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Appendix 1

BUSINESS PLAN

EAST & SOUTH EAST LONDON CITY STRATEGY PATHFINDER (CSP)

Greenwich, Hackney, Newham, Tower Hamlets & Waltham Forest

FINAL 1.0 23/3/07

East & South East London City Strategy Pathfinder - Business Plan

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What is the City Strategy? “A one size fits all, top down solution to policy making and delivery is increasingly unsuited to the challenges we face. The City Strategy is about pooling resources and creating new flexibilities for local partners to work together within a community, to improve economic regeneration through skills, employment and health - a consortium of local partners, using new seed-corn funding and new flexibilities to show how they would deliver real improvements in the proportion of local people in work in their local areas. We have high ambitions for this initiative; we want to push the boundaries of flexibility and devolution and to do so in a way that best meets the needs of individual towns and cities” John Hutton City Strategy Conference, 9 May 2006

Consortium Members The East and South East London City Strategy Pathfinder Consortium brings together key players responsible for the design, development and delivery of services across the Boroughs of Greenwich, Hackney, Newham, Tower Hamlets and Waltham Forest, as follows: the 5 Local Authorities Jobcentre Plus The Learning and Skills Council GLA LDA East London Business Alliance LOCOG ODA Southern and Eastern Region TUC

In addition, during the implementation stages, it is envisaged that respresentatives from the voluntary, health and housing sectors will be engaged, as well as employers from the private and public sector.


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EXECUTIVE SUMMARY................................................................................. 5

1 VISION AND STRATEGY.................................................................. 8

1.1 Vision ................................................................................................. 8

1.2 Strategy.............................................................................................. 8

1.3 Enabling Measures .......................................................................... 10

1.4 Strategic Objectives ......................................................................... 11

1.5 What does success look like? .......................................................... 12

2 LOCAL CONTEXT ........................................................................... 14

2.1 The CSP Area.................................................................................. 14

2.2 Worklessness in East London.......................................................... 14

2.3 Reasons for being workless ............................................................. 16

2.4 Skills and Qualifications ................................................................... 16

2.5 Benefit Claimants and the economically inactive ............................. 18

2.6 Local Analysis – Child Poverty in London ........................................ 19

2.7 Ethnic Minority Employment............................................................. 21

2.8 Supply Side Conclusions ................................................................. 22

2.9 The Demand Side - A Context of Economic Growth ........................ 22

2.10 Mapping Current Provision............................................................... 27

3. PROGRAMME DESIGN .................................................................. 35

3.1 Approach and Programme Design................................................... 35

3.2 Key Programme Elements ............................................................... 38

3.2.1 Workstreams.................................................................................... 38

3.3 Voluntary and Community Sector Engagement ............................... 46

3.4 Targets............................................................................................. 47

3.5 Cross Cutting Themes ..................................................................... 49

4 GOVERNANCE AND MANAGEMENT ............................................ 51

4.1 Governance - Overview ................................................................... 51

4.2 Membership of the Board................................................................. 52

4.3 Membership of the Senior Officer Group.......................................... 52

4.4 Programme Office Team.................................................................. 53

4.5 Accountable Body ............................................................................ 53

4.6 Roles and Responsibilities ............................................................... 55

4.7 Performance and Financial Management ........................................ 55

4.8 Administrative Budget ...................................................................... 56

4.9 Other funding ................................................................................... 56

4.10 Risk Management ............................................................................ 57

4.11 Implementation Timeline................................................................. 57

5 CONSULTATION, COMMUNICATIONS AND LEARNING.............. 59

5.1 Consultation ..................................................................................... 59

5.2 Communications .............................................................................. 59

5.3 Learning and Sharing Best Practice................................................. 61

5.4 Review and Evaluation..................................................................... 62

6 NEXT STEPS................................................................................... 64

Glossary ........................................................................................................ 65

Appendix 1 – Top third of East London workless wards................................ 67

Appendix 2 - Performance Management Framework .................................... 68

Appendix 3 – Risk Management.................................................................... 69

Appendix 4 – Case studies and proposed interventions................................ 71


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Appendix 5 - Employment related funding and outputs for LSC and JCP in the 5 East London boroughs ............................................................................... 77

Appendix 6 – Staff role profiles...................................................................... 79

Appendix 7 – Focus Groups.......................................................................... 88

Appendix 8 – Single Points of Access ........................................................... 96

Appendix 9 – Interventions.......................................................................... 102

Appendix 10 – Detailed Plan ....................................................................... 110

Appendix 11 - Partnership Board Members................................................. 112

Appendix 12 – Supporting data for Section 2 Local Context ....................... 113


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EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

The City Strategy Pathfinder (CSP) is a new, ambitious and innovative approach to tackling worklessness and child poverty. The CSP was launched by the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) in May 2006 and there are 15 in total, including two in London, one in East London and one in West London. The East and South East London CSP brings together a consortium of the key partners in the area, including the five boroughs, Jobcentre Plus (JCP), the London Development Agency (LDA), the Greater London Authority (GLA), the Learning and Skills Councils (LSC) and local employers, to radically re-shape welfare to work activity in the area. The scale of worklessness and child poverty in the 5 boroughs is huge. The 5 borough employment rate is 60.7%, a figure well below the London-wide figure of 68%, which, in turn is the lowest regional figure in the UK and well below the national employment rate of 74.4%. These high levels of worklessness contribute to the unacceptably high levels of child poverty in the capital. In East London approximately 35.45% of dependent children live in households where no one is in work, and approximately 41.6% live in benefit receiving households. In response to the scale of the problem in East London, the Consortium partners have developed the following vision for the East and South East London CSP: “Our vision is to reduce and prevent worklessness and child poverty in the 5 East London Boroughs by making a step change in the effectiveness of publicly-funded service delivery and involvement with employers for the sustainable benefit of local people.” The CSP consortiums aim to increase the employment rate across the 5 Borough area from a current rate of 60.7% to at least 63% by 2012, the result of getting an additional 28,370 workless people into jobs. This will result in a reduction in the number of children living in benefit dependent households of approximately 22,900. This will be achieved through the following strategic objectives:

1. Ensure services are open and easily accessible to all workless people and families.

2. Deliver services that are flexible and tailored to the needs of individuals and employers to enable workless people to access sustainable employment.

3. Achieve efficient and high quality services through better co-ordination, and strategic planning.

4. Ensure all services are informed and evaluated by strong performance management information and systems.

Current Delivery One of the key principles of the CSP is that there is minimal new funding available. Instead the CSP presents the opportunity for significant institutional and regulatory change. Indeed, significant resources are already invested in welfare to work activity in the CSP area; it is estimated that over £240m is spent each year (excluding benefit payments) on employment related services. The principal funders are Jobcentre Plus and Learning and Skills Council, while other funders include the London Development Agency and the European Social Fund and area based funds such as NRF. However, each of these funders has their own funding rules and targets and


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provision is delivered in the absence of a strategic overview of welfare to work in the CSP area. The outcome of this is extremely fragmented delivery. There are over 300 organisations delivering welfare to work type activity in the CSP area; this includes employability training and support providers, vocational training providers, welfare rights provision and Surestart centres. The extent of the number of providers would suggest that there is no shortage of capacity but, because of the lack of a strategic overview, this delivery is not ‘joined-up’ and workless residents too often fall into the cracks between the 300 providers and agencies. Another flaw presented by the lack of strategic framework is that there is little transference and sharing of good practice in the design and delivery of programmes. Similarly, information on the best performing providers is not widely shared. Short term and fragmented funding can also undermine the sustainability of best practice. The CSP seeks to provide this strategic overview and ensure that the maximum added value is gained from alignment with ongoing activity. Analysis Extensive analysis of worklessness, the barriers that prevent residents moving into work and the state of current delivery in the CSP area has been completed with the following conclusions. 1) There is no deficit of labour demand in East London or the wider region: The ratio of jobs per person has grown from 0.46 in 1995 to 0.65 in 2005 in East London and has grown further across London on the whole. These data suggest no shortage of opportunity, and thus the key issue is enabling workless residents to take advantage of these opportunities. 2) The workless face multiple barriers to employment: The strong locational correlations in East London indicate strong concentrations of different barriers within the same population. Therefore, focussing services on benefit groups by rather than on barriers has become increasingly out of step with the needs of the population. 3) The structure of worklessness makes child poverty a key issue: The heavy concentration of children in workless households in East London makes tackling worklessness a key objective in reducing child poverty in the region. It is also evident that without immediate action the situation is likely to get progressively worse in the future, creating greater problems of both social and economic concern. CSP Interventions National policy is going through a period of change. There have been three influential reviews in this area of policy; the Leitch review of skills, the Harker report on child poverty and the Freud review of welfare to work. Each of these reviews proposes that the status quo of welfare to work needs to change, while leaving the detail of these changes unclear. The CSP presents an opportunity to shape the outcomes of these reviews to solve the specific problems in East London. This approach is endorsed by Gordon Brown in the budget 2007 which states “individuals should be able to receive a personalized service that meets their specific needs, but which operates to high quality standards and is joined up across the public sector. Where appropriate this may entail pooled funding streams to deliver services that cross traditional organizational boundaries, such as employment, skills and health,


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and the scope for this will be explored as part Comprehensive Spending Review process.” The table below sets out the key interventions proposed by the CSP Consortium Introduce a “New Deal for Parents”

This follows directly from the Harker report and entails extending current services to non-working partners in single earner low income households as well as extending support to lone parents through greater in-work benefits

Introduce single points of access to services

Featured in all 5 Boroughs by: a) extending services in existing locations, and b) introducing new service centres in key locations (where appropriate)

Extend entitlements to childcare

Support to lower income parents, engaged in work-related activity

ESOL provision Improving the quality, effectiveness and efficiency of work-focused vocational ESOL provision

Joint Investment Plan Develop and agree a joint investment plan to provide a strategic overview for procurement of welfare to work related services and provide a more coordinated use of resources and service delivery

Implementation Further work is required to better understand the challenges ahead and design appropriate solutions. Therefore, implementation of the CSP will go forward in 3 stages, but with some significant early wins during the initial months of the Pathfinder. Design and refine Apr 07 – Sept 07 Testing Oct 07 – Mar 08 Implementation Apr 08 – Mar 09 Funding The DWP newly created Deprived Area Fund (DAF) provides the only significant new funding to the CSPs, aside from the seedcorn. DAF is a discretionary fund that is under the direct control of the CSP Consortium. The East London DAF allocations have been confirmed as follows: 2006/07 £1,866,481 (some carry forward has been authorised and is currently

being calculated) 2007/08 £5,718,250.


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1 VISION AND STRATEGY

1.1 Vision

Our vision is to reduce and prevent worklessness and child poverty in the 5 East London Boroughs by making a step change in the effectiveness of publicly-funded service delivery and involvement with employers for the sustainable benefit of local people. This will be achieved by bringing together a range of partners, “The Consortium”, within a strategic framework to align initiatives, and develop a client-focused service delivery model that is genuinely responsive to the specific needs of individuals, is easy to access, and helps those excluded from the labour market into work whether engaged in the welfare system or not. We aim to increase the employment rate across the 5 Borough area from a current rate of 61% to at least 63% by 2012, the result of getting an additional 28,370 workless people into jobs. This will result in a reduction in the number of children living in benefit dependent households of approximately 22,900. To achieve these targets, a significantly improved performance is required in each of the 5 Boroughs.

1.2 Strategy

Our strategy is driven by the following principles: PRINCIPLE 1: We will build on successes of local projects and knowledge of what works in tackling worklessness and child poverty. There are many examples of successful employment-related projects across the 5 Boroughs, spanning the voluntary, public and private sectors. The CSP will capture the good practice that currently exists, and build on it by scaling up current activity, disseminating good ideas and practice and adapting current programmes and initiatives to contribute towards CSP objectives. PRINCIPLE 2: Employer involvement is essential to the success of all our activities. One of the guiding principles of CSP is that employers’ needs are essential to good programme design and delivery. The LDA’s review into welfare to work activity “What works with tackling worklessness”1, concludes that employer involvement is essential to successful delivery of welfare to work activity, especially around skills and training. This finding is echoed by the recent

1 Pam Meadows, 2005


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Leitch Review of Skills and the Freud Review of Welfare to Work. The principal recommendation of the Leitch Review is that delivery of skills provision needs to become more ‘demand led’. However, skills and employment policy have been separate for some time,. Leitch notes that “The skills system is largely separate from the employment system and both work to different goals: entry into jobs for the employment system and full qualification attainment for the skills system”. The City Strategy Pathfinder presents an opportunity to bring employment and skills delivery together in East London. The CSP is currently engaged with local employers in the area, including MITIE, Skanska, London City Airport and The Innovatory, through the East London Business Association (ELBA). ELBA are members of the Consortium and have a track record of valuable support to projects that provide training into work in the CSP area. However, there is a need to look beyond the CSP boundary as the East London residents are part of the larger functional London labour market, which goes beyond even the London administrative boundary. Over half of all working residents work outside the 5 Borough area. Across London there are a variety of initiatives that are seeking to impact on skills and employment by working with employers. The CSP must seek to align with these initiatives to ensure it achieves the maximum added value. These include: London Skills and Employment Board The Leitch review proposes “a network of employer-led Employment and Skills Boards to give employers a central role in recommending improvements to local services” and the London Skills and Employment Board (LSEB) is the first of its kind. The LSEB has formal powers to set a skills strategy, and the power to set the strategic direction for the Learning and Skills Council post 19 budget (approx £400m p.a.), and is tasked with integrating skills and employment policy. The LSEB represents employer involvement at the highest level and it is therefore critical that the CSP and LSEB are aligned to ensure they bring the maximum added value and inform each other’s activities. London Employment and Skills Taskforce (LEST) Although this CSP is not focused on the London 2012 Olympics, there are a number of initiatives that are. The London Employment and Skills Taskforce (LEST) uses the opportunity and momentum created by the 2012 Games to support work to tackle worklessness and to break down the barriers to employment. LEST sets out how London can build on the special opportunity presented by the 2012 Games to make a permanent reduction in the level of worklessness across the city, and to achieve this it sets out actions for improving the integration and focus of skills and employment work in London. The alignment of the CSP and LEST is particularly key given the matching geographies of the CSP and the 5 Olympic Boroughs.


