By Richard Johnstone in Brighton | 23 September 2013
Labour would devolve control over back-to-work schemes to local authorities, shadow work and pensions secretary Liam Byrne has said today.
Byrne said that the current centralised system of support to help people back to work, with payment-by-results contracts being agreed with providers by the Department for Work and Pensions, was ‘fighting unemployment with on hand tied behind our back’.
He told the Labour party’s annual conference in Brighton that the party would deliver ‘a large devolution of power from the Department for Work and Pensions to local councils’.
He added: ‘Let’s build a new partnership between our jobcentres and town halls. Let councils shape the programme to get people back to work.’
He also said the party would work with local authorities to ‘save’ the government’s Universal Credit programme to merge six benefits into one payment to ensure people are always better off in work.
Byrne said the job of the next Labour government would be to ‘maximise the potential of earnings’ for all people in employment. ‘That’s why we need the Universal Credit to work,’ he said.
‘If the government won’t act to save it, we will. The Tories’ system may prove dead on arrival, so we need a better way.’
Byrne announced that Kieran Quinn the leader of Tameside Metropolitan Borough Council, which was the fist area to pilot the Universal Credit, had agreed to help Labour develop its proposals to revamp the scheme. The implementation was criticised by the National Audit Office earlier this month.
Byrne also recommitted Labour to imposing a cap on total social security spending, as proposed by Ed Miliband in June. It is intended the cap would cover the ‘structural’ elements of welfare spending, such as Housing Benefit and pensions payments, which tend not to fall when an economy grows.
Chancellor George Osborne has also set out plans to impose a limit on total spending on most benefits payments from 2015/16 in the Comprehensive Spending Review earlier this year.
