LGA urges devolved approach to welfare

21 Jun 07
Town hall leaders have urged ministers to reject a key proposal from David Freud's welfare review, claiming that regional 'mega-contractors' could fail to combat deep-rooted local unemployment problems.

22 June 2007

Town hall leaders have urged ministers to reject a key proposal from David Freud's welfare review, claiming that regional 'mega-contractors' could fail to combat deep-rooted local unemployment problems.

The Local Government Association published its wish-list for the provision of welfare and employment services on June 19. Welfare reform: the case for devolution, dismisses Freud's call for 11 prime contractors – covering Scotland, Wales and the nine English regions – to co-ordinate and commission services for the 'hardest to reach' unemployed people.

Instead, the LGA calls for the devolution of decision-making and funding to sub-regional partnerships of councils, job centres, the private sector, charities and employers.

The LGA claims such partnerships would be better placed to help ministers meet their target to get 1 million people off benefits and into work – and achieve an 80% employment rate nationally.

Work and Pensions Secretary John Hutton, backed by Prime Minister Tony Blair, wants to devolve responsibility for long-term unemployed people away from the government's Jobcentre Plus agency.

Freud reported back to Hutton with proposals for a multibillion-pound private and voluntary sector market in February. But experts are split over whether the core contractors should operate at regional or sub-regional level.

'We are calling on the government to reject David Freud's proposal to base the delivery of welfare to work programmes on 11 mega-contractors at the regional level with private sector providers,' the LGA report states.

Instead, the LGA has called for a massive expansion of the Department for Work and Pensions' Cities Strategy programme: 15 pilot projects that have devolved decision-making to sub-regional level. Town halls want to use Local Area Agreements to stipulate responsibilities for services because, the LGA claims, they would provide sufficient flexibility to deal with inter-authority variations in employment rates.

Cities such as Manchester and London possess pockets of both high and low employment, while even prosperous counties have towns where fewer than half of working-age residents are employed.

LGA chair Sandy Bruce-Lockhart said: 'In places like these, generations of top-down national initiatives pass by on the main road while in the

side-streets fathers hand worklessness on to their sons. The time for localisation has definitively come.'

Hutton this week extended his experiment with sub-regional programmes by making an additional £33m available from the government's Deprived Areas Fund to support the Cities Strategy pilots next year. The total is now £65m over two years.

Hutton said: 'While in health and education we have made rapid progress towards a more devolved model, in welfare reform we have more to do.

'We need to encourage and reward investment and improved performance; and should draw on… the expertise of local organisations.'

PFjun2007

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