Allister Hayman,
Regen.net,
30 September 2008
Labour's welfare-to-work reforms would receive "much needed fine-tuning" under a Tory government, shadow minister for employment James Maddison said this week.
Speaking at the Conservative Party conference in Birmingham, Maddison said that while the Flexible New Deal was a step in the right direction, more needed to be done to ensure the system supported the long-term unemployed back into work.
Commenting on Labour’s policy to pay private and third sector job providers to get the long-term unemployed back into work, Maddison said the system needed some “tweaking”, including more measures and incentives to ensure that jobseekers who needed more support were not “parked” and forgotten about.
He said: “Parking has been one of the big problems over the last ten years. I mean people have just been parked on incapacity benefit with no end. We will consider ways of incentivising providers through graduated payments to ensure that they work to get those hard to reach people into work.”
Speaking at the same fringe event, Ian Mulheirn, chief economist of think-tank the Social Market Foundation, said there was also a real need to ensure that the welfare-to-work system, with the new contracting arrangements for private and voluntary sectors, was better integrated with the Government’s regeneration funding streams, particularly the Working Neighbourhoods Fund.
“What people are telling us is that these approaches are not joined up,” he said. “Organisations have contracts from Jobcentre Plus or the Learning and Skills Council, but they cannot be joined up with the WNF or other regeneration funds to tackle worklessness. There’s a need for a much more finely tuned system with more flexibility.”
