Birmingham spent £46m of Working Neighbourhood Fund money over the last two years trying to help people get into work. Even by the standards of the largest local authority in the country – and in a city with 14% unemployment – that’s a considerable amount of taxpayers’ money. That it only actually helped 170 people get a job shouldn’t surprise any of us, nor the fact that there’s little to show for the £500m that’s spent on the same problem since 1997. Even the Labour peer, Lord Myners, a recent convert to common sense now his party‘s not in government, knows that throwing money at ‘job creation’ doesn’t work:

“The government can’t create jobs” he said last month. “The government can create the environment which is conducive to the creation of jobs but it cannot create jobs and we mislead ourselves if we believe it can.”

The council’s targets for this largest tranche of money – getting 4,000 people into work, and advising a further 15,000 – were clearly hugely over optimistic. That’s not to say the money has necessarily been wasted, but it’s clearly symptomatic of much wider problems that the fund has been used instead to either plug the gaps of a failing educational system that sees so many young people leave work without the basic skills needed for a job, or has been spent on smoothing over the deficiencies of a benefit system that makes it financially prohibitive for so many people to come off benefits and into work.

And the bigger issue here is Lord Myner’s second point – that what governments can do is create the environment that is conducive to the creation of jobs. And businesses – whether already settled in the city or looking to locate from elsewhere – tend to be in broad agreement on what constitutes that type of ’conducive’ environment. It’s one with a good transport infrastructure, low crime rate, cultural and entertainment amenities on tap as well as access to the basics such as affordable housing and quality education. This is what councils need to remain focused on, not the impossible task of creating private sector jobs in the midst of a severe recession.