Posts Tagged ‘DWP’

Inequality matters: Labour will shift the balance of power in favour of the consumer, the citizen and the worker

19/12/2014, 04:03:03 PM

by Stephen Timms

Ed Miliband has set out the central challenge his government will need to address: “This country is too unequal.  And we need to change it.”  Our task is to make this change in a radically different landscape then when Labour took office in 1997.

Ed has acknowledged that inequality will have to be tackled in a period when there won’t be much extra money around.  The government’s oft-proclaimed economic plan has fallen disastrously short of its deficit reduction target.  We were promised the deficit would be ended in this Parliament.  In fact, it won’t even be halved.  That means we will be able to shift spending priorities, and to alter regulation, but big new spending programmes – beyond a small number of key priorities with specified funding – will not be on the cards for some years.

With the tools that will be at our disposal, we will need to tackle seriously long term unemployment, especially among the young; to raise real wages; and to tilt the balance of power in favour of the consumer, the citizen and the worker.

Everything points strongly to devolving power.  There is, of course, strong impetus in this direction from the Scottish referendum.  Powerful economic arguments for devolution were set out in Andrew Adonis’s growth review in July.  And the work I have been doing on employment support points to a much more localised approach too.

Andrew Adonis’s review calls for a “bold and simple offer of devolution”, ending the excessive centralisation which has held back economic growth in England.  He argues that: “spending on economic development is trapped in departmental siloes that do not sufficiently reflect economic realities”.

His case is well illustrated by the poor performance of the coalition’s approach to employment support.  Hundreds of millions of pounds have been spent on the government’s Work Programme, and hundreds of millions of pounds have been spent on skills support – for example by increasing the number of apprenticeships.  But there has been a complete disjunction between the policies directing them.  The programmes have worked at cross purposes.

They have been overseen by two huge Whitehall departments with different agendas.  For example, the criteria set out by the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills make it almost impossible for an unemployed person on the DWP’s Work Programme to start an apprenticeship.

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The work programme: improving, but for who?

27/06/2013, 04:28:28 PM

by Bill Davies

The latest figures from the work programme show it is doing, on aggregate, better than it was. Now the programme has been running for 22 months, we are in a better position to consider whether it is achieving its main objective, to reduce unemployment and increase employment amongst all eligible claimant groups.

It is doing better than last time, particularly when you look at newer cohorts to the programme, but little better than the programme it replaced. At this stage of the flexible new deal, 13 week job outcomes as a percentage of eligible starts were 18%, and 26 week outcomes were 12%. The coalition’s work programme, introduced to dismantle the ‘fundamentally flawed’ Flexible New Deal, is at this stage achieving outcomes of 13%. Better than last time, but not brilliant. The statistical release of the department for work & pensions shows that 22 out of the 40 contracts have not met their targets for moving the largest group of job seekers allowance claimants (over 25 year olds) off benefits and into work. The target for this group was 27.5% of starters to move into work, but at this stage, the target has been narrowly missed, at 27.3%.

The most staggering figure is that employment & support allowance, the group for people moving from incapacity benefits gradually back into the labour market had a target of 16.5% of starts to job outcomes, but the actual outcome rate was 5.3%, only a third of the target.

Is the work programme assisting those regions that have the most difficult labour markets? On the basis of current performance, it is still largely reflecting them.

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Government rides roughshod over civil service rulebook

02/03/2011, 10:34:44 AM

by Tom Watson

New answers to FoI requests released to me this week, show that the cabinet office has breached the civil service recruitment principles 30 times to make appointments, using an exemption to the rules aimed at helping the unemployed.

Exception one of the civil service code has been used to appoint people like Katharine Davidson, Michael Lynas, Kris Murrin and Rishi Saha, who formerly held political posts in the Tory and Lib Dem parties.

Rishi Saha is head of the government’s “digital communications”. How can the interests of the civil service be served by allowing a post like this to be filled without a trawl of the very best digital specialists in the country?

More importantly, how could cabinet secretary, Gus O’Donnell, have allowed his appointment to take place? It’s a clear breach, one where the interest of government is not served by making a political appointment to a non-political job.

Civil servants will feel very uncomfortable reading the new figures. The cabinet office refused to give me the names of 30 people on the list but I have a hunch that a number of them are also former staffers from the political parties. (more…)

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