A Fabian Employment Policy Seminar

Monday 27^th September 2010, Manchester

The Fabian Society was pleased to host a policy roundtable event in conjunction with Avanta. The seminar aimed to examine the Work Programme - the Coalition Government’s new proposal for getting the long-term unemployed into work.

The panel featured Anne Begg, MP for Aberdeen South, chair of the Work and Pensions Select Committee, Gavin Poole, Executive Director of the Centre for Social Justice, and Janette Faherty, Chief Executive of Avanta, a leading provider of training for employment. Tom Hampson, Editorial Director of the Fabian Society, chaired the meeting.

There was widespread concern about the lack of specific detail provided by the Coalition Government on its Work Programme, which replaces the previous Government’s Flexible New Deal. The Government called for submissions by contractors, but the contractors had no idea what sort of volumes they would be dealing with, and what sort of payment mechanisms and prices would be used. More than one contributor to the roundtable claimed that they did not know quite what the difference was between the new Work Programme and Labour’s Flexible New Deal.

The panel also expressed their concern to the reform plans, which tend to assume that the previous welfare-to-work schemes were an unmitigated disaster when in fact, incapacity benefit doubled from 1986 to 1996, and only started to turn the corner after Labour came to power. Given this, it was suggested that the new Government had rushed into the Work Programme in order to find savings on the welfare bill, when they could have stayed with the Flexible New Deal.

The role of small contractors and the voluntary sector was discussed. Some participants were concerned that the level of risk involved in taking on Work Programme contracts would scare off small contractors. And there was some disagreement over the extent to which the voluntary sector should be involved: one participant warned that voluntary organisations often fail to demonstrate clear intentions when becoming involved in welfare-to-work schemes; others insisted that the involvement of voluntary organisations was crucial because they are often the groups that have the best local knowledge.

Much emphasis was placed on the importance of getting benefit assessments right. One contributor suggested that the focus of assessments should be on what the claimant can do, rather than on what they cannot. Another warned that the manner in which assessments for incapacity benefit focus on a physical test fails to pick up on the psychological barriers to getting into work. Others agreed that it is important to look at the whole picture of unemployment, which means taking into account psychological elements and adopting a holistic approach to getting people into work. However, it was generally acknowledged that such fine-grained, attentive work is extremely difficult in the current sparse economic climate. The lack of money available represents a major challenge to all efforts to get people into work and off benefits, and given the Work Programme’s elemental focus on saving money, this represents a considerable dilemma.

It was noted that there were underlying problems which the Work Programme will struggle to address: in particular (and in this respect the Work Programme is no different from its predecessors) it fails to acknowledge the enormous gap between supply of jobs and the number of people out of work. And its emphasis on contractors achieving a single result – a job – makes it unresponsive to the particular needs of unemployed individuals. For instance, there does not appear to be much provision for helping people who want to become self-employed, and the roundtable agreed that this, given the shortage of jobs available in the first place and the benefits of entrepreneurship, is a major oversight.

The roundtable concluded with the speaking panel giving their “miligrams” – their advice to the new leader of the Labour Party. On the Work Programme, it was suggested that the best thing Ed Miliband MP can do, politically, is stay out of the way and let it fail of its own accord.

This event was kindly supported by Avanta