study available are from the needs of British employers and the economy.

Many commentators would add that the fact that people are sometimes better off on benefits than taking lower paid work does not help. But time and time again we read that young people, including graduates, don't have the attributes and attitudes that employers need.

And then again there are all to many young people who have suffered genuine deprivation leading to homelessness, mental health and substance misuse, and need a great deal of highly specialised support to get them ready for employment. The way the current Work Programme funding is structured makes it impossible for them to access this support because it is financially unviable for organisations like mine that have the necessary expertise.

I would be very interested to hear from colleagues who have had success in attracting and keeping young Britons in unglamorous jobs that serve as a stepping stone to better things. Has Boris got any realistic hope of filling those 250,000 apprenticeships? Particularly in respect of people who haven't had the best start in life or education. And what spade work does he need to do before sending out the application packs?

The Union to which all workers subscribed imposed a two-year embargo on any members taking court action against parents who refused to send their children to school. I therefore had the unenviable task of knocking on doors trying to persuade people who hated authorities and schools that it was a jolly good thing for them to take active measures to ensure their offspring got a good education.

They all knew that there wouldn't be any legal comeback on them, so unsurprisingly my efforts met with very little success. At best they made the right noises but let their kids continue working Portobello Market or doing their drug runs for them as usual. At worst I had a saucepan of boiling beetroots flung at me.

I think of this every time I look at progress of the efforts of the McLeod Task Force to get employers on a voluntary basis to actually practice better people management (forget 'signing up' to it, anyone can tick that box) so they get higher employee engagement.

Those refusing parents I tried to engage with 30 years ago have since spawned two generations of workless offspring. In much the same way, until the Government makes it compulsory for businesses, public services and not-for-profits to report on key people management and engagement indicators, they will continue to underperform badly against their potential. And so we will never get out of the downward spiral of recession, debt, public spending cuts and ever-increasing worklessness.

Stop blaming global and pan-European forces. Poor people management is at the root of much of the evil in our economy and prodigious wastage in public services.

The tribunal found the claimant had been subjected to an intimidating environment and treatment which left him close to a mental breakdown. Amongst other things, after he had raised a grievance the employer failed to take it seriously or investigate it sufficiently.

A friend of mine was recently unfairly dismissed from a senior position after months of bullying to drive him out because his face no longer fitted with certain people. The kind of treatment meted out, for example having his rights and dignity repeatedly and systematically trampled on, failure to investigate his grievance, and the impact on his psyche are all remarkably similar to that reported in the case referred to above.

Despite being advised that he would improve his financial prospects in ET greatly if he could find a way of adding either whistleblowing or age discrimination to the claim, he has opted to be honest and claim solely for unfair dismissal. The very most that he can hope to be compensated is the capped amount for unfair dismissal, £68,400. I feel exceptionally confident he will succeed

Few people would disagree that any harassment related to protected characteristics such as race, gender, disability is particularly odious and hurtful. But am I alone in thinking that there is something inherently unjust about a system whereby two people can suffer a similar degree of mental distress as a result of relentlessly intimidating treatment over a similarly extended period but one can be paid fourteen times more compensation?

I work for an organisation that tenders for service contracts from Local Authorities and the negative impact on us of the regulations as they stand has been enormous.

There is not a level playing field for competition for contracts since the most likely winners are always those that are prepared to take a gamble. The lack of clarity in the law means that they have a more than even chance of getting away with consulting to reduce the terms of TUPE staff from the date of transfer, and they enter their bid prices on this basis.

We are unable to commence redundancy consultation before the date of the transfer even though the services have been won on the basis of agreeing in advance with the Authorities that they must be re-shaped and slimmed down. The result is that we carry staff additional to complement for weeks after the transfer so the costs of running the contracts start to exceed the delivery price.

Most of the staff we have transferred in are great, but where there hasn't been a good match the costs and disruption of dealing with the issues and managing exits have been eye-watering.

And the worst thing about it is that TUPE really isn't any good even for the staff it's supposed to protect. They have to live with weeks of uncertainty before having the upheaval of transferring to a new employer, only to find out that they are going into a selection pot for redundancy with people from a range of other organisations that they don't know so they have no idea what they are up against.