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Employer Accord The LEST proposes that public and private employers help drive up the quality and quantity of job/training-ready candidates in the supply system and engage in relation to recruitment. This will be called an Employer Accord. The Employer Accord represents a voluntary ‘deal’ between employers and the public sector. Employers will be encouraged to set demanding standards for public sector training and employment agencies to meet the needs of industry and specific job vacancies. PRINCIPLE 3: Services should maximise take-up by all workless clients, and by parents in particular. This CSP should aim to impact on all workless groups, regardless of current levels of involvement with the welfare system. Reducing child poverty requires a particular focus on parents, both workless and those with low incomes.

1.3 Enabling Measures

This is a unique opportunity to make radical improvements in employment-related services which must be fully embraced. In order to redesign services and funding to meet the needs of individuals, radically different ways of commissioning, aligning and pooling resources will be required. Traditional methods of procurement will not enable funding to be drawn down to meet the needs of individual clients, with multiple barriers to work, leading clients to have to ‘chase’ funding. Such an approach has the effect of positioning resources into administrative silos which can not easily be joined up to meet the needs of individual clients. Therefore, in order to be radical and challenging, support will be required to overcome the traditional output-led specifications, and allow clients single access to multiple funding pots. Consortium members recognize that in dealing with worklessness and child poverty, the client group will face multiple barriers to work which can only be addressed through better alignment or pooling of resources between national, regional and local government, in a flexible manner. Detailed business cases for each requested enabling measure will be written, once the parameters of the requirements have been determined as the associated initiatives are developed. Enabling measures are expected to be required in the following areas:

• Aligned commissioning and contract management protocols, plus funding cycle flexibility to facilitate this

• Eligibility criteria for New Deal and all provision to be redesigned

• Review the criteria applying to the 16 hour rule

• Job Outcome Target (JOT) criteria to include measurement of interventions affecting families


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• Roll-on of benefit payments during initial month of employment

• Data sharing (to track clients irrespective of point of contact with system)

• Budget and target flexibility from funders

• Reward payments to support ongoing CSP development

• In-work credits, linked to in-work support.

• Devolved decisions on national contracting on priority services – especially Pathways to Work and ESF

This CSP is working closely with DWP and participating in Enabling Measures (EM) sub-groups to help drive and scope EM requests, in collaboration with other CSP areas.

1.4 Strategic Objectives

In order to deliver the ambitious vision, the Consortium members will pilot radically different ways of working from those that currently exist. The four strategic objectives that will deliver the vision set out above are:

Strategic Objective

SO1 Ensure services are open and easily accessible to all workless people and families

SO2

Deliver services that are flexible and tailored to the needs of individuals and employers to enable workless people to access sustainable employment

SO3 Achieve efficient and high quality services through better co-ordination and strategic planning

SO4 Ensure all services are informed and evaluated by strong performance management information and systems

1.4.1 Ensure services are open and easily accessible to all workless people and families (SO1) This CSP will look at addressing and implementing system change by focusing its design on barriers to employment experienced by individuals, rather than focusing on specific target groups. Many workless people face multiple barriers to works. Moreover, identified barriers to work are shared by a number of the groups that we will be looking to move into the labour market, including lone parents, single earner families and Incapacity Benefit claimants. 1.4.2 Deliver services that are flexible and tailored to the needs of individuals and employers to enable workless people to access sustainable employment (SO2)


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The uniqueness of this CSP is that it will develop a client-focused service delivery model to meet the needs of individual clients, focusing on each person’s specific needs and personal barriers to work. Consortium members will relate the financial resources within the CSP in a flexible manner, so as to be able to respond to this approach. This will ensure resources are targeted to respond to the needs of individuals, and build on the principle of funding following the needs of the individual. This will include putting structures in place to encourage organisations to work together. Our approach will also be directed at prevention, to assist in stopping the next generation of worklessness and child poverty. 1.4.3 Achieve efficient and high quality services through better co-ordination and strategic planning (SO3) One of the main focuses is on aligning, pooling and commissioning initiatives across the 5 Boroughs, drawing together the combined resources of the various Consortium organisations and agencies. This will drive a new collaborative momentum in place of fragmented and unconnected initiatives, and will ensure that resources are used to address the needs and barriers to employment of all clients. By linking the approach closely with existing local arrangements, including Local Area Agreements, Local Strategic Partnerships, and the Local Employment and Training Framework, maximum resources and expertise will be brought to bear on the wide range of issues that impact on worklessness and child poverty – health, housing, alcohol and drug dependency, community safety, teenage pregnancy etc. More details on the LSP/LAA can be found in the Glossary. Through this approach Boroughs will be encouraged to find additional resources to support CSP objectives. 1.4.4 Ensure all services are informed and evaluated by strong performance management information and systems (SO4) All the objectives of this CSP will be underpinned by strong performance management systems to enable all partners to gain the maximum benefit from each other’s activities and experiences. This will be based on existing systems where possible and new systems where not, and will allow for effective collection, aggregation and analysis of data. See Section 4.7 for more details.

1.5 What does success look like?

� A reduction in worklessness in each borough and a reduction in the number

of children living in benefit dependent households � A clear strategic, seamless and coordinated approach amongst all

agencies and businesses � A consistent, comprehensive service offer to workless residents and low-

income families across the 5 boroughs � Aligned resources to deliver a client-focused service delivery model


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� Improved engagement with existing clients, and greatly increased take up of services from those not currently engaged with the system

� Increased business commitment to the provision of job and placement opportunities

� An increase in the number of employers supporting training, resulting in an increased percentage of the workforce engaged in learning

� Devolved decision making, aligned service budgets, targets and outcomes. The success of this project is dependent on the granting of enabling measures that will allow it to be radical, creative and innovative. This includes allowing the CSP Consortium maximum opportunity to guide, influence and manage the commissioning of key national initatives such as Pathways to Work.


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2 LOCAL CONTEXT

2.1 The CSP Area

The CSP covers the 5 boroughs that will host the Olympics and Paralympics Games in 2012. The 5 host boroughs are Greenwich, Hackney, Newham, Tower Hamlets & Waltham Forest as shown in Map 1. Map 1 – The CSP Area

2.2 Worklessness in East London

Across the 5 boroughs there is a working age population of 713,000 composed of three main groups: � 432,000 (60.7%) are in employment � 46,500 (6.5%) are unemployed � 234,000 (32.8%) are economically inactive2. The scale of the challenge for the 5 boroughs is huge. The 5 borough employment rate is nearly 8% and 14% less than the London and England averages respectively. In order to move the employment rate to that of the London average, an additional 49,700 people would need to be in employment. To move to the national average, an additional 96,000 people would need to be in employment. Even if the number of the unemployed were halved, this would not be sufficient to reach the London employment rate average. Therefore, a strong emphasis is needed on moving economically inactive people closer to the labour market and into jobs. There are large variations between the 5 Boroughs. Hackney has the lowest employment rate, with only 53% of working age residents in employment and

2 Appendix 1 shows workless people by ward who are located in the top third of East London

SOA's with the highest number of workless.


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74.1

68.6 68.1

59.4

54.1 53.2

0

10

20

30

40

50

60

70

80

UK Greenwich Waltham Forest Newham Tower Hamlets Hackney

Employment rate by boroughSource: Annual Population Survey 2005/06

London Employment Rate: 68.6%

(Red line)

over 40% of the population are economically inactive. In addition, employment rates vary significantly within individual boroughs, and areas of low employment cross borough boundaries as shown in Table 1 - Employment rates in the East London boroughs. This suggests that worklessness in Greenwich and Waltham Forest is close to the London average. However, this masks wide variations within those boroughs. Neighborhoods such as Woolwich and Leytonstone suffer similarly unacceptable levels of worklessness and child poverty as experienced across the other 3 boroughs. Table 1 - Employment rates in the East London boroughs

Source: Nomis, Apr 2005-Mar 2006 Employment rates in East London have remained firmly below London’s by around 10 percentage points for the last ten years. Despite the wider success of the UK economy and the growth of employment, East London has not succeeded in closing the employment rate gap. At the same time, East London departs from the national picture in having very few couple households where both partners are working. While at national level 70% of couples with children have both partners in work, across the CSP area, only 40% of couples have two earners. Again, this is more marked in Newham, Hackney and Tower Hamlets, but rates are very low compared to national level in all the boroughs. As single-earner couples have a one in five risk of poverty, this makes a significant contribution to child poverty in this area and reinforces the need to address worklessness across all family types, including within households where another adult may be working.


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2.3 Reasons for being workless

(Meadows, 2005), notes the following core factors that increase the probability of being workless in London: Having dependent children Being sick or disabled Having low qualifications Being a migrant from a less developed country Being female BAME disadvantage Further detailed analysis of the above can be found in Appendix 12. Child poverty - the impact of being workless The impact of worklessness is not limited to the individual. Low levels of social mobility in the UK mean that the income of a child is quite strongly correlated with that of their parents (Gregg, et al, 2005). As a result children growing up in poverty are more likely to continue living in poverty during adult life, affecting their own children in the same way. This is not just a serious social issue but one that affects the overall performance of the UK Economy over time through reducing the ability of people to maximise their potential. In inner London, just over half of all children live in relative poverty. In East London approximately 35.45% of dependent children live in households where no one is in work, and approximately 41.6% live in benefit receiving households and thus by definition below the poverty line. Multiple barriers to employment East London has a high concentration of workless people with multiple barriers to employment. Simple correlations of the locations of people who are workless in the above groups and other potentially disadvantageous factors, such as low skills, or of BAME origin, show great concentrations of these factors in East London (shown in the Table 2: Correlations of disadvantage below). This indicates that many of those out of work in the area suffer from not single, but multiple disadvantage in the labour market. Table 2: Correlations of disadvantage

2.4 Skills and Qualifications

Table 3 - Highest qualifications of working age residents shows the qualifications of residents across England and Wales, London and the 5


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boroughs. There are a lower percentage of residents in the 5 boroughs with NVQ4 and NVQ3 qualifications compared to the London average, but not compared with the national average. There are a high percentage of residents that do not have any recognised qualifications, although it is thought that this figure includes people with unrecognised foreign qualifications. Table 3 - Highest qualifications of working age residents

0.0

5.0

10.0

15.0

20.0

25.0

30.0

35.0

% with NVQ4+ % with NVQ3 % with NVQ2 % with NVQ1 % with Trade

Apprenticeships

% No qualifications

% o

f w

ork

ing a

ge p

opula

tion

England and Wales

London

5 Borough Average

Source: Nomis, Jan – Dec 2005 Table 4 - Employment rates by qualification shows the employment rate of residents according to the level of qualification that they currently hold, using the UK employment rate of 75% as the base. For all qualifications, employment rates in the 5 boroughs are lower than the London average. Table 4 - Employment rates by qualification

Source: Annual Population Survey Jan-December 2005

60% 65% 70% 75% 80% 85% 90%

London

East London

Olympic

Low Qualifications (Under 2-0) NVQ Level 2

NVQ level 3 High qualified (Level 4+)


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As employment rates for all levels of qualifications are lower, this suggests that residents in East London face a higher incidence of other barriers to employment. However, the incidence of low qualifications amongst the workless has implications for how, and what sort of training is linked with welfare to work programmes.

2.5 Benefit Claimants and the economically inactive

Within the 5 Boroughs there are approximately 143,000 benefit claimants. This is made up of JSA claimants (25%), sick or disabled (47%), lone parents (24%) and other groups (5%)3. It is estimated that the total direct cost of benefit payments across the 5 boroughs amounts to £435 million per annum as shown in Table 5 - Benefits Recipients across 5 boroughs.

Table 5 - Benefits Recipients across 5 boroughs local authority

total JSA

claimant sick or

disabled lone parent

other group

Greenwich 26,800 5,700 13,500 6,500 1,200 Hackney 31,500 7,700 14,300 7,900 1,600

Newham 32,400 7,900 14,900 8,000 1,500 Tower Hamlets

29,200 7,800 13,600 6,000 1,800

Waltham Forest

23,300 6,100 10,400 5,800 1,000

Total 143,100 35,200 66,600 34,200 7,100

Estimated cost of benefits per annum £435,000,000 £103,000,000 £239,000,000 £93,000,000 -

Source: Nomis (May 2006) & JCP/DWP Estimates Of the 234,000 residents that are economically inactive, there are a wide range of reasons why people are not actively engaged in the labour market.

