Philip Parkin

Unemployment in Birmingham was a huge problem even before this recession, with levels at 20% in some wards in the city. With the economic downturn particularly affecting the manufacturing industry, and unemployment now considerably worse, getting people back into work has become the city’s biggest priority.

A £500m fund set up for the City Region to tackle this problem, and a new plan – the Multi Area Agreement for Employment and Skills (MAA)- gives us the opportunity to make a real difference to residents’ lives. Unfortunately, however, and even though Birmingham makes up 40% of the City Region in terms of population, there’s not a single elected member for the city sitting on the Board set up to administer the MAA. Instead, the Employment and Skills Strategic Management Board (ESSMB) is made up of chairs of the regional Employment and Skills Boards, directors of Job Centre Plus and the Learning and Skills Council, and the chief executive of Solihull Council. The only councillors on the board are the leaders of Solihull and Dudley Council. There are no elected members representing the interests of Birmingham residents, despite our particularly acute problem with unemployment.

We desperately need a fresh approach, particularly given the lack of progress made in the past. The reason this issue is in the news today is because the Council’s Regeneration Scrutiny Committee ‘called in’ the original Cabinet decision, made in June. The Birmingham Post’s call for a City Region version of this body, to scrutinise the Employment Management Board which, afterall, meets behind closed doors, is an excellent idea. And proper accountability at the regional level should also reduce the risk of further ‘call-ins’ when the money is eventually spent on the ground.

Decisions made in local government often come across as being complicated because they are complicated, and the use of technical language is the only way to adequately explain what on earth they’re about. And no amount of re-wording or attempts to simplify is ever going to change that. Often, though, what’s discussed seems complicated because bureaucrats and politicians have temporarily lost the ability to communicate effectively and have submitted to pressure to use jargon. And I’m often guilty of this, too. However, given the importance of some of the stuff that gets discussed in local government – and, also, bearing in mind that the overuse of jargon has been identified as one of the reasons why people are turned off politics – this ’overcomplication’ is not only frustrating, it also isn’t good for democracy.

Today’s Birmingham Cabinet Meeting, for example, had over 20 items on the agenda, most of their titles and reports written in the usual impenetrable council style. So the meeting began with an item titled the ‘Reconsideration of Decision Called-In – Multi Area Agreement for Employment and Skills’. And the agenda included the snappily titled item: ’Winning Resources: Local Area Agreement Working Neighbourhoods Fund Strategic Interventions’. Yet both these items – if you can get past the titles - were, and are, extremely important – dealing with the spending of huge amounts of money on trying to tackle perhaps the biggest problem this city faces at the moment – long term, mass unemployment. We should all, as far as we can, be trying to get away from this sort of convoluted language.

Today’s Cabinet Meeting was actually one of the most important for a long time, with decisions being made on the:

‘Highways Maintenance and Management Private Finance Initiative’ – the awarding of a £2.2bn, 25 year, highways’ maintenance contract (one of the biggest PFI contracts in the country).

‘Approval of Academies Process’ – significant progress on the setting up of 3 (controversial) new Academy schools.

‘BMG Birmingham History Galleries Project – Full Business Case’ – the awarding of a £2.9m contract to repair the roof works at the Council House Extension and the submission of a £4.8m bid to the Heritage Lottery Fund for the setting up of a History of Birmingham Gallery at the Museum and Art Gallery. It was also agreed to spend £874,000  to cover development work on the project.

Be Active – £9.3m to be spent on an 18 month project to increase participation in sport. All residents may now swim/use the gym at council run leisure centres completely free of charge.

There was much more discussed at Cabinet today, all of it important to residents in Birmingham and not much of it decipherable by those outside of local government. And that’s why we need to ensure our established local media survives this deep recession. After all, somebody needs to help explain what all this stuff means.

Recent news from Birmingham’s Citizens’ Advice Bureau makes it clear that the recession is hitting harder in this city than elsewhere in the country. Locally the organisation has seen a:

• 77% increase in debt related issues (c/w 32% growth nationally across the CAB network)
• 60% increase in benefits issues (nationally 29%)
• 14% increase in employment advice (nationally 9%)
• 93% increase in Jobseekers Allowance Issues (nationally 61%)

The Birmingham CAB has also seen a 34% increase in mortgage arrears issues and a 184% increase in debt collection problems. The number of people seeking bankruptcy advice has gone up by 122%.

