Hyper Active Labour Market Policies - Councils required to tackle worklessness together

A DCLG report urges councils to band together through multi-area agreements or statutory city-regional structures to create work and skills plans tailored to local economies. It claims more needs to be done to encourage councils to use Working Neighbourhoods Fund (WNF) money for innovative programmes to tackle worklessness and that programmes aimed at ethnic minority communities are not receiving adequate support.

Councillor Stephen Houghton chair of the review team said councils should be required as part of their forthcoming economic assessment duty to appraise their local labour markets and the problems of worklessness in their areas.

But the problem may be less planning and resource allocation than linking implementation through outher contacts with the workless through third sector, housing and health organisations.

The DCLG evaluation of the impact of the Neighbourhood Renewal Fund (forerunner of WNF) operated through local authorities concluded that in some areas it had led to �disparate and incoherent interventions�.

Meantime DWP is commissioning large private sector organisations for national and regional employability programmes in which any local provision is at best sub-contracted, and requiring City Strategies to address the worklessness problem through partnership working with local employers.

This lack of joined up policy or delivery at and between national and local levels is worse than disjointed incrementalism as it flies in the face of available evidence and probably some more pressing needs from the deepening recession.

Which only leaves the question as to what Local LSCs, TECs and JCP have been doing or achieving at different stages of the economic cycle over the past twenty years in partnership with the same local councils?

Tackling Worklessness, a review of the contribution of local authorities and partnerships � interim report, DCLG, 2008

Impacts and Outcomes of the Neighbourhood Renewal Fund, DCLG 2008