The logistics in terms of job-matching and making selections are a nightmare for us and unsettling in the extreme for the staff. Particularly when existing staff who have been doing a great job and are told that as a result of someone transferring across who may have a claim to having done something similar in their old organisation, they have to go in a selection pool and are suddenly at risk of redundancy.

How much better it would be for everyone if staff could be consulted on redundancy and redeployment options before their outwards transfer, and be given the choice of either redeployment with their current employer or accepting a new job on the new terms that go with that in the transferee organisation.

There is little hope that the government, even if it does hear the reality of what is happening on the ground, will be able to do anything about it since a European directive is involved. But what a shame for us all that we are tied by the yoke of legislation that was dreamt up in the late 1970s aimed primarily at factory workers in a still predominantly industrial context. It simply isn't working for the infinitely more complex services-based economy of the 2010s.

I'm not so sure about this, since I fear there may be a causal link between the application of disciplinary and capability procedures and the latest well-publicised concern that stress-related absence is now the leading cause of sickness absence in the UK.

I say this because in my experience of working with voluntary and public sector organisations as an advisor, something like seven out of 10 employees told they will be subject to these procedures become ill with stress and get signed off by their GPs, often for several months.

It's a real worry that procedures designed to protect individuals' rights and interests could in fact be making them ill...

I wonder what HR magazine readers’ best leadership and management books of the year would be? For me it would have to be Scott Keller and Colin Price’s Beyond Performance.

The authors have carried out an extensive empirical research project over the space of a decade with hundreds of companies. Their evidence shows that only a third of organisations that achieve excellence are able to maintain it over decades and that the successful companies are those that focus not solely on performance, but on organisational health.

They identified 37 practices against nine dimensions that separate organisations that both achieve and sustain excellence and those that don’t. And guess what? Around two thirds of those practices relate directly or indirectly to the way people are managed. Canny HR practitioners can extrapolate the grid as a template for a persuasive approach to organisational development within their companies.

Do other HR readers have Top 20 truly useful HR Books of the Year nominations?

Sian Harrington is right to place her bet that reform of regulation of itself won't bring about employment recovery. But I believe it would make a significant contribution in a whole variety of ways. One example is the amount of time and money spent by public authorities on compliance with regulations that add nothing to service and social outcomes: reform would enable those bodies to become more efficient at a time when they are being forced to reduce staff.

My second example concerns the reluctance of many employers to take on as apprentices high risk groups such as young people who have had not previously had the opportunity to learn the work ethic when they have a disproportionate array of rights and protections from Day One.

Those of us advocating reform are doing so because we believe that it will be in everybody's best interests at the end of the day, including employees and those who want to find work, not because we want unfettered power for employers.

To find out more about HR magazine's campaign, click here

One obvious correlation, it seems to me, is that most HR professionals are women and most CEOs are men. There must be a relationship here somewhere to that current high profile debate about why there are not more women on boards.

One thing I've noticed time and time again is the vicious circle that prevents HR professionals being more strategic within their organisations. HR has not traditionally been seen as a strategic function which adds measurable value, so CEOs are reluctant to invest in it properly.

It's too much of an article of faith to spend a decent amount of money on it since they've never seen with their own eyes the return on investment that comes from a properly resourced team, with truly competent individuals, operating at the right levels.

The HR staff they employ are then often operating at too low a level with too few staff in their departments to handle even the basics of the job well.

I have seen many a bright and able HR 'head' or 'manager', reporting to the top tier through a finance director, with a tiny team of juniors to support him or her (most often a her). They desperately want to get out there, understand the business and focus on long-term strategic planning, but are bogged down handling the complex and time-consuming work of dealing with regulation and employee relations.

They are seen as pretty useful and reasonably competent within the business for fire-fighting reactive purposes. But, their potential to do the more strategic work of influencing the business to operate in a way that minimises the potential for such problems to arise in the first place remains unseen. This means the top decision-makers lack the evidence to invest more to have the right people in the right places within the function to make it a leading contributor to the success of the business.

In short, I believe that it is this vicious circle that serves as the main barrier to progression of HR people to the top, rather than anything intrinsic about the HR function or the mindset or capabilities of the people who go into it. Then again, as the article pointed out, there are a number of HRDs who have broken through this vicious cycle to become high impact contributors to successful businesses and public bodies but haven't become CEOs because they don't want to, being more inclined to venture into setting up successful HR businesses of their own.

Helen Giles is HR director at Broadway Housing