There are 426 CABs across the country, predominately staffed by volunteers and they’re independent charities, dependent on a variety of (often short term) funding streams. And it seems that the absence of more stable funding makes it extremely hard for Birmingham CAB to make long term plans. Even in the ‘good times’ the organisation was under pressure – over 58,000 people sought (free) advice from the CAB  in 2007/08 and it dealt with debt issues totalling £60m.

These latest figures don’t just underline how severely the recession is impacting on Birmingham – they also remind us as to the incredible job done by CABs across the country as well as of the huge importance of the volunteer workforce.

Interesting article in the Birmingham Post today about how the public sector led approach to tackling unemployment doesn’t actually appear to be making any difference. Even at the height of the ‘boom years’ unemployment in certain wards in the city was at 20%. ( And the figure was much higher if you included people on disability/single parent benefit).  With the unemployment claimant rate  in Aston currently running at 28.2% (and with the wider ’worklessness’ figure across the city at 37%) it’s obvious that we need a radical change in how we address this issue. The current approach just isn’t working.

July Unemployment Briefing

As part of the city council’s scrutiny process, whereby decisions made by the executive and outside bodies are reviewed by backbench councillors, I’ve been working with colleagues investigating the ‘effectiveness of employment strategies’. The city, like the rest of the country, oversees the spending of hundreds of millions of pounds every year to try and get people (back) into work. The review started about 18 months ago, and even then, at the height of the boom years, the unemployment rate in certain inner city wards was 20% and the ‘worklessness’ rate  was 30%. (‘Worklessness’, incidentally, is a word that has been around since the 1880s but is being increasingly used by bureaucrats to mean ‘economically inactive’, so it includes anyone who isn’t working, whether they are in receipt of Job Seekers Allowance or not. I was determined never to utter the word but gave up after it started cropping up everywhere).

The report came to full council this week, and it would have been obvious to anyone with the patience to wade through it that there are some serious problems in the way that unemployment is currently being addressed. Firstly, there is far too much complexity and bureaucracy involved. The report pointedly referred to the ‘complex web of interlinked programmes and funding streams’ around the issue. That’s being far too kind. Nationally there are no less than 4 different government departments involved in tackling unemployment. Below them there’s Job Centre Plus, the Learning and Skills Council, AWM (our redevelopment agency), and the local authorities, and beneath them sit the City Region (the ‘greater Birmingham councils’ group) and local strategic partnerships. Coordination between these partners is often poor, focus constantly shifts so that we now talk about priority ‘super output areas’ rather than priority wards, and quangos change, with the LSC, for example, soon to be abolished and replaced by two new organisations. What doesn’t change however is the fact that there is a multitude of different agencies involved in tackling this issue, and all of them are helping to spend what amounts to hundreds of millions of pounds. And, if we take ‘closing the gap’ – between those wards with the highest unemployment and the city average – as being the measure of success, then it looks as though none of this effort and money is actually making any difference. Unemployment may have come down in the priority areas, but, when the report was started, it was coming down across the whole of the city.

This isn’t to say that employment strategies aren’t getting some people into work, however. Many of the agencies we spoke to as part of the review claimed to have helped people into work. However, as no tracking of these individuals has taken place, we can’t be sure whether people finding work are being counted more than once – are lots of agencies claiming success with the same people, for example. Also, because of this lack of tracking we have no idea whether people finding work actually keep their jobs and are still there 3, 6 or 12 months later. And we don’t even know if those helped into work were the long term unemployed or the recently unemployed who may well have found a job fairly quickly anyway. This lack of tracking, which is put down in the case of Job Centre Plus, for example, to concerns over data protection, means that we have no effective way of knowing whether the various unemployment strategies are working.

Finally, initiatives to tackle unemployment have traditionally been far too centralised. This results in uniform, nationally focused programmes and also, as the Local Government Association suggests, a ‘democratic deficit’ in relation to overseeing public expenditure. There should be proper consultation, then, with councillors, at constituency level, on the detail of local plans. And unless schemes can demonstrate their effectiveness then we should stop throwing public money at them.