3 Numbers may not add to 100 due to rounding.


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2.6 Local Analysis – Child Poverty in London

A child in one of the 5 boroughs is twice as likely as the England average to grow up in a workless household. One of the overarching objectives of this CSP is to reduce levels of child poverty in East London. London has highest rate of child poverty in Great Britain – 39 % of all Greater London children, rising to 52% in Inner London.

Whilst there has been some variation, there has been no consistent improvement in the levels of child poverty in London over the last ten years.

Source: London Child Poverty Commission ‘Monitoring child poverty in London’

Approximately 50% of children in poverty are in lone parent families in London, and 50% are in couple households. 59% of children in poverty are in workless households. Parents in London tend to have lower employment rates than at national level, a point stressed in Lisa Harker’s report for DWP, from which table 5 is taken. People without children tend to have similar employment rates in London and elsewhere. Source: Annual Population Survey/GLA Data Management and Analysis

Table 6 - Employment rates by family status, 2004

London Rest of UK Women without children 75 77

Women with children 54 68 Men without children 86 91 Men with children 81 82 Female Lone parent 41 55 Mother in couple 61 72 Male lone parent * 64 Father in couple 86 91

Increasing labour market detachment The longer an individual is out of work, the less likely they are to re-enter. Data from Jobcentre Plus show the flow of East London JSA claimants into work declining from an average 4.8% of the stock per month amongst those who have only been claiming for up to 8 weeks week, to around 1.7% of those who have been claiming for over a year. As Jobcentre Plus job entry figures show, job entry rates amongst other benefit claimants such as workless lone parents or those on incapacity benefit are also much lower - due in part to longer time spent on benefit, (the average workless lone parent in East London has been claiming benefit for more than 3 years and JSA claimant 13-26 weeks).


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* sample size too small to measure Data from DWP suggests that in 2004 there were around 115,000 children living in benefit dependent households in East London, and therefore likely to be living in poverty. Table 7 – Children in Families on Benefits shows that East London has a significantly higher percentage of children living in families on benefits in comparison with London and the UK. Table 7 – Children in Families on Benefits In London, 42% of children in poverty are in households with somebody in employment. Child poverty rates for couples with only one partner working are the second largest group of any household type/employment combination in overall child poverty figures (after workless lone parent families). However, whilst poverty rates are highest for children in workless families, they are also high for children in working lone parent families and in couples where only one partner is working. For example, in a couple household where one person is working part-time, the risk of child poverty is 66%. Similarly, for a working lone parent there is a 28% risk of children being in poverty. The highest risk of child poverty in London is in the Pakistani/Bangladeshi community where poverty affects nearly 70% of children. In addition, 60% of Black African lone parents are workless. However throughout the 5 Boroughs there are many other disadvantaged minority groups. The overall trends across London since 2000 can be summarised as: � a fall in the proportion of children in households with the lowest risk of

poverty (dual earner couples)

Children in Families on Benefits - East London Olympic in

comparison to the London Region, London Suburbs, and Great

Britain

0.0%

5.0%

10.0%

15.0%

20.0%

25.0%

30.0%

35.0%

40.0%

45.0%

East London Olympic London Region London Suburbs Great Britain

JSA LP Sick & Disabled Other


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� a rise in the proportion of children in households with significant poverty risk (single earner couples)

� little change in the proportion of children in households with the highest poverty risk (workless single parent and couple households).4

A significant way to reduce child poverty is to help the parent or parents increase their income by either moving into work or, if in work already, by increasing hours and/or pay. This requires giving attention to the quality of employment, as only sustainable jobs will keep families permanently out of poverty. When implementing the proposed New Deal for Parents for East London, we will be ensuring we can target and deliver services to the high risk groups, including reaching single earner couples in low income households.

2.7 Ethnic Minority Employment

While there are important variations in employment between different minority groups, East London has high numbers of groups with the highest levels of disadvantage. The objective of tackling child poverty converges with the aim to reduce disparities in employment between ethnic minority groups, especially as the younger age structure of minority populations means they account for a high percentage of the children in the area, as well as being more exposed to risks of worklessness. All the main ethnic minority groups have employment deficits compared to ethnic minority rates (as shown in Table 8 - percent of ethnic groups in employment in East London) for the rest of London and Great Britain, although the gap is small for some groups. The Pakistani/Bangladeshi group has the lowest employment rates at under 40% and this is partly because of extremely low participation rates by Pakistani and Bangladeshi women. We will be closely examining how services are structured and delivered to ethnic minority groups and looking for considerable improvements in how services can be accessed and tailored to meet specific needs of different groups.

Table 8 - percent of ethnic groups in employment in East London Source: Census 2001

4 Gaffney, D – Presentation to London Child poverty Commission, 17 March 2006

Employment Rates for Ethnic Groups in East London Olympic, the London Region, London

Suburbs, and Great Britain

0.0%

10.0%

20.0%

30.0%

40.0%

50.0%

60.0%

70.0%

80.0%

East London Olympic London Region London Suburbs Great Britain

Black or Black British Indian Pakistani/Bangladeshi Mixed Ethnic Other Ethnic


- 22 -

2.8 Supply Side Conclusions

A range of different issues causes worklessness and child poverty and therefore cut across many services. In addition to services that can be offered through welfare to work programmes, other services can play a central role in helping people access employment. This includes affordable childcare, affordable housing, health, cost of living debt counseling and financial advice, basic skills and ESOL, and transport. For this CSP to be successful, there is the need for more joined up working across all of these areas.

2.9 The Demand Side - A Context of Economic Growth

The problems of worklessness and child poverty in the 5 boroughs and in London generally are not due to weak labour demand. Indeed, in recent years, the 5 boroughs have made a significant contribution to job growth in the London economy (as shown in Table 9 - Total Jobs across the 5 boroughs 1998 - 2004). In 2004, there were over 443,000 jobs in the 5 boroughs, a growth of almost 15% since 1998. However, residents in the 5 boroughs participate in the wider London labour market, and residents of other areas of work within the 5 borough, so this area cannot be treated as if it constituted a distinct labour market or economy. The main driver behind growth in this area has been the expansion of employment opportunities within the financial and business services sector based around Canary Wharf. Table 9 - Total Jobs across the 5 boroughs 1998 - 2004

0

50,000

100,000

150,000

200,000

250,000

300,000

350,000

400,000

450,000

500,000

1998 1999 2000 2001 2002 2003 2004

To

tal N

um

be

rs o

f J

ob

s

Waltham Forest

Tower Hamlets

Newham

Hackney

Greenwich

Source: Annual Business Inquiry. Existing plans for the area offer a huge opportunity to continue this strong growth. Some of the planned developments include:


- 23 -

• London 2012 Olympic and Paralympic Games

• Growth in the Thames Gateway

• The Stratford City development

• Greenwich Peninsula

• Continued growth at Canary Wharf.

Table 10 - Projected job numbers (stock) in the East London boroughs (000’s)

76

95

76

161

67

78

100

83

203

65

0

50

100

150

200

250

Greenwich Hackney Newham Tower Hamlets Waltham Forest

2003

2011

Source: GLA Economics, Working paper 18, October 2006 Further job growth (as shown in Table 10 - Projected job numbers (stock) in the East London boroughs (000’s)) in the 5 boroughs is likely to be driven by the financial and business services sector, which accounted for just over half of job growth over this period across the 5 boroughs. Employment projections published by the GLA in May 2006 confirm that Tower Hamlets will experience the highest level of employment growth in London. Table 11 - Industrial makeup in East London, 2004 below shows the industrial makeup of East London. The two main sector employers are the business and financial services, accounting for 32.5% of total employment. Note however that these figures relate to jobs, not to residents in employment for whom the pattern will be different. GLA projections indicate that trends within these sectors are likely to continue producing job growth of 213,000 jobs in London by 2012.


- 24 -

Table 11 - Industrial makeup in East London, 2004

Source: Annual Business Inquiry, 2004 Whilst employment in these sectors is concentrated towards occupations requiring high qualifications, growth in East London is not likely to be limited to these occupations. Projections suggest that other large employers in East London are likely to experience job growth in lower, entry-level jobs. Key sectors are Hotels and Catering and the public sector employers in the Health Services and Education. Across London, expected change in these sectors is shown in Table 12 - Employment levels and projected change, London.

Table 12 - Employment levels and projected change, London

Source: Volterra Consulting.

This data cannot currently be broken down by borough, although GLA projections show overall job growth in the 5 boroughs as follows in Table 13 - Employment Projections by borough:

- 10,000 20,000 30,000 40,000 50,000 60,000 70,000 80,000 90,000

Business Services

Financial intermediation

Wholesale and Retail

Health and social work

Education

Manufacturing

Transport and communication

Public adminisitration

Other personal and social services

Hotels and restaurants

Construction

Primary and Utiltities


- 25 -

Table 13 - Employment Projections by borough

Source: GLA Economics, 2006.

Whilst the data shows strong job growth, only 20% of all residents in the 5 boroughs have jobs in their borough of residence. 64% of employed residents work outside their borough of residence, and over half work outside the 5 borough area. The travel to work patterns of residents within the 5 boroughs are shown in Table 14 - Commuting flows. Table 14 - Commuting flows Employed

Population Lives and works in the borough

Works in borough but lives outside

Greenwich 87,508 39.2% 30,406 Hackney 75,488 34.0% 48,640

Newham 81,196 38.6% 35,901 Tower Hamlets 70,396 41.1% 128,262 Waltham Forest 93,725 37.1% 25851

Source: 2001 Census However, it is clear that past employment growth in itself has had little impact on resident employment rates. This partly reflects the concentration of job growth at the higher end of the occupational scale, where jobs will tend to be taken by in-commuters. The aim of the CSP is to increase employment, regardless of whether people find jobs within the CSP area or in the wider London labour market. Many jobs are taken by people commuting into the area, while many residents find employment outside the area. It would therefore be a mistake to treat the 5 boroughs as a single closed labour market. However employment opportunities within the CSP area will be important, as � Lower income workers tend to have shorter commuting journeys5 � Local employer engagement has proven benefits in helping

disadvantaged groups � Flexible/part-time jobs that tend to recruit locally can make an important

contribution to reducing family poverty.

5 What works with tackling worklessness?, Meadows, P. 2006


- 26 -

This means that there needs to be renewed efforts on local employer engagement and providing continued support to the workless once they are in work, concentrating in particular on part-time and flexible jobs which will benefit local residents. Change over time Whilst the general employment situation in East London has been improving, the number of jobs per working age resident grew from 0.46 in 1995 across the region to 0.65 in 2005, the ability of the furthest from the labour market in exploiting this demand has not. The proportion of those on benefit who have been claiming for longer than a year has grown from around 67% in 1998 to 70%. Data suggests that local employment services available to these groups are under-performing, compared with UK average performance. Alongside this, workless individuals are more likely to be suffering from multiple barriers than in the past – leaving workless East London residents further and further away from the labour market. In May 1995 only 3.7 percent of people out of work and claiming sickness-related benefit were single parent families. This proportion had increased to around 8.1% by May 2006. Conclusions The following key points emerge from this analysis: 4) There is no deficit of labour demand in East London or the wider region: The ratio of jobs per person has grown from 0.46 in 1995 to 0.65 in 2005 in East London and has grown further across London on the whole. These data suggest no shortage of opportunity, and thus the key issue is enabling the non-employed workforce to take advantage of these opportunities. 5) The workless face multiple barriers to employment: The strong locational correlations in East London indicate strong concentrations of different barriers within the same population. Therefore, focussing services on benefit groups by rather than on barriers has become increasingly out of step with the needs of the population. 6) The structure of worklessness makes child poverty the key issue: The heavy concentration of children in workless households in East London makes tackling worklessness a key objective in reducing child poverty in the region. It is also evident that that without immediate action the situation is likely to get progressively worse in the future creating greater problems of both social and economic concern.


- 27 -

2.10 Mapping Current Provision

2.10.1 Funding

Estimates suggest that the main employment-related funding streams contribute in the region of £240 million per annum - as shown in Table 15 - Funding for employment and skills provision in the 5 East London boroughs (£millions). Table 15 - Funding for employment and skills provision in the 5 East London boroughs (£millions)

134

42.2

8

42

12.6

LSC (including ESF)

ESF (2006/07)

LDA (including ESF)

JCP (2005/06)

Borough level

Source: UKRP This estimate excludes LSC funding for school sixth-forms and provision that leads to qualifications above level 2 (mostly A-level courses). These funding streams support a wide range of employment related services, including: � Help individuals acquire the knowledge, skills and/or personal attributes to

help them get back or in to work � Remove barriers to that process e.g. through childcare provision,

transport and help with managing finances6 � Identify and support work experience placements � Identify and match individuals to job opportunities through recruitment and

job brokerage services

6 The figures above exclude new funding being sought from the LDA Childcare Affordability

Programme Round 2, which is currently under discussion.


- 28 -

� Help keep people in work, including in-work support for individuals who have been inactive for long periods, welfare rights and services for low paid employees

� Programmes to help employers improve their recruitment/job matching practices and which boost workforce development and career progression in the workplace.

