10th March 200910 March 2009
Britain’s employment and training providers say that radical revisions to the Government’s employment and skills programmes are needed to help more people back into work.
The private, public and voluntary sector providers, who deliver the programmes, argue that some of the planned reforms to the flagship New Deal scheme were designed for an entirely different economic climate and that they should be placed on the backburner immediately or subject to a complete overhaul.
The providers’ trade body, the Association of Learning Providers (ALP), has presented an alternative set of proposals to ministers which stress the urgent need for greater integration of publicly-funded employment and training programmes to arm the unemployed with the skills required to secure sustainable employment.
ALP points out that the new Flexible New Deal (FND) was designed to move large numbers of long-term unemployed back into jobs being created by a strongly growing economy. While agreeing that support for the long-term unemployed should not be ‘parked’, the Association believes that priorities should shift to the immediate casualties of the recession.
Unemployed people need intensive retraining as quickly as possible, especially as the economy will see a dramatic reduction in low skilled jobs over the next ten years in line with Lord Leitch’s predictions. ALP is therefore seeking eligibility for retraining support to be available for all unemployed people after six months out of a job or even earlier.
A Community Programme for the 21st century
According to ALP, the depth of the recession requires the resurrection of a revamped eighties-style Community Programme, but linked into the increasingly popular Adult Apprenticeship programme and the growing ‘green industries’.
ALP’s proposals set out how this redesigned and updated programme would provide an alternative skills-based solution to simply paying out an increasing amount of deadweight benefits to an ever more demoralised and growing army of unemployed, while trying to find them increasingly non-existent jobs until the economy has turned around. The programme would give its beneficiaries the skills necessary to take instant advantage of the employment opportunities available when things pick up.
Flexible New Deal needs fundamental redesign
ALP’s reservations about the Flexible New Deal going ahead in its current format echo some of the Commons select committee’s concerns expressed last week about the programme’s funding and design.
Accompanying its alternative proposals to ministers is a major critique of the way that the FND’s prime contracting framework has been shaped in keeping with the Freud recommendations. ALP argues that taxpayers’ money is being put at risk by entrusting huge amounts of provision to very few organisations, some of whom may have no experience of UK welfare to work delivery. It also explains in its submission why existing good quality provision is being endangered by the new arrangements.
The Association warns ministers that they must heed lessons from the debacle of Carter & Carter, the collapsed training company that wooed the Government and the Learning and Skills Council (LSC) with wholly unrealistic offers of unit price reductions, enhanced efficiencies and more effective outcomes. Like the select committee, it believes that the proposed output related funding regime for FND needs completely revising with the onset of the recession.
Graham Hoyle OBE, ALP’s chief executive, comments: “There is a widely held suspicion across the provider network that many of the current bids under consideration are unrealistic, but nevertheless have been produced as a means of ‘staying in contention’ in the hope or expectation of renegotiation after contract approval. This is no way to commission multi-billion pound government services. The new economic situation demands an immediate review of output funding rates.”
ALP’s latest submission to ministers calls for a significant increase in the number of prime contractors to respond to the rise in demand and the pool of core contractors to be firstly drawn from those with a successful track record of delivery of skills and employment programmes for the LSC and Jobcentre Plus.
Above all, it wants the Government’s response to rising unemployment to recognise what the Freud recommendations essentially missed – the need to re-skill unemployed people in the face of a rapid decline of non-skilled jobs.
Graham Hoyle adds: “The jobs-first strategy that has dominated the government approach to welfare-to-work for decades is no longer appropriate and has to go. Ministers recognise this but we have yet to see things change on the ground.”
Dods Parliamentary Communications Ltd