In the euphoria of the 1997 General Election victory, Lord Michael Bichard, then a rarity as a permanent secretary from a local government background as the former chief executive at Brent LBC and Gloucestershire CC, helped usher in the New Deal for young people – from pilot to successful national rollout in less than a year.
Before the Department for Employment was separated from the Department for Education and merged into the newly-created Department for Work and Pensions (DWP), the Jobcentre Plus network was created as a merger of the Benefits Agency and Employment Service as a ‘one-stop-shop', yoking benefits claims and job-searching in modernised offices. This was in sharp contrast to the previous shuttered counters and protective screens for staff, often cowering from their customers, who sat on screwed-down seats set on filthy linoleum floors.
From a strategic perspective, the Government must balance fiscal reform and long-term geographic inequalities while seeking to generate the economic growth the country needs by investing in local economies and labour markets.
New Labour social security secretary Alistair Darling described a Birmingham benefits agency he visited as like a ‘scene from Dante's Inferno, there were drug addicts dealing, lone mothers failing to cope with screaming kids and staff pulling down the shutters in despair'.
From this recent enough political history we must judge the immediate efforts of Liz Kendall as Sir Keir Starmer's secretary of state for work and pensions to solve the puzzle of worklessness and its connection to productivity as a challengingly ‘wicked problem' in cities and towns across the country when the Government's ability to intervene from the centre, to raise skill levels and improve labour market access, is severely limited.
The recent Spending Review reflected a shift toward a more selective and strategically targeted approach to tightening welfare spending through focused reforms rather than indiscriminate cuts.
For Kendall, the problem is not about consolidating and merging the infrastructure for employment support as much as tackling entrenched regional disparities in economic activity and labour market outcomes – especially in localities such as former industrial towns, seaside resorts and deprived urban areas where these are deepest and most prevalent.
From a strategic perspective, the Government must balance fiscal reform and long-term geographic inequalities while seeking to generate the economic growth the country needs by investing in local economies and labour markets.
The Get Britain Working White Paper, which was published last November outlined what were promised as ‘the biggest reforms to employment support for a generation' and set a long-term target of an 80% national employment rate.
Localis has been investigating in our research programme with AKG entitled ‘Guarantee of Potential', how decentralisation of employment support in line with the grain of the wider agenda for devolution, public service integration and commissioning might be advantageously used for the benefit of a distinctly localist approach to tackling worklessness.
Spoiler alert: the ground is shifting in a positive direction for decentralisation as it has to, if we are to face down staggeringly persistent high levels of worklessness and poverty, with economic inactivity rising to more than nine million working age adults – a situation exacerbated by long-term sickness affecting nearly three million people and an ageing workforce.
‘Connect to Work' is the decentralised delivery system for this – a voluntary-supported programme primarily targeted at assisting around 100,000 disabled people and those with long-term health conditions a year from 2026-27.
This approach will be administered by 43 local authority clusters in England and four in Wales with a lead local authority acting as the accountable body for DWP grants. Other aspects of the Get Britain Working agenda include an overhaul of the existing Jobcentre Plus network into a modernised jobs and career service which gives local authorities opportunities to collaborate more deeply with co-located services and dovetailing local skills initiatives with the new service.
‘Guarantee of Potential' will illustrate how devolution can improve employment services by moving decision-making closer to communities and allowing local leaders to design interventions tailored to the needs of place, and in doing so, break down policy silos, reduce duplication, win local support and leverage local knowledge.
The report will also address the risks and challenges posed by the uneven spread of resources and skills which often favour major city regions over coastal and rural areas.
Our report also looks at employment and health integration and how we embed this nascent co-ordination between and within mayoral authorities and Integrated Care Systems.
‘Guarantee of Potential' also examines how recent procurement reforms can give local contracting authorities greater flexibility and strategic authority to commission services that explicitly target local needs to drive social value and local growth.
Jonathan Werran is chief executive of Localis
Localis will launch Guarantee of Potential during the LGA Conference in Liverpool at the Leonardo Hotel on 1 July at 3pm