We are undertaking further mapping work to identify the specific value of the funds supporting these types of activities. Between them, the LSC and JCP account for more than 70% of all spending on employment related services in the 5 boroughs. A provisional breakdown of how LSC and Jobcentre Plus funds are being spent is shown in Appendix 5. ESF programmes also represent a significant tranche of funding at just over £42m in 2006/07 (17.5%). This money is supporting more than 300 different projects that contain an employment element of one sort or another. However, the complexity of the funding mix and geographical coverage of these initiatives is such that we are unable to offer a more refined analysis of ESF provision at this stage. The LDA’s spending on employment related activities (estimated at £8m in 2006/07, but this does not take account of all LDA activity, including childcare subsidy, and will need to be revised) is broadly based and covers: � Independent careers and learning advice and guidance � Diversity initiatives � Workforce development/productivity improvement � Awareness raising on career opportunities and pathways back into work

for those suffering particular disadvantage � Specialist pathways targeting different age groups including young people

and over 50s � Connecting communities to enterprise and training � Multi-faceted, area-based skills and employment actions linked to specific

geographical areas. The funding of borough level employment programmes – either by or through local authorities (including NRF, s106 and other funding) – is relatively small in comparison with that of the large agencies. However, the services provided at this level often include highly innovative programmes. Many of them exemplify the principles of integrated service delivery which the CSP is seeking to replicate more widely.


- 29 -

2.10.2 Service access and delivery

Table 16 - Employment related service provision in the 5 boroughs shows the breakdown of the different types of employment related provision in the 5 boroughs. Table 16 - Employment related service provision in the 5 boroughs

5

6

10

10

12

13

14

18

18

20

20

20

25

30

38

42

47

64

65

100

0 20 40 60 80 100 120

Education Business Partnerships

Employment Zone outlets

CoVEs

NDC projects

FE providers

JCP off ices

Other job brokerage

LSC funded Work Based Learning providers

JCP programme providers

nextstep delivery partners

Welfare rights/law centres

learndirect centres

Connexions centres

Employment advice

Surestart centres

Job preparation

Business/enterprise support organisations

ESOL providers

Vocational training providers

Employability training/support providers

Source: UKRP, November 2006 These service outlets, which we estimate to number more than 300 in total7, cover just about every aspect of delivery in the employment service ‘supply chain’. There is almost no step in the client’s journey back or in to work that is not covered in some way by one or more of these providers or service access points. The problem is that very little of this provision is ‘joined up’, either in terms of planning, funding or delivery8. Amongst the mainstream service providers, there are also a number of ‘neighbourhood learning centres’, some co-located with other services. These centres offer a combination of employability training, job preparation and job search tailored to the needs of individuals. As such, they make an important contribution to service delivery in East

7 It should be noted that the number of service types and outlets listed here exceeds the number of providers by

about 200 because so many providers offer more than one service (e.g. employability training and job preparation). 8 Neighborhood Learning Centres Feasibility Study, LDA, 2002.


- 30 -

London, but their remits and relationships with other providers are limited, often by their funding. Other evidence supports the view of a fragmented service infrastructure at the local level. In Waltham Forest alone, the local authority has recently identified 40 different providers of 60 separate employment and skills related programmes.9 Very little of this is inter-connected in any planned way, and referrals between agencies tends to be limited. Moreover, no single agency has responsibility for, or an overview of, where clients come from, go next or end up. In terms of the demand side, few providers are engaging proactively or routinely with employers. The mapping suggests that there are around 14 job brokerage access points across the 5 boroughs, outside the network of 13 JCP offices (from April 2007), some of which provide different outreach delivery points for the same commissioning organisation. It is clear from this that traditional top-down commissioning has led to a plethora of fragmented services which does not assist the needs of those most requiring help. A key objective will be to develop a greater alignment or pooling of resources, delivered in a flexible manner, to meet the specific needs of those individuals.

2.10.3 What works – principles and examples

The 2006 report, ‘What works with tackling worklessness?’ (Synergy Research & Consulting) examines the evidence for the effectiveness of different types of interventions. Some of the key findings include: � Help and support needs to be tailored to the needs of the individual � The most effective programmes have a range of options including training,

help with job search and presentation, and support with other potential barriers to work such as finding childcare and arranging transport

� The most successful labour market programmes appear to be those which actively involve or engage employers both in delivery and design.

CSP partners have provided local examples of projects that are tackling worklessness successfully in innovative ways. A number of common themes have emerged from successful interventions, many of which are consistent with best practice identified by the above report. Themes include:

• Services offered on an outreach basis, close to where the target client group lives or visits

At Whipps Cross Hospital in Waltham Forest a special outreach mini job centre, the Jobs Junction, offers employment focused services to people looking for work in the hospital. Through collaboration

9 Source: London Borough of Waltham Forest, Regeneration Programmes, Environmental Services.


- 31 -

between the PCT, JCP and the borough - with other separately funded projects also being at hand to offer specialist barrier breaking support - people disadvantaged in the jobs market are helped to get guaranteed job interviews with the hospital. Children’s Centres and well-positioned high street jobs brokerage shops (Reed in Partnership in the Employment Zone and Skillsmatch in Tower Hamlets) are other examples of facilities in areas of high unemployment where the target client group is likely to call in. Greenwich Local Labour and Business (GLLaB) has dedicated outreach staff working with young people who have no obligation to engage, by attending community events, linking with local partner organisations, including IAG staff, to offer access, participation and progression. Outreach can open up access to a full range of services for people that might otherwise not have used them. It depends heavily on close partnership working with key intermediaries ‘on the ground’.

• An integrated service offer – bringing together and creating a menu of professional and other services focused on a range of personal, financial and practical issues, accessed through a single point and designed to tackle a variety of complex needs and barriers.

JCP, especially in the Employment Zones, has been able to bring services together for the customer by using a personal advisor to co-ordinate the offer. The work of Action Teams uses a model where a personal advisor builds a level of trust with the customer to identify barriers to work. Personal support focuses on an integrated service and continuing support to both the employer and new employee. Newham Action Team, for example, have helped people move from Incapacity Benefit and into work by tackling mental health and self-confidence barriers, where counselling and medical support has been close at hand, using specialist partners but with the continuity of a single personal advisor. Newham’s Job Broker project is an into-work benefits advice service delivered by the East End Citizen’s Advice Bureau. This is a ground breaking partnership between public, voluntary and private advice providers. CAB advisors are based in job broker agencies, providing crucial advice for people moving into work on benefits and tax credit entitlement. 1,524 people were assisted in making benefit and tax credit claims between July 2004 and September 2005.

• A service that is flexible and can work around funding criteria or regulations to ensure the customer is offered appropriate services for their needs.

A good example is the award winning LBTH Skillsmatch programme, Earn as you Learn. This programme offers a paid intensive week long training programme, tailored to meet employers’ requirements followed by a paid 6-8 week placement with employers including Credit Suisse, DTI, Price Waterhouse Coopers, Tower of London and BP. The programme has been extended to meet the needs of the NEET group


- 32 -

(Skillsladder programme) by including 2 weeks intensive training and an extended work placement period. As JSA and IB clients are currently excluded from such long periods of work placement, JCP is working with the Council to offer flexibility to clients through flexible extension of the work trial option. It is anticipated that this can also be extended to IB clients.

• Investment in employer engagement by offering ongoing support to help employers recruit and retain people. In addition, engaging employers to influence employability and work-related training to ensure that it is demand led.

Tower Hamlets is working in collaboration with local employers at both service design and delivery stages. Training and work trial elements are tailored to meet employers’ needs using a model that is transferable to any employment sector. Over two hundred clients have gained work through this programme, with 97% being long-term, sustained jobs.

• A focus on achieving sustainable outcomes based on a sustained service offer – too often, good projects run out of time and money, lose their best staff and are unable to offer sustainable support for individuals because of time limited or output driven funding.

SureStart/Children Centres in Newham (branded Early Start), illustrate the success of long term, sustained and trusted support, especially where an employment focus and service is integrated from the beginning.

These examples show what can be achieved through well designed local initiatives. The task of the CSP will be to apply lessons learned from schemes such as these across a much larger area and with a higher level of ambition in terms of overcoming the fragmentation of service delivery.

2.10.4 Value for Money (VfM)

Local mapping has produced a combined estimate of the current average unit costs associated with each new job entry being achieved by JCP and other publicly funded job brokerage agencies in east London at the moment. Overall, we calculate that JCP, together with other non-statutory employment services, are achieving up to 30,000 job entries per annum in East London10. The average cost of each job entry, based on a simple division of total spending by the number of job entries achieved, is £1,530 (within a range of £1,430 to £1,590 per job entry)11.

10

Note – these are job entry figures rather than the number of new job entrants or individuals finding work. 11

This figure excludes the investment being made further upstream by the LSC in skills and qualifications for entry

level jobs.


- 33 -

Although this is a rather crude measure of baseline unit cost, it is the only estimate available at this stage. As such, it provides a starting point for future VfM measures, but only where the definition of ‘value’ is confined to monetary costs without reference to measures of value added. Target communities for the CSP include large numbers of economically inactive adults who are in ‘the system’ in some way but locked out by their passive relationship with service providers. This CSP will reach those who are presently not engaged with welfare to work initiatives and will need to engage people in new ways. The distance that many of these people will have to travel is potentially much greater than claimants who are already actively engaged. They are likely to require a more personalised service, possibly over longer periods. These groups will need to draw on more and different types of services to sustain their personal journeys back to work. The measure of ‘value’ must therefore include an account of value added – of the difference that the CSP offer makes to the economic and personal prospects of the people involved. VfM measures will need to include some new metrics, which Workstream C covers in more detail. A key aspect of service re-design and realignment is using existing resources in different and more efficient ways. The key question here is not so much the amount of money we have to spend, but how we can best re-focus the skills, knowledge, time and working relationships of existing frontline service providers. It is here that additional value will be achieved, by making better use of service provision across the 5 boroughs. 2.10.5 Gaps and opportunities Our analysis of current employment-related activity in the 5 boroughs suggests that there are serious gaps in, and between, provision. In general, we have noted: � A disconnected and fragmentary funding infrastructure, with public

agencies contracting employment related services in an uncoordinated manner

� A high degree of fragmentation between service delivery specialisms and access points is evident and this weakens referral, onward support and progression links for clients

� The need for more systematic and focused engagement with service users at both ends of the supply chain.

� Limited activities focussed on keeping people in work and helping them progress into higher skilled and better paid jobs.

� Lack of local flexibility in commissioning services to reflect local circumstances.

� Restrictive eligibility criteria creating gaps in what is available for workless residents.


- 34 -

We are undertaking a detailed mapping of provision that we will then want to use to make decisions about how funding streams should be aligned. In doing this we will need to consider: � how we reach more people and how volumes can be increased � whether there needs to be a re-distribution of funds between target

groups, and potentially of eligibility criteria � how we can reduce the transaction costs and bureaucracy both for

commissioners and providers � how we ensure there are no gaps or under-supply in provision � how we stimulate all parts of the infrastructure to offer more integrated

services. This is detailed work that we will be taking forward over the coming months. We hope some measures can be introduced in the short-term, but others we recognise are longer-term.


- 35 -

3. PROGRAMME DESIGN

3.1 Approach and Programme Design

The CSP will build on and add value to the work being undertaken within each local authority, and align with local agreements, including Local Strategic Partnerships (LSPs) and Local Area Agreements (LAAs). The links with Local Authorities will help ensure proposals are rooted in local strategic partnerships and that related issues of health, housing, environment etc. that impact on worklessness, can be advanced in a complementary fashion. The proposed governance arrangements for the CSP will ensure that the CSP and programmes such as Local Employment and Skills Taskforce (LEST) and Local Employment and Training Framework (LETF), Opportunities Fund etc are complementary and reinforce one another. Lisa Harker's recent report to DWP Delivering on Child Poverty, what would it take? explores a number of key issues also raised in this Business Plan. It identifies a number of changes needed to meet the Government's ambitious child poverty targets for 2010 and 2020. It includes a section specifically on London, reflecting the fact that child poverty rates are so much higher in the Capital than in the rest of the country, and that these rates have not fallen since 2000, despite the progress seen elsewhere. The report's main recommendations include a stronger focus on parents in Jobcentre Plus' activities, the need for a consistent offer to parents through a New Deal for Parents, the importance of sustainable work to tackling child poverty, and the need to develop an integrated work and skills package that enhances individuals' opportunities for moving into sustainable employment. The report does focus on JCP activity, and has not looked at all Consortium members' contribution to tackling child poverty, unlike this Business Plan. However, the main themes of the report mirror the Consortium's own views about the steps needed to be taken in East London by all partners to tackle its extremely high levels of child poverty. In December 2006, Lord Leitch published the report Prosperity for all in the global economy – world class skills. This analyses the UK's skills needs to 2020 and recommends that the UK commit to becoming a world leader in skills by the same date. It contains a number of recommendations that will affect the work of the Consortium on skills, particularly through the LSC. These include much stronger training support for workless people, delivered through co-located services - which the Consortium will need to prioritise in its own proposals for co-located employment services, in the next phase of developing the CSP. They also include recommendations for a new integrated skills and employment service, with employer-led Employment and Skills Boards - where London already has new Board in place, chaired by the Mayor.


