The new government has made a strong commitment to devolution. Its strongest policy position to date is set out in Rewiring the State. It includes a commitment to “devolve employment support to mayors to ensure provision reflects local need”. This is a continuation of a process which has been happening in various ways since Greater Manchester (GM)’s first devolved employment programme back in 2014. SQW has worked with GMCA since then on the first Working Well programme and others subsequently - as well evaluating devolved programme in other areas such as Greater London, South Yorkshire, and helping further areas develop their Get Britain Working plans. This experience has highlighted a range of opportunities and challenges if the ambition of Government is to be met.
The stated intention is to enable areas to “procure and provide tailored and specialised support for the long-term unemployed”. The terminology used is interesting. Firstly, it focuses on the long term unemployed, but we know employment support is much more broadly cast including the focus on the inactivity, and work and health.
Regardless of specific target group, the devolution of employment programmes we have witnessed, and SQW has evaluated, over the past 10 years would follow this model. Most areas have had scope to procure and oversee delivery of a programme. However, what is delivered has often been quite tightly specified by central government. Put another way, areas have been acting as local commissioners of nationally designed programmes, rather than having full autonomy to design their own interventions. See for example Greater London’s Work and Health Programme, Individual Placement and Support in Primary Care, and most recently Connect to Work (where we understand only GM is developing different provision, even in the context of flexibility offered through the Integrated Settlement). In parallel, other programmes have been introduced by the Department for Work and Pensions (such as Restart and the Jobs Guarantee) and other departments. These other programmes tend to sit alongside but sperate from locally commissioned programmes.
Two devolution scenarios for local employment programmes
This context is helpful in thinking through the opportunities and challenges that could arise in the future. To simplify the discussion we consider out two scenarios. Firstly, a maximalist devolution scenario could see areas being able to design and implement their own programmes, in effect choosing the approach, groups to targets, outcomes to track, etc. This may be too large a step during this initial transition period , and questions might be asked about the capacity across areas to: know what the evidence base would suggest would work; or develop their own approaches to deliver at scale having not done so previously. It could lead to new and innovative practice, but care would need to be taken to embed evaluation to ensure that the impacts and lessons were understood fully.
The second, less radical scenario involves more incremental change (at least initially). All funds for employment programmes are routed through mayors, with each programme still identified as a discrete entity and with a design outline/ expectation provided by Government. This could be similar to the approach with Connect to Work and in Integrated Settlements, but made available to all areas and with greater flexibility about the scale of each/any.
Even this more limited approach would provide an important set of opportunities around co-ordination and join-up at a local level. The key opportunities include:
- The opportunity to weight delivery to particular local priorities, for example to target residents close to regeneration projects or skills pathways linked to local sector strengths. More broadly, this positions employment support as part of the wider local growth landscape alongside business development, premises, transport and other factors – recognising the inter-dependence between these issues.
- Being more strategic in the ‘fit’ of individual programmes and deploying them more effectively as a result. This would include defining the specific roles and added value of different interventions, the routes through which people enter them and progression opportunities. In doing so, an area would move away from the current position which can see similar programmes in effect in competition with each other as they are run by different organisations looking for similar people, but with slightly different yet overlapping entry criteria or outcome expectations. This leads to inefficiencies in delivery and risk residents missing out on support that is aimed at them. Developing clear pathways would enable better targeting and joining up of resources.
These types of benefit are a key rationale for devolution, and the employment programmes provide an opportunity to take this forward. Doing so would align to the aspirations of partners we have worked with in developing Get Britain Working plans as to how to make the system work better in local areas. These co-ordination benefits should be attainable if the right actions are taken by local partners and systems put in place to ensure they deliver as expected.
What would success look like?
That leads to two sets of questions for local partners:
- What should those local skills systems look like? This should involve building on the work started in developing their Get Britain Working Plans
- Are the systems working as we want, and how will we know if they are?
Monitoring and assessing system effectiveness is not straightforward. As a first step, we would expect areas to think about how people are to be reached and flow through the system, what data needs collected to evidence this, and how that data will be reviewed. Doing so will inform a view on how far any new approaches are meeting expectations and so whether the anticipated benefits of devolution are being realised.