By David Williams
23 October 2009
Conservative proposals to abandon the government’s Flexible New Deal jobs programme and replace it with an untried alternative are irresponsible, Work and Pensions Secretary Yvette Cooper has said.
Cooper told delegates at the Employment Related Services Association conference – which represents employment agencies – in London that ‘the consequences would be to create huge uncertainty and would delay important help for people who need it’.
Under the FND, the Department for Work and Pensions contracts private agencies to find jobs for long-term unemployed people. The scheme launched earlier this month, and a second wave of contracts for 2010 is under negotiation.
But shadow work and pensions secretary Theresa May told the same conference that an incoming Conservative government would scrap phase two of the programme. She later said the Tories would not automatically junk the phase one contracts already in operation, but would reconsider those with built-in review periods.
Cooper said: ‘I don’t think it is responsible to rip up FND contracts now, and to not go ahead with phase two…replacing it with a new framework, which has not been tested, involves very substantial risks with public funds.’
It was important to steadily develop the marketplace for FND providers, she told delegates.
‘If you try and do things faster with no proper testing and no value for money assessments or sensible contracting, what you have is a system that crashes. That’s too much to risk,’ she added.
But Tory shadow minister for work and pensions Lord Freud, whose 2007 review laid the foundations for the FND, told the conference that a Conservative government would not pilot its proposed welfare-to-work reforms.
‘It’s too slow,’ he said. ‘The trouble with pilots is we simply won’t get national coverage when we need it – when we’re coming out of this recession. When the jobs are there we want to start pushing people into that upswing.’
Freud proposed replacing ‘top-down and bureaucratic’ piloting with more local freedom to innovate.
‘If we just say, we’re opening this market, go for it, this is the payment structure, you’re going to do the experimentation, it will be very rapid.
‘The things that work will be adopted very quickly because you’ll be watching all your competitors. When you get it right, people will be jumping on successful formulas.’
Freud also said he hoped to reduce the burden that welfare-to-work programmes placed on employers, describing current arrangements as a ‘paper chase’.
23 October 2009
Conservative proposals to abandon the government’s Flexible New Deal jobs programme and replace it with an untried alternative are irresponsible, Work and Pensions Secretary Yvette Cooper has said.
Cooper told delegates at the Employment Related Services Association conference – which represents employment agencies – in London that ‘the consequences would be to create huge uncertainty and would delay important help for people who need it’.
Under the FND, the Department for Work and Pensions contracts private agencies to find jobs for long-term unemployed people. The scheme launched earlier this month, and a second wave of contracts for 2010 is under negotiation.
But shadow work and pensions secretary Theresa May told the same conference that an incoming Conservative government would scrap phase two of the programme. She later said the Tories would not automatically junk the phase one contracts already in operation, but would reconsider those with built-in review periods.
Cooper said: ‘I don’t think it is responsible to rip up FND contracts now, and to not go ahead with phase two…replacing it with a new framework, which has not been tested, involves very substantial risks with public funds.’
It was important to steadily develop the marketplace for FND providers, she told delegates.
‘If you try and do things faster with no proper testing and no value for money assessments or sensible contracting, what you have is a system that crashes. That’s too much to risk,’ she added.
But Tory shadow minister for work and pensions Lord Freud, whose 2007 review laid the foundations for the FND, told the conference that a Conservative government would not pilot its proposed welfare-to-work reforms.
‘It’s too slow,’ he said. ‘The trouble with pilots is we simply won’t get national coverage when we need it – when we’re coming out of this recession. When the jobs are there we want to start pushing people into that upswing.’
Freud proposed replacing ‘top-down and bureaucratic’ piloting with more local freedom to innovate.
‘If we just say, we’re opening this market, go for it, this is the payment structure, you’re going to do the experimentation, it will be very rapid.
‘The things that work will be adopted very quickly because you’ll be watching all your competitors. When you get it right, people will be jumping on successful formulas.’
Freud also said he hoped to reduce the burden that welfare-to-work programmes placed on employers, describing current arrangements as a ‘paper chase’.