- 36 -

CSP activity will be planned to impact progressively, reflecting the degree of challenge of the task, and the need to make rapid progress on this priority issue. Deprived Area Funding (DAF) from DWP is for the year 2007-08 of the CSP after which the CSP will need to fully mainstream its approach through the strong and long-term commitment of its partners to sustain these new ways of working. More information on DAF can be found in section 4.9.

3.1.1 Model for policy responses

The model overleaf summarizes the individual pathways between worklessness and sustainable employment that informs the policy responses developed in this Business Plan, and shows alignment with workstream activity (see section 3.2)


- 37 -

Clients Services Employment

Workstream A:

Redesigning and extending services for all workless people and families

Workstream B:

Improving performance, co-ordination and strategic alignment of services

Services to address labour market barriers

Workstream C: Informing and measuring success

Lone Parents

IB Claimants

Measures to prevent

worklessness

Young People/NEETS

JSA

• Job search/ brokerage • Childcare • Training • Basic Skills • Debt advice • Health Support

Available

and

wanting

to work

A job

Sustained

employment

Non-benefit claimants

East London model for policy responses


- 38 -

3.2 Key Programme Elements

All of the changes proposed by the CSP are driven by our strategic objectives, and draw strongly on the evidence in Section 2 of the specific challenges in East London, the problems with existing service provision, and good practice of what works tackling worklessness and child poverty in the area. The evidence shows that a more effective approach to worklessness and child poverty must maximize the benefits from a strategic and coordinated approach, whilst ensuring delivery is genuinely responsive to the specific needs of individual clients.

3.2.1 Workstreams

The strategic objectives of this Plan will be delivered via 3 Workstreams:

Code Strategic Objective

SO1

Ensure services are open and easily accessible to all workless people and families

SO2

Deliver services that are flexible and tailored to the needs of individuals and employers to enable workless people to access sustainable employment

SO3

Achieve efficient and high quality services through better co-ordination and strategic planning

SO4

Ensure all services are informed and evaluated by strong performance management information and systems

Proposed interventions are detailed below; there will be further lines of enquiry through the workstreams to examine particular local circumstances and the specific needs of individual clients that impact on worklessness in East London, and the measures required to address them e.g. high cost of living and making work pay.

Workstream

Workstream A Redesigning and extending services for all workless people and families

Workstream B Improving performance, coordination and strategic alignment of services

Workstream C Informing and Measuring Success


- 39 -

3.2.2 Workstream A - Redesigning and extending services for all workless people and families

Key elements

• Stronger focus on low income families: Introducing a New Deal for Parents to encourage wider take-up of employment-related services by families.

• Better client engagement and widened access: Widen access to

existing services for workless residents and low income families, building on links with children’s centres, Sure Start etc, and introducing new, ‘single points of access’ centres located in or close to key locations. Also a need for caseworkers with the right skills to provide an improved interface with clients and a better link to various services on offer.

• Client focused service delivery model: The development of flexible service offers to ensure that delivery is genuinely responsive to the specific needs of individual clients.

• Employment focused skills development and training provision:

training provided within the workplace, with employers involved in programme design, and evaluation and re-design of existing provision to ensure it is fit for purpose, and increasing work-based learning opportunities

Full details in Appendix 9

Rationale: Child poverty is one of the two top priorities for this CSP, alongside worklessness. This responds to the recognized very high levels of child poverty in East London, the limited impact of existing policies in this area, and reflects the high priority now put on the issue by Government.12 These proposals are focused on the need to extend support to low income families, building on the package offered to lone parents through the New Deal for Lone Parents. Consistent childcare support and entitlements are a priority; this CSP will look at the ‘front end’ of employment-related services, the point(s) of access and interaction with individual clients and business, and propose changes aimed to increase voluntary take-up of support from families not currently engaged – especially partners in single earning couples and working parents on low incomes – and through greater employer involvement.

12 John Hutton speech 2006: no1 priority for DWP


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The LDA’s review into welfare to work actitivity “What works with tackling worklessness” concludes that employer involvement is essential to successful delivery of welfare to work activities, especially around skills training. Across London there are a variety of initiatives that are seeking to impact on skills and employment by working with employers, including the London Skills and Employment Board and work stemming from the Olympics around the Employer Accord and the LETF – the CSP will seek to align with these initiatives and ensure it achieves maximum added value. Lone parents are a key priority for East London as elsewhere in the country. Workless lone parents comprise a significant portion of families in poverty, and much more needs to be done to support them moving into employment in London, as their employment rates have remained persistently low, unlike other parts of the UK. But there are also a large number of working families – especially couple families where only one parent is working – that live in poverty, and where there is not the range of employment support services to help them move out of poverty. There are also significant concentrations of workless couple families in the 5 boroughs. In particular, non-working partners in single-earner families comprise over 30% of the workless population in East London, and are in over 30% of families in poverty. Yet they are generally not receiving benefits, and are not in regular contact with any employment service. While lone parents and incapacity benefit recipients represent a large number of the families of children in poverty, and continue to be priority groups to help them access employment, they are already entitled to support through current New Deals, and other routes. There is no such offer for non-working partners in families in poverty. A new offer for these groups is needed. The offer must be simple and straightforward, to encourage voluntary take-up of support. This means providing holistic support for the barriers they may face such as childcare, basic skills, transport costs etc.

The package of service provision should be led by client demand with intelligence from interactions with clients driving the development of the offer to the individual. The idea is for local flexibility responding to demand variations, within an integrated scheme across the CSP area, enabling local areas to respond to local conditions in the most effective ways. Our aim is to design initiatives in such a way as to maximise take-up by all workless clients, and by parents in particular. The approach for this new offer needs to be based on tackling barriers to employment, in such a way that individuals can work with advisors to put together the right package to deal with the combination of barriers they face. The Consortium will need to ensure that an appropriate core offer of services is available to individuals when they first engage with the CSP: better off


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calculations, job brokerages, affordable childcare, debt and financial advice, training and transportation that will be needed to help people into work. Improved access for all families to the services they are entitled to is required. The CSP identified a range of options here:

- Minimal change: build on existing initiatives to align services in East London, and increase coordination within existing structures. Small cost and low disruption.

- Extending use of children’s’ centres and libraries. Maximise use and service provision of children’s centres, and other community centres. Early pro-active support to families.

- Piloting new single points of access to services. High street access, to maximize accessibility for those outside the system. Not JCP branded to reduce association with benefits.

- Piloting a network of branded single points of access based on a core ‘work-life balance’ offer to parents.

- Complete integration of access to services across the CSP area in single points of access open to all, with specific entitlements for benefit claimants and lower income families.

It should build on the good work already in place in a number of children’s centres. However, it is recognized that we cannot put all this work on them, as the primary aim of children’s centres is on learning for the children not employment for the parents. We also need to build on the links with Registered Social Landlords, for example in the Waltham Forest Working Futures project, in some parts of the CSP area. Our general conclusion is that, even with better connections to these other ‘spokes’ of outreach, new centres will be needed to manage this scale of throughput, that provide this holistic form of support within key communities, directly incentivised to engage with more families and other workless people. In addition, this CSP must align national or regional activity with this approach – in particular the roll-out of Pathways to Work in London, through contracts managed in DWP, and the Childcare Affordability Programme funded by the LDA. A focus on child poverty links closely with the themes in Workstream B, and how the services needed by workless individuals can be better integrated at the point of use. Given the existence of multiple barriers to employment, the effectiveness of any service to tackle worklessness will depend on the availability of other services. Clients should not have to deal simultaneously with a multiplicity of agencies to negotiate their way to overcoming their own barriers. It is recognised that achievement of more integrated access to the full range of services will be an important challenge for this CSP and one that needs to be linked through existing local service delivery arrangements. Extending the range of services to non-working partners will require investment. It may also bring new people into the benefit system, claiming JSA for the first time perhaps, and this may increase benefit payment levels in


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the short term. However, this is necessary to move towards longer-term public sector savings and employment growth. Sources of this funding are likely to come from one or more of: (i) efficiency savings realised through workstream B; (ii) reward payments for delivering improvements in service delivery, as requested in Workstream B; or (iii) new money from partners or Government.

3.2.3 Workstream B - Improving performance, coordination and strategic alignment of services:

This workstream will create an integrated and locally flexible provision of services in East London, reduce duplication and maximize on best practice and local relationships. To ensure this is fully effective, it is essential that the CSP, Local Area Agreements and other local arrangements are closely aligned. Key elements:

• Joint planning: the Consortium will closely align its business planning and commissioning processes, embedding the CSP priorities in their mainstream planning. It will agree a Joint Investment Plan, with the Consortium Board to agree / advise on any new contract being offered by partners or national agencies for any of the priority services for the CSP.

• Re-focused, aligned targets: the Consortium will change its targets to support this joined up approach and to reflect the new focus on families. It will refocus the existing Job Outcome Target (JOT) criteria for JCP to ensure reflection of family priority, and test employment outcome targets for FE colleges.

• Joint contracting: the CSP will maximise on the benefit of joint Consortium contracting power for the benefit of the wider client group including all working or workless families living in poverty. It will trial joint contracting for New Deal for Lone Parents with services offered to other parents in families in poverty. This will require flexibility in the service offer to reflect local variations and to ensure that delivery is responsive to specific client needs.

• Improving performance: the Consortium will argue for reward payments to the Consortium to incentivise performance improvements from existing resources, and share information on the best providers.

Rationale: Investment in East London on employment-related services across different public sector agencies is relatively high, yet it hasn’t made a significant impact on the long-term trends of worklessness and child poverty. This suggests that traditional approaches to commissioning are not meeting the specific needs of


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individuals which the Consortium’s proposals and interventions will seek to address. Improving the performance of existing investment in East London is a key priority for the CSP. This proposal looks at the ‘wiring’ behind investment in employment-related services, and specifically the commissioning and performance management systems of partners involved. It will look at ways to increase coordination and strategic alignment to maximise the impact of provision in the CSP area. These proposed changes to the ‘wiring’ are closely connected to the changes outlined above in workstream A, around a stronger focus of employment-related services on families. One third of New Deal clients are ‘returners’ to the New Deal. This reflects the high degree of churn that is characteristic of any flexible labour market, and the flow of people onto and off benefits. But in some instances, this shows that people are not finding sustainable employment even when they are helped into work by a New Deal. The proposals will look at ways to improve the sustainability of job outcomes, to increase the performance of the employment support system as a whole. Workstream A sets out the Consortium’s plans to introduce a new offer based on the New Deals to reach out to these workless groups, offering a package of tailored support that encourages them to take up the services voluntarily. To encourage more people to voluntarily take up these services, they will need to be offered in a much more integrated and coherent way, and may need to be delivered outside the current Jobcentre Plus offices. The proposal is not to significantly change the existing New Deal model for existing New Deal client groups. However, if the extended services are being offered in a new way in new locations, then it would be possible to move some of the existing New Deal delivery into these locations as well. This may also increase the efficiency of delivery. Thus, the Consortium aims to jointly commission for NDLP in particular with other services for parents – given the close links between support offered through NDLP and support needed by other parents. Ongoing research for the CSP into the array of such services within the 5 boroughs suggests a very complex, crowded and fragmented picture. There are dozens of often short-term, unrelated project-funded programmes and initiatives, all with an element of focus on employment and related activities. Taken together, they do appear to be addressing the employment support needs of excluded groups at just about every step in the journey back or into work – from initial awareness raising and confidence building, through vocational skills training, to job placement, job brokerage and in-work support. But, they are rarely joined up or jointly planned and so almost never delivered in a series of progressive, seamless steps. This means that we are not


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extracting as much value from these services as might be achieved under a different arrangement and re-alignment of resources. From an individual client’s perspective, this leads to variable quality and an inconsistent offer of support in some parts of the CSP area, compounded by a lack of comprehensive entitlements on some forms of support. This means that clients receive very different levels of support and service, depending on where they are based. To address this fragmentation, and enable services to be accessed by clients in an integrated way, the Consortium will adopt a number of proposals to bring together its business planning, targets, contracting and delivery arrangements.

3.2.4 Workstream C - Informing and measuring success

This workstream will aim to develop a performance management framework around the strategic and operational goals of the CSP. Key elements:

� The performance management framework will have established a

common set of principles whose implementation can be tracked using existing data sources and some measures of partnership development that can be continuously developed. There will also be robust evidence on ‘what works’.

� This will involve the identification of macro-trends in the area, measurement of product and process changes and recording the key lessons that are being learned.

� The framework will combine the process and product outcomes of the other workstreams and provide an holistic overview of all the activities. Client feedback will be part of the contribution of these workstreams and the destinations of individual clients will be an important outcome to be captured both numerically and through vignettes. A diagram of the proposed Management Framework is attached at Appendix 2.

Rationale: At present, partners appear to have a limited understanding of the performance management frameworks for other organisations so an initial sharing of current arrangements will form a good basis for common understanding. It is unlikely that the DWP National Evaluation approach will provide the level of detail that is needed for the “Hard/Product” indicators so this Consortium will develop this. One possible outcome of this could be a move towards shared target(s). Should this be the preferred route there will need to be a formal agreement over data sharing and client “tracking”.


