§ Mr. BoothTo ask the Secretary of State for Employment whether she has completed her review of her Department's employment and training measures for unemployed people; and if she will make a statement.
§ Mrs. Gillian ShephardI have concluded my review and am today announcing a new framework of employment and training measures to help unemployed people back to work. This will operate from April 1993 onwards.
As a result of these changes, there will be half a million more opportunities on our programmes in 1993–94 than we are providing this year. The extra opportunities will be concentrated on long-term unemployed people and those who face particular difficulties in the labour market, such as people with disabilities. These are the people who are most in need of special assistance to get back to work.
TEC-delivered programmes
Training for Work, a new adult training and work programme, to be run by training and enterprise councils (TECs) in England and Wales and local enterprise companies (LECs) in Scotland, will replace employment training and employment action. TECs and LECs will have important new flexibilities to develop programmes of skills training, temporary work and job preparation to meet the needs of local unemployed people and local circumstances. TECs and LECs will be encouraged to use these flexibilities to make best use of their resources, for example by developing training credit schemes and expanding useful temporary work in our public services. I expect the new programme to provide 320,000 opportunities in 1993–94.
In order to help improve performance, the funding regime will be developed to offer a progressively higher proportion of payment for results, including payments for participants gaining jobs or qualifications. This will strengthen the incentives for TECs to deliver programmes that best help individuals and meet labour market needs.
Today's announcement incorporates most of the recommendations made by the TEC adult training working group, including the merger of employment training and employment action and the development of a new payment system based on starts and outputs.
Employment Service Measures
There will be a further expansion of the successful job club and job interview guarantee programmes. We will also be developing work trials of up to three weeks with employers, which give unemployed people the opportunity to prove themselves in a job, without their benefits being affected. In all, these employment service measures are expected to provide an extra 180,000 opportunities in 1993–94.
A major point of entry into other opportunities will be the new jobplan workshops to be run by the employment service. These will advise and assess the needs of people 902W unemployed for a year or more, principally those who have not taken up other offers of help open to them. The successful experience of existing Restart courses and job review workshops will be drawn on, but the new workshops will offer more intensive support from workshop leaders, including one-to-one advice and guidance, new computer-aided guidance and an enhanced action plan. Those completing workshops will have priority access to other programmes. It is expected that around 300,000 people will pass through the programme in 1993–94.
Employment service advisers will offer places in job plan workshops to all those out of work for a year who have not taken up an offer of help back to work. As is currently the case with Restart courses offered to people unemployed for two years those who do not take up places offered to them may lose their benefit for a period of time. The social security advisory committee will be consulted shortly about the benefit for non-attendance in these circumstances.
Eligibility
All those unemployed for over six months, including lone parents, will be eligible for these programmes, with earlier access available to all of them for people with disabilities, ex-service personnel, ex-detainees, labour market returners, people who need help with literacy, numeracy or basic English and those unemployed as a result of major redundancies.
Unemployed people with disabilities and those leaving the new job plan workshops will have priority access to these programmes. These priorities will replace the current aim and guarantee which were designed to help certain groups of unemployed people in rather different labour market circumstances.
Other measures
All unemployed people will of course remain entitled to the full range of jobcentre services to help them back to work as soon as possible. There will also be an extra 10 thousand places in job review workshops for short-term unemployed people and more career development loans will be made available to enable more unemployed people to invest in their own training.