12 January 2010

Rt Hon Jim Knight MP

"We can work it out" report launch

Tackling Worklessness in Recession event

House of Commons

Tuesday 12 January 2010

[Check against delivery]

I think we are all agreed on the need to deliver services differently and I think we share the view that part of that will involve central government letting go, pushing power out from the middle and giving people some say in the services we provide.

The challenge for all of us here today is to think about that next step, this is not just about local delivery of services; it’s about personalised delivery of services.

This is not about big or small government – it’s about a totally new form of government that sits alongside people enabling them to get on but being there to help out when they need it.

And it’s not about theories of public sector delivery – it’s about people whose lives our decisions affect day in and day out.

I believe that people are best served when they are treated as people, when they are recognised as individuals who are in charge of their own destinies, who are able to make their own choices and manage their own support.

Over the last decade Government has been working to make the services we all use more flexible, more responsive and increasingly able to look at a person as a whole – not as part of a process or a number.

We have pushed power out from the centre giving hospitals and schools control over local budgets. We have introduced choice – people don’t just get what they are given from public services any more, in many areas they actively choose what’s best for them.

The vision has always been efficient, responsive public services built around the individual, with people supported to achieve their ambitions not told what their ambitions should be.

So for me delegation to local authorities is secondary to delegation to individuals.

So, we can only think about the role of local government in tackling worklessness in the context of the people out of work – if you start at the individual then everything else will fall into place.

One of the challenges of the recession was that the range of people out of work just exploded. We very quickly moved from a situation of almost full employment and a world where the vast majority of unemployed people had very complex needs that had to be addressed before they could get work ready and into one in which highly skilled people found themselves without a job.

The global nature of the recession meant that every aspect of the economy was affected. Jobcentre Plus saw the number of customers applying for unemployment benefits double in 12 months. New customers had a range of skills; years of experience and each and every one of them expected and needed something different from our service. It has been a steep learning curve but one I think the service has coped with phenomenonally well.

We have some great people working in Jobcentres, people who understand their local labour market, who want to help customers achieve their potential to not just find work but also move on in the workplace.

But more importantly people who see their customers face to face, often building a relationship with them and are able to get to know them a bit, as people.

I want to empower Jobcentre Plus to use that knowledge to provide a more locally tailored service. So, as I announced in the White Paper just before the Christmas break we will give Jobcentre Plus managers more control over the money we spend in their area. From April we will test in four Jobcentre Plus districts the same sort of freedoms we give private providers and we will measure them against the same standards of success.

This is still devolution to local level and will offer our managers the freedom to do more with local councils if that is what delivers the sustained employment outcomes we want.

Technology opens up a myriad of further routes for government to deliver tailored services. It has the potential to make interactions between the citizen and the state much more direct, giving the individual the power to access the services they want, at the time they want them – everything from paying bills online to accessing distance learning. The technology is there we just need to use it better. Work around the Smarter Government White Paper will explore some of these ideas further.

That is not to say that local government does not already have a significant role to play in delivering personalised public services.

Local partners have played a key role in helping people through the recession, not just through the quality employment schemes many local authorities run but also the delivery of programmes like the Future Jobs Fund.

In areas of high unemployment and low skills I know local authorities are running some really innovative projects using the flexible funding from the Working Neighbourhoods’ Fund.

We value that support and want to continue to explore ways of working better together.

The City Strategy Pathfinder areas are in many ways ahead of the game. From a DWP perspective we have begun to involve partners in many of the decisions we take about how to spend money in their region. In Manchester, Nottingham and Liverpool the City Strategy partnerships have added local funding to DWP money to enhance the Jobcentre Plus Support Contracts.

We are also working hard to make that wonderful couple Ame-Del switch. This is something David and I do agree on, it’s an exciting prospect for the DWP, which by far has the largest AME spend of any Government department – to be able to reinvest some of the savings from their success would have radical implications. Five pathfinder areas will test this Invest to Save model with the first customers next year. The issues we are working through at the moment are the same ones I began my speech with – how do we make this great idea fit locally, how do we tailor the pathfinders so they best serve the people in Manchester, or Glasgow, or Birmingham – that’s what we have to keep coming back to again and again.

The Flexible New Deal offers further opportunities to get involved in local provision by encouraging private providers to work in partnership at local level.

The mantra of flexible, personalised support must echo through the corridors of Whitehall, around every policy team and in every Ministerial office.

If you take a step back and think about the “service user” as a human being then it becomes easier to see the other services they might use, how those services interact, and sometimes overlap.

This makes it easier to see where savings can be made, not just in terms of delivery but in terms of the public purse. For example, we know work is the best route out of poverty and we are well versed in the impact poverty can have on things like health and education but that is very difficult to quantify in any meaningful way. We know the savings are not just in terms of benefit spend and are looking at how to measure those knock on effects.

On a broader level Total Place is taking forward some revolutionary work in mapping provision identifying savings by bringing service providers together to focus on key themes. This systematic approach in places like Kent and in my own South Dorset constituency has clearly demonstrated areas where real improvements can be made.

As we move out of recession and into recovery what people need is not an age of austerity but an age of smarter government, more responsive public services and a government ready to step in when they need it and step back when they don’t.

The challenge for local government is to demonstrate how the local partnerships you have created can meet our desire to deliver better public services for all.