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The CSP must demonstrate its impact, so that lessons can be learnt, and to be clear that it is delivering the improvements in outcomes and widened engagement with new groups as set out in this Business Plan. A new approach to designing services around barriers, as well as client groups, has implications for the evaluation evidence needed, and this will require detailed investigation and review to produce an optimum methodology. Shared data, longitudinal tracking and performance management systems will be needed to demonstrate and evaluate impact. Many stakeholders have also raised the issue around data sharing as a barrier to integrated delivery, as well as evaluation and monitoring. This critical element will be analysed further and appropriate, evidenced enabling measures will be prepared for submission. Table 17 - Interventions outlines all proposed interventions and maps them back to CSP strategic objectives demonstrating the link between the two. On initiation of the CSP wider participation and contribution within each workstream will provided by partners, with specialist organisations (including providers, health representatives, employers, voluntary and community sector agencies) invited to contribute and develop the CSP offerings to ensure they are demand-led and fit-for-purpose.

Table 17 - Interventions

Code Intervention SO1 SO2 SO3 SO4

A1 Introduce a “New Deal for Parents” (non-working partners and other workless people in families, whether or not currently included in any other New Deal.)

X X

A2

Introduce single points of access to services featured in all 5 Boroughs by: a) extending services in existing location, and b) introduce new service centres in key locations (where capacity is insufficient)

X X

A3 Extend entitlements to childcare support to lower income parents, engaged in work-related activity X

A4 Improving the quality, effectiveness and efficiency of work-focused vocational ESOL provision. X X

A5 Increase and improve employer involvement X

B1 Develop and agree a Joint Investment Plan X

B2 Refocus the existing Job Outcome Target (JOT) criteria for JCP to reflect family priority, and employment outcome targets for FE Colleges.

X

B3 Consortium partners to report – for Board approval – details of all forthcoming contracts for any priority services

X


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B4 Trial joint contracting for services to parents, to include the New Deal for Lone Parents. X

B5 Devolve decisions on national contracting on priority services where possible – especially Pathways to Work and ESF

X

B6 Reward payments to Consortium to incentivise performance improvements from existing resources X

B7 Map East London and London-wide skills initiatives and business support provision e.g. Employer Accord, Train2Gain, LEST, LSEB, Business Link

X

C1 Identify and disseminate examples of employers improving their competitiveness by addressing barriers to work, e.g. flexible working, childcare provision

X X

C2 Establish a Performance Management Framework X X X

3.3 Voluntary and Community Sector Engagement

The Voluntary and Community sector (VCS) has a significant role to play in the development and delivery of CSP interventions. The VCS reflects diverse communities and is an important partner in ensuring the CSP ensures equality of access to services, especially for those most in need. There are a range of roles that the VCS will assume, representing a wide target group and multiple service provision. The main roles to be played include:

• As a partner to the Consortium: East London Council for Voluntary Services (CVS) network is the sub regional network body for the 5 boroughs, with between 10-15,000 voluntary and community organisations in the 5 boroughs. Through active engagement in the workstreams driving the design and implementation of the CSP objectives, the CSP can ensure that expertise and guidance, plus hands on knowledge can be used to inform and advise CSP activity, to ensure it is fit for purpose and maximises on existing structures and initiatives.

• As an employer: The VCS is a significant local employer, with around 40,000 paid staff. Growth is predicted in this area, with at least an additional 7,000 employees and up to 200,000 volunteers by 2016, many of whom are people using volunteering as a first step towards employment. It is therefore essential that the sector is engaged in all aspects of development and delivery to ensure their needs as an employer are met.

• As a provider of services: The VCS has an increasing role in the delivery of public services, particularly supporting vulnerable and isolated individuals in the community for which training, advice, outreach and help getting into employment are notable service areas. We will seek to include the VCS in


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our engagement with service providers to secure front line feedback, plus as providers of quality services to CSP clients.

• As a point of access for people who are workless: The VCS often provides support to workless people, particularly those furthest away from accessing mainstream services. Representing those hardest to reach and communicating through their established chain of contact and trust with isolated communities, the VCS is well placed to represent a range of views of people who may not be engaged with the system. This makes the sector well placed to support local people access the 12,000 new jobs and 70,000 volunteering opportunities planned for East London by 2012. It is proposed that this CSP host exploratory thematic workshops and cross cutting focus groups with local VCS providers to ensure the CSP activity reflects the needs of clients engaged with VCS organisations.

3.4 Targets

Because of the amount of change taking place in East London (including high levels of in- and out-migration), it is difficult to account for the effects of other factors such as development around the Olympics, jobs growth in Stratford City as well as the likely continuance of financial and business service growth at Canary Wharf. Such upheaval reduces the appropriateness of historic trends, (usually the staple ingredient of predicting future growth) as a basis for estimating change. As such, the best way forward for setting target outcomes should be based on the detailed propositions for action that emerge from the workstreams, but at this stage of planning, setting the parameters that the target levels are likely to fall within is provided below. While the Consortium in no way wishes to set targets which are not challenging, it believes they should be regularly reviewed in the light of experience on a regular basis. There are four reasons for this:

I. The neighborhoods where target client groups live are those subject to the highest rates of mobility. Experience suggests that those who become successful tend to leave some neighborhoods and move away, making them difficult to count;

II. The attraction of east London as an historic destination for newly arrived communities often replacing those referred to in point (i) above;

III. The nature of some of the clients to be targeted will require a higher level and more highly resourced series of interventions before many can be deemed ‘job ready’.

The sheer scale of activity in the area means that there is a vast array of differing targets set for employment related interventions/activities from a number of different organisations . For example, the Hackney Local Area Agreement aims to reduce by 2 percentage points the benefit claimant rate in the Borough’s NRF district, a mandatory target shared by the boroughs in receipt of NRF. In other areas, these targets are supplemented by client


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specific employment outputs that tackle worklessness specific to that area. The other main targets for the region are those set in the London 2012 Local Employment and Training Framework. These targets, alongside mainstream JCP provision, contribute to an estimated general flow into work of approximately 17,700 unemployed people. This is from an unemployed base of around 143,000 benefit claimants across the area, and is based on estimates from JCP of the flow into work from each benefit group. This flow into work is still below the levels seen elsewhere in the country. As the remit of the City Strategy Pathfinder is to develop a system to meet the needs of the local population that are not met through the nationally administered “one size fits all” policy, it is appropriate to set targets that reflect the “amplification” effect of the CSP on these flows. , This City Strategy Pathfinder, combined with other labour market factors, should yield an increase from the current levels of workless people flowing into work to that of the upper quartile in England as at 2006. Current estimates (based on JCP job entry rates) suggest the flow of benefits claimants moving into work is 12.1% of the stock per annum. The CSP interventions aim to increase this flow to an average 15.4% per annum to 2012. This will lead to around an extra 4,600 people flowing into employment each year, and produce an increase of around 28,370 extra people in jobs by 2012. This will yield an estimated 2% rise in the employment rate to 63%. It is recognised that this change will not occur at once but is likely to depend on when changes are introduced and the time it takes them to bed in. An example of the type of incremental change expected in achieving the target over time is shown in Table 18 - Incremental change in those moving into work, and quantifies these guideline expectations.

Table Table 18 - Incremental change in those moving into work

2006/07 2007/08 2008/09 2009/10 2010/11 2011/12 2012/13 Total Additional people into work 0 567 1,702 3,404 5,106 7,666 9,929 28,370

Source: LDA calculations

The CSP will regularly review this headline target as the project progresses and more detailed plans are produced. At present, the performance management systems of those providing employment services are not set up to be able to measure impacts on child poverty, except in the case of lone parent job entries. The best way for this to


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be achieved would appear to be through an extension to the Job Outcome Target (JOT) methodology used by Jobcentre Plus. Data on the tax details of individuals in the JCP client groups are translated into Jobcentre Plus target scores by the Inland Revenue (the source of this information) and used to evaluate the performance of Jobcentre Plus. However, these data in a more raw form could, in theory, be used to track in more detail the absolute number of those affected. Further work is needed in identifying suitable targets to support the Pilot’s child poverty objectives, and the job entry targets set out above should not be seen as definitive. This will be undertaken in Workstream C.

3.5 Cross Cutting Themes

3.5.1 Diversity

The East London population is characterised by its rich diversity yet particular groups of local residents are more likely to be without work than others. These groups include: lone parents; people from Black, Asian or minority ethnic (BAME) communities; and people with health problems or disabilities. As such, the CSP is specifically geared to develop a more diverse workforce across employers and to address current disparities in employment. This will be achieved by:

� strengthening existing work with employers to encourage them to recruit local residents, so that their workforce reflects the diversity of local communities;

� pooling information about current vacancies so that all local residents can access the same information;

� ensuring that activity developed and delivered by ‘Diversity Works for London’ is shared across agencies and organisations working with employers in East London;

� improving residents’ access to work by making sure that information, advice and guidance (IAG) and other referral services are located in places that priority groups live and frequent; and

� developing a more coordinated and integrated pathway that is tailored to individual needs to help more local residents progress towards and into work.

An Equality Impact Assessment will be undertaken as a precursor to producing a delivery plan.

3.7.2 Health Promoting healthy living and supporting those with health related problems represent significant areas of interest for the CSP and will be developed further in the Implementation Plan. Poor health is strongly correlated with worklessness13. In 2005/06, more than 56,900 people or 8% of the working

13

GLA Economics (2005) Working Paper 15: Worklessness in London – Explaining the differences between worklessness in London and the UK


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age population claimed incapacity-related benefits14. As underlined in the recent DWP Welfare Reform Green Paper15, people on Incapacity Benefits (IB) face severe barriers to (re-) entering the workplace, as a person is more likely to die or retire than to find a new job. In order to support this vulnerable target group, we will work closely with the voluntary and health sectors to establish a clear understanding of the major health issues that prevent IB claimants from working. We will consolidate existing links with local health services and ensure they are fully integrated and coordinated into mainstream service delivery. This will support IB claimants in East London to better access advice and information about existing support services to help them stay in touch with the labour market.

3.7.4 Regeneration Significant levels of deprivation exist across East London as indicated earlier. Local residents of these areas are likely to experience multiple barriers to work and not be in contact with mainstream employment and training services.

The CSP will provide targeted support and services in these areas to support people towards and into work, and reduce local deprivation. This approach will, over time, reduce the number of people claiming benefits – particularly inactive benefits such as Income Support and Incapacity Benefit – and reduce the incidence of child poverty in London. We believe that the Pathfinder provides an excellent opportunity to support ongoing regeneration activity by boosting both economic and social regeneration, in terms of inclusion and community development.

3.7.5 Social Inclusion Tackling child poverty is one of the two overarching aims of the CSP. Across the East London boroughs, there are a number of people without work who are more likely to live in poverty. The Pathfinder presents a valuable and timely opportunity to help more people into work and also contribute to reducing child poverty in London. The VCS engagement with the Consortium will be fully integrated into our planning and implementation structures to ensure our work responds to the needs of isolated individuals who are at risk of social exclusion.

14

Incapacity Benefit and Severe Disablement Allowance 15

A New Deal for Welfare: Empowering People to Work, 2006


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4 GOVERNANCE AND MANAGEMENT

4.1 Governance - Overview

There are a number of high profile, significant initiatives currently being delivered and planned for the 5 Olympic borough area, and it is critical that the CSP aligns and enhances this activity to maximize on the impact and value for money achieved. A 5 Borough Partnership Board (5BPB) has been established to oversee and align strategy and initiatives already under development or in delivery, including the Local Employment and Training Framework (LETF) and will oversee the Child Affordability Programme (CAP), Deprived Area Funding (DAF) and other related initiatives. This brings together all existing Consortium Members involved in the development and implementation of the East and South East London CSP, including the regional tier (GLA and LDA). The governance of the CSP will be through this 5BPB. The scale, complexity and challenge of the CSP requires focus, guidance and involvement of the 5BPB to ensure the desired alignment, and local responsiveness, is achieved. A detailed Partnership Agreement will also be developed to supplement the Governance Protocol. To inform and respond to the direction set by the 5BPB, a Senior Officer Group (SOG) has been established. This high level group consists of senior members of key Consortium organisations. The role of this SOG and its membership is outlined below. To support and inform the 5BPB, and to work alongside the SOG, a dedicated, high calibre Programme Office team with significant leadership capability and credibility across all partner agencies is being recruited, to supplement resource already committed by partners. The Business Plan provides funding for the recruitment of this resource. The organizational structure established, summarized below, provides clear accountabilities and defines the roles and responsibilities of Consortium partners, to ensure that decision making and governance is effective and in alignment with local objectives, focusing on the delivery of high quality initiatives to support the worklessness challenge in the 5 Host Boroughs.


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East & South East London CSP Governance Structure

4.2 Membership of the Board

The 5BPB is Chaired by the Leader of Greenwich Council, Councillor Chris Roberts, and comprises membership from the following organisations :

� Each of the 5 Host Boroughs (Cabinet level) � Greater London Authority (Senior Mayoral Advisor) � London Development Agency (Director) � Olympic Development Authority (Head of Procurement) � London Organizing Committee for the Olympic Games (HR Director) � Learning and Skills Council (Director) � Job Centre Plus (Director) � East London Business Alliance (with additional business representation

as agreed) (Chief Executive) � Trade Union Council (through South East Region TUC).

