Inclusion has broadly welcomed government’s budget proposals, set out on the same day that the ILO measure of unemployment rose to 2.1 million, to invest £3bn in a new package of support for the unemployed and to create 250,000 employment and training opportunities.
Announcing that government would not repeat the errors of past recessions by doing ‘too little, too late’ and that ‘short term job loss should not be allowed to lead to a lifetime on benefits’, the budget package focuses in particular on the needs of the long-term unemployed and young people, and includes:
- an additional £1.7bn investment to support core Jobcentre Plus provision and the delivery of Flexible New Deal
- guaranteeing everyone aged between 18 and 24 who has been claiming Jobseeker’s Allowance (JSA) for 12 months a job, work placement or work-related skills training for at least six months. If it becomes necessary to do so, the government will work with local authorities and other delivery partners to determine how participation in one of these options could be made mandatory
- investment of £260m of new money for training and subsidies to help young people obtain the skills and experience needed by sectors of the economy with prospects for strong future demand
- funding for Care First, offering 50,000 traineeships for young people in the care sector. Social care providers will receive a subsidy for offering sustained employment and training to young people who have been out of work for 12 months
- funding for local authorities and partners to take forward the creation of 100,000 new jobs in socially useful activity; 10,000 of these will be green jobs
- funding for local authorities to provide a further 50,000 jobs in areas of high unemployment across the country, to support communities most affected by rising unemployment
- extra investment to ensure that every 16 and 17 year old who wanted to stay in education or training could do so – £250m this year and £400m in 2010-11.
The overall size of this package is in line with our recommendations for the Budget as set out in the March edition of Working Brief. In our proposals we called for investment in Jobcentre Plus to be used to deliver enhanced assessments at six months and agree a personalised package of activity, leading to a job and/or a qualification. This package could be linked to an additional payment on top of JSA – ‘more for more’. This may still be possible and we will need to see how the additional £1.7bn for Jobcentre Plus is now put to use. However, we also called for targeted action to be taken in areas of high unemployment to provide young people out of work with a temporary job and/or training, combined with jobsearch support, once they have been unemployed for six months. While the guarantee of a job or training place for all young people unemployed for 12 months is welcome, we believe that there is still a case for earlier support to be provided to those young people with low or no qualifications and living in areas with low vacancies, and are disappointed that the government‘s guarantee will not come into effect until January 2010.
We particularly welcome the announcement that local authorities will be provided with additional funding to create 100,000 new jobs and that there will be additional monies for those areas most affected by rising unemployment, although there will also be a need to ensure that high quality training and jobsearch services, as well as decent wages and conditions, are embedded in the schemes that result.
Nevertheless, this investment is a direct response to recommendations made by Cllr Stephen Houghton’s Tackling Worklessness Review and we look forward to seeing further details of the funding allocation and how this will now be distributed. We now need to see how this funding can further help to integrate local services and funding with mainstream employment and skills provision on the ground.
However, we remain concerned that the impact of this budget needs to be felt across all groups of workless people and not just JSA claimants if we are to support our most deprived communities through the recession. The focus on young people in this budget is understandable, but we also have to make sure that, where there is still flexibility in the use of funding announced in the budget, this is used to support local authorities and providers to meet the needs of the most disadvantaged.
In addition to the package of support for the unemployed the budget includes details of significant investment in capital programmes designed to directly employ around 15,000 people in 2009/10. As ever, linking people in our deprived communities to these and the other opportunities that will be generated locally will be critical.
