Member News
By Martin Kornacki - 30th October 2009
The shadow work and pensions secretary has outlined further details of the funding for Conservative welfare reform.
In a speech at the 2009 Dods Westminster Briefing Welfare and Skills Summit this week, Theresa May said the Conservatives planned a "common sense" approach to the benefits budget if they won power.
"Money saved from the benefits budget by getting people in to work would be used to pay for programmes to get more people in to work," she said.
The funding scheme, backed by shadow chancellor George Osborne, is described by the Tories as the "DEL-AME switch".
At present Treasury rules mean that money spent in the budget dealing with benefit payments, the Annually Managed Expenditure (AME) can not be used to pay for programmes for getting people into work, the Departmental Expenditure Limits (DEL).
The budget plans are one of several key differences between the government's current approach to welfare and the Conservative's Work Programme, according to May.
Speaking to a packed room at Central Hall in Westminster she went on to defend her party's plans for technical schools, which have been described by the NASUWT teachers' union as dividing pupils with a "sheep and goat mentality".
"As part of the skills agenda there is a value in recognising a young person's particular attributes, interests and abilities may be suited to going down a more technical, vocational route and giving them that education through technical schools," she insisted.
"We think that is important in building up the definition of vocational training and building up the skills training for the future, but of course the main point of all this is that people find themselves in work."
She said using private and voluntary sector providers and rewarding them based on outcomes would be the key to successfully implementing the party's plans.
As an example she described her party's plans to introduce a mentoring scheme for entrepreneurs that would reward providers based on how successful the small company being mentored became.
"It is even more important than previously to continue with a welfare reform programme during a recession than it was previously," she added.
And she stressed that the ability of people to gain skills that would get them in to work was as important as ensuring the unemployed retained their skills before returning to the workplace.
To safeguard this May proposes unemployed people should undertake volunteering work to keep in touch with the workplace.
"That can be to learn new skills," she said.
"But crucially it is about keeping routine and keeping that link with routine work."
Work was not just about taking people out of poverty, the shadow work and pensions secretary added, it also had social and health value.
"There are enormous benefits to society as a whole, as well as benefits to the economy if people are in work," she said.
"We are absolutely clear that we need to be working with people who have been long-term unemployed to ensure that when we come out of the recession we are not just seeing people who have recently been out of the workplace getting back in to jobs and a large number of people still unemployed," she concluded.
The Employment and Skills Summit was chaired by University of York welfare and employment research director, Roy Sainsbury, and was sponsored by the Careers Development Group, the European Social Fund and Reed in Partnership.
Speakers at the event included Professor Stephen MacNair, the associate director of the National Institute of Adult Continuing Education, Michael Davis, director of strategy at the UK Commission for Employment and Skills and Jobcentre Plus director Matthew Nicholas.
Dods Parliamentary Communications Ltd