It is proposed that a Director-level representative of the Accountable Body attends Board meetings in an observer capacity. Information on the make up of the 5BPB is in Appendix 11.

4.3 Membership of the Senior Officer Group

This group will be chaired by the Programme Director appointed to lead the Programme Office team, and will comprise senior level representatives from key Consortium member organisations:


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5 Host Borough Unit (Executive Director) LDA GLA JCP LSC 1 x Borough representative (at Director / Head of level). This SOG will discharge guidance to the 5BPB, respond to its direction in terms of strategy, ensure alignment of initiatives is maximized, and prioritise interventions for 5BPB sign off. This Group, comprising senior level representation of key funders in the CSP territory, will review opportunities for alignment of targets, resources and funding, and highlight areas of underperformance, making recommendations to the 5BPB to rectify same.

This Group will also have access to resource within member organisations, and as such, will direct internal resource to research, align and adjust activity to fit with CSP initiatives and objectives as much as possible. As required the Programme Director will meet with the Chair of the 5BPB. This meeting will also be attended by the Executive Director of the 5 Host Borough Unit to maximise on alignment with other local activity.

4.4 Programme Office Team

A Programme Office team is currently being recruited to lead on the implementation of the CSP Implementation Plan, and act as the key point of contact and direction for the 5BPB and the SOG. Operating between these two bodies, the Programme Office will ensure effective communication and consultation occurs between Consortium partners, and will comprise 1 Programme Director, 1 Senior Project Manager and 1 Coordinator/Administrator. Recruitment of the Programme Director is well advanced, and an appointment is expected shortly. The Senior Project Manager has been appointed and commences employment on 1 April 2007. Recruitment for the Coordinator/ Administrator has not yet been initiated.

Detailed Role Profiles for the Programme Director and Senior Project Manager are attached herewith at Appendix 6.

4.5 Accountable Body

The Accountable Body function will be performed by the London Borough of Hackney. Hackney Council has excellent experience of acting as Accountable Body and a first class track record in carrying out these functions. In recent years Hackney has been accountable body for a wide ranging set of regeneration programmes including but not restricted to City Challenge, 3 SRB programmes, a New Deal for Communities programme and, most recently, Neighbourhood Renewal programmes. The Council has realised unqualified audits in respect of these programmes.


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As accountable body, Hackney will take on the following responsibilities.

• Propriety and regularity;

• Ensuring proper use of funds for defined purposes;

• Maintenance of records and the audit of accounts. Hackney will require that the programme is tightly measured through:

• The quarterly monitoring of spend and the KPIs being identified by the Performance Management Framework;

• The quarterly monitoring of the outcomes required by the Council’s contracts and/or service level agreements;

• The quarterly monitoring of performance of individual projects in terms of milestones and delivery of outcomes.

This measurement will be managed by the CSP Programme Office and be distributed to the 5BPB and the Accountable Body on a monthly basis Responsibility for overseeing the Accountable Body function will fall to the Assistant Director of Regeneration and Planning who, along with a senior officer management role and supporting monitoring officers, will ensure the above procedures are followed. The AD will report to the monthly Capital Board which scrutinises all of the Council’s Accountable Body functions including the Corporate Finance Director. The Council has a framework agreement in place which will allow it to bring in additional resources to support the core team at no notice should work loads suddenly exceed expectation. Sound arrangements are in place for:

• Contracting

• Making payments

• Monitoring performance and spend

• Maintaining records

• Performance reporting

• Reclaiming expenditure

• Review and evaluation

• Responding to audit requirements. As a partnership will be administering this programme a Service Level Agreement will spell out:

• Roles, responsibilities and accountability

• Services to be delivered by each party

• Timescales

• Monitoring and review arrangements.


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4.6 Roles and Responsibilities

Clear roles and responsibilities of the 5BPB and its sub-groups are critical to ensure that decisions are taken swiftly and from an informed basis. In addition, clear routes of escalation for issues arising have been identified. Detailed definition of the above can be found in the Governance protocol.

4.7 Performance and Financial Management

Through its work to date, the Consortium has identified its policy approach and key interventions to deliver the CSP objectives. Management of this Implementation Plan will be overseen by the Programme Office Team using the Performance Management Framework being developed (in Workstream C). This framework:

• Determines a common set of principles (governing priorities, targets and information sharing) to be adopted by all service providers.

• Determines protocols for the reporting of stakeholder activity to the Programme Director each quarter.

• Determines Key Performance Indicators (KPI) on the overall performance of the CSP programme

• Tracks (quantative and qualitative) targets for structural reform and individual client progression in line with CSP objectives (for each of the business plan workstreams)

The key information to be tracked will include:

1) Macroeconomic information - To provide an overview of the economic conditions in the area and idea of the overall impact of the programme outputs.

2) Measurements and milestones of product and process changes and the outcomes of these changes

3) The lessons learnt and information from the evaluations of the Pathfinder at a local and national level.

The Programme Office Team will be established to provided dedicated support to the CSP, and as such will develop and implement effective systems and procedures to monitor and measure progress and achievements during the lifetime of the CSP. This team will also be the central point through which best practice will be shared, not only amongst the 5 Boroughs, but also more widely via the London Development Agency, for the benefit of the other London CSP (West London Working) and other London boroughs not participating in the CSPs. Information will be provided to and collated by the Programme Office Team by service providers and partners each month, and KPI reports presented to the 5BSPB and SOG each quarter along with Exception Reports which will identify and detail any underperformance. Remedial action will be determined by the 5BSPB and actioned via the Programme Office Team. The Programme Office team will also be responsible for leading on the


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investigation and roll out of a cross-CSP partner data capture and performance management system. The Programme Office Team will be responsible for monitoring and reporting on performance and progress, outputs achieved, and spend.

4.8 Administrative Budget

Set out in Table 19 - Administrative budget (2006/07 - 2007/08) is the administrative budget (2006/07 - 2007/08) which includes set up and running costs for the CSP. Administrative costs beyond this point will be met by partner organisations. In addition, the re-investment of reward payments, a key source of future funding, will be reviewed once further clarity is received from DWP. Table 19 - Administrative budget (2006/07 - 2007/08) Total Total Total

(2006/07) (2007/08)

Staffing

Chief Executive/Programme Director* 0 103,200 103,200

Project Manager* 0 59,340 59,340

Admin/Coordinator * 0 32,250 32,250

Recruitment 0 20,000 20,000

Training / Conferences 0 4,000 4,000

Travel / Expenses 0 2,800 2,800

Sub total 0 221,590 221,590

Operational Costs

Communications 0 6,000 6,000

Evaluation 0 15,000 15,000

Consultancy 48,900 20,000 68,900

Meetings / Conferences 2,000 5,000 7,000

Audit 0 5,000 5,000

Sub total 50,900 51,000 101,900

TOTAL 50,900 272,590 323,490 * Includes on costs at 29%

Seedcorn Allocation from DWP is 2007-08 £110,000 2008-09 £210,000

4.9 Other funding

The DWP newly created Deprived Area Fund (DAF) provides the only significant new funding to the CSPs, aside from the seedcorn (allocated for set up and running costs). DAF is a discretionary fund that, within CSP areas, is under the direct control of the CSP Consortium. In East London, this control is exercised by the 5BPB.


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DAF has been calculated for each CSP and the East London allocations have been confirmed as follows: 2006/07 £1,866,481 (some carry forward has been authorised and is

currently being calculated) 2007/08 £5,718,250 It is the intention of the CSP that contracting for expenditure of this DAF is with service providers who align with the CSP strategy and objectives, and assist in the delivery of the CSP initiatives. It is imperative that DAF is utilised swiftly and efficiently to fill gaps in provision or fund new initiatives, as delays will only compound the worklessness challenge that we face.

4.10 Risk Management

The nature of the instruction from Ministers to be radical, innovative and creative in our approach to the CSP naturally dictates an element of risk that is needed in order to achieve this objective. In order to track risk appropriately and proactively, a comprehensive risk register will be maintained at a Programme and Project level, and will be monitored monthly by the SOG, with areas of high risk highlighted to the 5BPB in a monthly report submitted. See Appendix 3 for a full risk assessment and management analysis.

4.11 Implementation Timeline


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At Appendix 10, a detailed Implementation Timetable is provided, with key milestones highlighted. This will form the basis from which priorities will be established, and KPIs will be assigned.


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5 CONSULTATION, COMMUNICATIONS AND LEARNING

5.1 Consultation

This Business Plan has been designed and developed with a wide range of partners actively engaged within the Consortium. Each of the workstreams has been led to date by a specific Consortium member, but continues to require the engagement of all members of the Consortium. Other agencies have been brought into the discussions to ensure local expertise is maximized where necessary. Throughout the Implementation stage the views of all partners will be sought and included in the design process. A key component of each intervention design will be to ensure that there are mechanisms for residents, employers and service providers to feedback on the effectiveness of the interventions. This will take place before interventions are rolled out, but also during the implementation stage to ensure that an ongoing review of services is in place. As such, feedback mechanisms will form an integral part of the contracting process. Regular and frequent dialogue will be developed and maintained between the CSP and the LAA theme groups operating within each of the 5 boroughs. This will ensure overlap and confusion is minimized, and that initiatives, resource and funding align. Attached at Appendix 7 are the outline briefs for preparation and delivery of 3 core focus groups, which will be revisited for the duration of the CSP period:

- Residents (focusing on families with children) – draft specification to be sent to contractors for tender;

- Employers (focusing on SMEs) – overview and objectives for focus groups (delivery partner to be agreed – ELBA to assist);

- Providers – overview and objectives for focus plus initial attendee list.

5.2 Communications

Communicating the CSP plans and progress amongst stakeholders within the CSP area will utilise a variety of methods and approaches. As well as the focus groups identified above, stakeholders at every level will be engaged and awareness raised as to the progress of the CSP and its initiatives. This activity will be co-ordinated by the Senior Project Manager within the Programme Office team. Plans will continue to be enhanced within workstream C activity, but initial plans include:

a. Newsblog – It is proposed that going forward, all Consortium partners contribute key contact details to the Programme Office, to include them on a master mailing list to receive a quarterly e-Newsletter relevant to


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the CSP. These names will be added to the circulation list for a CSP newsblog in due course;

b. Pan London Employer group – much interest in the CSPs has been

shown by a number of London employer groups, including Business in the Community, London First, East London Business Alliance, etc. Much work is currently under away across London to utilise the knowledge and expertise of these groups, as well as engaging in employers in all sectors. The SP will ensure close alignment with existing borough-led and partner-led initiatives, as well as maximise on the work being undertaken by the London 2012 Employment & Skills Taskforce that is introducing an Employer Accord;

c. Small networking events - a number of key organisations are

engaged with the CSP on the periphery, and will be impacted and engaged in the delivery of some of the CSP actions. It is proposed that a number of small, niche networking groups be established to engage these partners, and share information and thinking about how best to develop the CSP, specifically with their market in mind. For example, a first event will be hosted for members of the voluntary and community sector, with another for academic partners, and another for those involved with housing and benefits. These niche groups will be invited to engage and learn from the CSP and its activities, as well as inform the development of specific interventions and initiatives as required;

d. Focus Groups – Cross cutting focus groups will be established, and a

schedule of engagement created, to inform and assist with the design of the CSP work streams, their timetables and outputs. This will include engagement with both groups of CSP customers – representative from our target groups (lone parents, incapacity benefit claimants etc), and employers. It is recognised that only by understanding the requirements of individual clients (including employers), can the workstreams be properly developed to meet the needs articulated in this Business Plan. As well as inviting them to comment on their experiences of the CSP’s activity, it will also be used as an opportunity to gather ideas and suggestions as to how the service provided by public (and private sector providers) can be improved to better serve our client’s needs. These focus groups are outlined in more detail in Appendix 7 as referred to above;

e. Internal Partner Updates – members of the CSP Senior Officer Group

will, as part of their remit, be encouraged to share CSP progress, learning and best practice within their organisations. In addition, they will provide feedback and suggestions back to the SOG and 5BPB.

f. Staff Development Workshops – it is proposed that key CSP partners

with responsibility for delivery will each run a series of staff development workshops to ensure staff capability and understanding of the CSP and its objectives is maximised, and individual learning needs


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identified This will also assist in maximising alignment with existing partner priorities and initiatives;

g. City and East London – JCP has an external partner/stakeholder

newsletter than can feature CSP updates. In addition, all districts are involved with external client support groups via borough-wide or district-wide events, mostly quarterly;

h. Union Learning Representatives – There are several hundred Union

Learning Representatives (ULRs) in the 5 borough area, covering a wide range of employers in a variety of sectors. URLs provide information and advice to union members of learning opportunities, and work with employers to stimulate work-based learning. They will provide a useful resource for communicating new employment and skills initiatives to many employees and employers, where appropriate;

i. Ad hoc Communication Requirements – It will be inevitable that

communications outside those scoped above will be required at points during the lifetime of the CSP. For example, Ministerial or Mayoral visits to the CSP area are expected, and promotion of these will be undertaken as appropriate.

