LGA - Rethink job centres to help more unemployed people

23 Jan 2017 03:55 PM

With half of unemployed people receiving no support to help them back into work and the other half staying on benefits for longer, now is the time to devolve funding to councils and not Jobcentre Plus (JCP), town hall leaders said last week.

The number of unemployed people not claiming benefit was 797,214 in October 2016 out of a total of 1,603, 905 (49.7 per cent), according to analysis by the Learning and Work Institute of figures from the Office for National Statistics.

While overall figures do show that unemployment has fallen to its lowest total for more than a decade, half of all unemployed people, many with complex needs, receive no benefits or government support, and this demonstrates that the national agency in charge of getting people into work, JCP, is simply not doing enough to engage people. Ensuring all unemployed people are engaged and receive the right support at the right time is critical to create an inclusive economy, in which people can contribute to, and benefit from growth.

To make things worse, the jobless that are receiving employment support through JCP are staying on benefits longer. While the claimant count for December 2016 shows a slight improvement on previous months, it is still 61,614 more since February 2016, while unemployment has remained more or less constant. This is an indication that job centres are failing to find them employment. 

JCPs' key task is now to find people work as the Government's Universal Credit programme encourages claimants to manage their benefits online.

These figures are the latest evidence proving that job centres, run by the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP), are failing to identify and attract half of those unemployed to support them into work, and even when they do, are simply unable to find jobs for them. This is despite powers and funding firmly in the hands of national government and its agencies, such as the DWP and JCP.

In stark contrast, locally run schemes have been successful at identifying, reaching and supporting the jobless. With reduced funding, including DWP's recent decision to exert greater central control on all remaining European Social Fund monies, which local areas were able to use to train people for jobs, local schemes may no longer be able to provide the safety net for failed national interventions which they currently do. 

The Local Government Association (LGA), which represents more than 370 councils in England and Wales, is calling for greater devolution of employment and skills funding to councils and a radical rethink of the way in which JCP works. This will enable integration of services, so councils, working in partnership with others, can develop a single, place-based strategy based on the needs of people rather than separate institutions.

Cllr Mark Hawthorne, Chairman of the LGA's People and Places Board, said:

"The longer a person is out of work, the more scarring the effects of that unemployment will be on them and the harder it becomes to support them into sustained work.

"Job centres need to engage with more unemployed people for a start and then help more claimants move into sustainable employment. This is crucial to boosting local growth. Councils know best how to do this. We know our local economies, we know our local employers and we know our residents and we can bring local services together in a way central government will never be able to.

"It is also difficult currently for a national agency to understand the jobs available in the local economy in the immediate and medium term and the courses available locally to help claimants train for these jobs.

"These barriers could be overcome if job centres did more to engage all employers through local enterprise partnerships and local chambers of commerce. Councils are well placed to help broker and create these partnerships and to produce quality local labour market intelligence to inform this."

Notes to editors

1.  Latest ONS figures

2.  LWI analysis