5.3 Learning and Sharing Best Practice

It is recognised that the lessons learned from the CSP will have wide reaching benefit to the remaining 28 London boroughs. There are a number of planned activities to share this learning:

a. The LDA is leading on the coordination of both London CSPs, and will ensure that learning between both of these CSPs is maximised and shared; this will be facilitated through the internal CSP LDA team that has been recruited and is in post;

b. Both London CSPs will develop ideas and initiatives that can be shared

with other London boroughs on an ongoing basis. The CSP proposes to host a London seminar every quarter, to draw together not only the two London Consortia, but also invited representatives from other London boroughs, to share practice and learning, and to update colleagues on progress and developments. It is proposed that this event will be supported by invited speakers from relevant industry or partner organisations, each of whom can bring a varying input on the impact, benefits, challenges etc of being involved in a CSP;

c. In August 2006, the GLA and LDA co-hosted a workshop that

considered how the CSPs can directly impact on child poverty, given the priority of the DWP to consider this within the City Strategy development. Representatives from both London CSPs were in attendance, and speakers included representatives from the DWP, GLA and The London Child Poverty Commission. The workshop was


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facilitated by the Centre for Economic and Social Inclusion (CESI) and a report from the workshop has been shared with other CSPs across the country. (For copies of this report, please contact [email protected]). The LDA is keen to ensure that events such as this continue to be scheduled as the need arises, and will monitor needs and facilitate the setting up of these sessions as required.

d. Active participation in thematic workshops between all CSP areas have

been scheduled and coordinated by DWP, as well as the establishment of enabling measures sub groups. The CSP is keen to engage with other CSP areas to share learning and best practice, and also seek advice and guidance as challenges arise. Initial discussions are in train, led by the LDA, to engage with colleagues nationally. In addition, the CSP is keen to be engaged in any centrally organised events that bring CSP areas together and would welcome advice as to the DWP’s response to this request;

e. Discussions are scheduled with colleagues in Manchester, to discuss

the practicalities of twinning with the Greater Manchester CSP, given the obvious synergies of both cities hosting significant sporting events. It is envisaged that an informal relationship will be established to share best practice, and compare and contract approaches to optimise on the services delivered.

Learning will be identified by the Programme Office team, working in conjunction with colleagues in the Senior Officer Group and partner organisations. This learning will be sourced from and align not only with the findings of the focus groups (as outlined above), but with the monthly reporting provided by the Programme Office on performance, and the ongoing work of colleagues participating in Workstream C – Informing and Measuring Success. The CSP Senior Project Manager will work closely with the LDA Senior Project Manager to share this learning, so that it may be shared more widely, not only with the West London CSP, but with the other London boroughs as outlined above.

5.4 Review and Evaluation

Discussions have taken place with DWP Evaluation lead in Sheffield, and the CSP will explore how alignment with central DWP evaluation activity can best be achieved. In addition, the CSP will seek to evaluate project and partner performance locally, and this will be developed within Workstream C. The evaluation framework being developed in Workstream C has been shared with DWP in Sheffield.

The CSP will undertake regular evaluation on the impact and benefits achieved as a result of the CSP and its approach, interventions and alignment


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opportunities. This evaluation will be led by Workstream C under the leadership of the LSC, and will assess performance against our Strategic Objectives and individual intervention implementation plans. In addition to monitoring performance in terms of outputs and target achievement, the CSP will also monitor the following criteria: - Maximisation of aligned funding; - Capture and utilisation of best practice; - Risk log – raising and swift resolution of issues; - Alignment of partner targets and, ultimately where possible, funding

cycles; - Fulfillment of Strategic Objectives.


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6 NEXT STEPS The Consortium will continue to drive and develop the activities outlined in this plan. Detailed planning is now under way to develop the proposals made, and begin implementation. Whilst development is in progress, the CSP will endeavour to deliver the early wins highlighted in the Interventions tables (see Appendix 9). The CSP would welcome early insight into the approval of enabling measures requests made on a national basis, to inform our planning process. If you have any questions on this Business Plan, please contact: Rebecca Shepheard Eryl Smith London Development Agency 5 Host Borough Unit Tel: 07976 081029 Tel: 07836 294963 Email: [email protected] Email: [email protected]

30 March 2007


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Glossary LSEB – London Skills and Employment Board The LSEB is chaired by the Mayor of London, Ken Livingstone. The Board’s membership is predominantly large employers. The Board’s powers were confirmed in a letter from the Secretary of State for Education and Skills on the 13th July 2006 and the 26 members of the board were announced on the 5th December 2006. LEST – London Employment and Skills Taskforce The London Employment and Skills Taskforce (LEST) uses the opportunity and momentum created by the 2012 Games to support work to tackle worklessness and to break down the barriers to employment. LEST sets out how London can build on the special opportunity presented by the 2012 Games to make a permanent reduction in the level of worklessness across the city, and to achieve this it sets out actions for improving the integration and focus of skills and employment work in London. The alignment of the CSP and LEST is particularly key given the matching geographies of the CSP and the 5 Olympic Boroughs. LEST produced a final plan in August 2006 , setting out actions to maximise the employment and skills benefits of the 2012 Games in London. The Taskforce has now disbanded, having completed its report, and proposed that overall ownership of implementation of the LEST report and future strategies for skills and employment is with the Mayor’s Skills and Employment Board for London, working with a small business led group to drive progress. Train-to-Gain Over the last decade, the division of responsibilities between government, employers and individuals has continued to evolve. A major recent innovation has been the introduction of the Train-to-Gain service offering employers workplace training to meet their needs, with public subsidy for training for Level 2 qualifications and support for wider training beyond that level. The Leitch Review has found that the skills and employment systems, which should work in tandem to improve people’s job chances, are disjointed. Out of work support is not joined up with in work support. There are ineffective links between someone moving into work from the New Deal and in-work support such as Train to Gain that can help them stay in work and progress as the Leitch review proposes. This CSP will start to bridge this gap. 5BPB – 5 Borough Partnership Board LSC – Learning and Skills Council LDA – London Development Agency JCP – Jobcentre Plus DWP – Department of Work and Pensions


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GLA – Greater London Authority LSP – Local Strategic Partnership LAA – Local Area Agreement

Each of the 5 local authorities has a Local Strategic Partnership in existence which brings together the CSP consortium members and others at a local level to oversee the development and implementation of Local Area Agreements. Each of the 5 Boroughs in the East CSP area has a LAA in place and include actions and targets relating to worklessness. The aim through the East CSP is to reinforce the work of LSPs across their work as it impacts on worklessness and other core areas & to support them in achieving their LAA targets. This is a two-way relationship. The CSP consortium can assist the LSPs build the case for new enabling powers, the implementation of new approaches and commitment to the alignment of funds. LSPs will help to inform the overall direction of the CSP, implement new CSP approaches locally and contribute to the delivery of the overall CSP objectives. This is demonstrated in the proposal for Single Points of Access, which is described in Appendix 8.

The close involvement of the LSPs ensures that many of key local stakeholders are engaged in tackling issues that impact on worklessness and child poverty. It also allows wider range of issues, particularly preventative issues such as teenage pregnancy, alcohol and drug dependency, community safety, health and housing to be brought to bear in achieving the CSP objectives.

This approach is consistent with the increasing importance the government is placing on Local Area Agreements. It will ensure synergy between mandatory targets in the LAAs on worklessness and the reduction in benefit claimants in the most deprived wards – which in the case of the East London CSP covers much of the area, and CSP objectives

The ‘refresh’ process also allows CSP priorities to be incorporated in LAAs – for example introducing local targets and actions that related to Child Poverty. This refresh process will commence from next year.

ELBA – East London Business Alliance


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Appendix 1 – Top third of East London workless wards


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Appendix 2 - Performance Management Framework

Performance Management Framework (v.1.1) Possible Indicators

Process (structural reforms)

Product (people into jobs)

Hard • Shared targets

• Joint planning

• Joint commissioning

• Redesigned and joint service delivery

• Shared data/ MI/ CRM systems

• Changes in employer recruitment and wfd practices

• Longitudinal tracking system

• Employment rate rise

• Reductions in child poverty

• Reductions in NEETs

• No. into sustained employment

• Reduction in benefit ‘churn’

• No. gaining vocational quals

• No. employers engaged/ committed

• No. new work experience opportunities created

• No. employers sharing job vacancy information

• No. employers committing to new wfd programmes

• Career progression rates

Soft

• Improved partnership working

• Greater mutual understanding

• Growing trust and confidence for individuals and employers

• Cultural change

• Increasing engagement with those not engaged with the system

• Client confidence levels grow

• Individual client aspirations/ horizons change

OUTCOMES

M E A S U R E S

(KPIs)


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Appendix 3 – Risk Management

EAST CSP - RISK REGISTER

Risk Cat.

Description

Impact

Raised

By

Date

Raised

Date

Updated

Mitigation

Resolution

by

Status

RAG

1. H Enabling measures requested not granted by central government

Inability to be radical and innovative Commitment of partners reduced/eliminated

RS 291106 291106 Active engagement with DWP to progress requests and where not granted, seek alternative approach

010407 A

2. H Lack of funding for interventions due to non-release of funding by partners

Unable to deliver to target due to lack of funds

RS 291106 291106 Analysis of partner funding and identification of funds Appropriate enabling measures requested

010407 A

3. M Insufficient resource to manage increased volume of individuals through new systems

Inability to process volume to achieve desired outputs

RS 291106 291106 010407 A

4. H Funding from DWP (seedcorn and DAF) not released in time to spend appropriately

Loss of funding Loss of opportunity Achievement of targets compromised

RS 291106 291106 Decision from DWP required urgently – Consortium to chase actively for resolution

310107 A

5. M Lack of momentum due to time required

Loss of interest by partners

RS 291106 291106 Milestone interventions and stagger roll out

010407 A


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to establish systems and processes

Targets not achieved

6. M Priority for CSPs diminished due to change of government commitment and priorities

Reduced support for CSPs As a consequence, lack of support/participation by partners

RS 291106 291106 Keep abreast of changes with DWP and maintain communication channels

Ongoing A

7. M

Loss of focus due to various competing/ complementary initiatives

Resource wrongly assigned Resourcing pressures on partners

RS 291106 291106 Ensure clarity between various targets achieved and sustained

Ongoing A

8. M

Project Requires strong leadership and supporting structure

Wiithout this focussed drive the programme could stall

ES 061206 071206 Engage dedicated project team who can drive activity and ensure alignment with other local initiatives

300307 A

Notes: 1. Risk Categories are: Unacceptable (U);

High (H); Medium (M); Low (L)

2. Status is: Active (A); Completed (C); Cancelled (CA); Suspended (S)

3. RAG: Red = Mitigating actions not sufficient to manage risk, Amber = Mitigating actions likely to meet risk, but needs careful review Green = Mitigations expected to meet risk


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Appendix 4 – Case studies and proposed interventions Case Study Barriers Proposed CSP intervention

Lone Parent: 4 children; some work experience 10 years previously now on JCP caseload. Typical of many lone parents - wants work as care assistant – part time and local. Customer wants to use experience as stepping stone to job in elderly care but does not have NVQ level 2 demanded by almost all employers

• Require flexibility in working hours

• Require flexible and affordable childcare provision – access, type, affordability, location

• Low skilled, requires NVQ2 to progress in work

• Unsure of financial gains of work when combined with loss of benefits

• Need work experience

• Education

• Introduce ‘New Deal for Parents’ (non-working partners and other workless people in families not currently included in any other New Deal. [A1]

• Introduce single points of access to services featured in all 5 boroughs by (a) extending services in existing locations and (b) introduce new service centres in key locations [A2]

• Extend entitlements to childcare support to lower income parents, engaged in work-related activity. [A3]

• Refocus the existing Job Outcome Target (JOT) criteria for JCP to reflect family priority, and test employment outcome targets for FE colleges. [B2]

• Trial joint contracting for services to parents, to include New Deal for Lone Parents [B4]

• Remove eligibility criteria to ensure needs of individual met [A1]

• Introduce a case worker to work with individual into and whilst in work [A1]


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Case Study Barriers Proposed CSP intervention

IB Claimant:

Worked for 15 years and suffered from a nervous breakdown –off work for 6 months after which he decided to resign. His mental health condition was quite bad (depression) and it took him 3 months from when his SSP finished before he made a claim.

• Cannot work in a pressurised environment and doesn’t want to be around too many people.

• Employers attitudes around perceived risks rather than potential benefits

• Need for work placement/trials

• Basic skills

• Condition management

• Employer understanding

• Employer awareness of support, including financial, available

• Customer unaware of support available

• Extension of work trials/placements to reduce risks from employers point of view and increase customer confidence

• Ensure that “Pathways to Work” delivery is included in the joint procurement process – including in work support and mentoring [B5]

• Introduce single points of access to services featured in all 5 boroughs by (a) extending services in existing locations and (b) introduce new service centres in key locations [A2]

• Develop and agree Joint Investment Plan [B1]

• Better employer engagement [A5]

• Remove eligibility criteria to ensure needs of individual met. [A1]


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Large public sector employer: This case study illustrates the barriers and interventions from an employer’s point of view.

• Attitudes and perceived risks of employing CSP customers

• Perceived as more expensive to employ people part-time

• Inflexible employment conditions; unsociable hours

• Inflexible initial training

• To process applications need CVs, which for many workless people are blank.

• Confusion over numbers of providers, relevance of assistance

• Lack of awareness (among providers /agencies) of employer recruitment requirements results in mismatch of supplied candidates.

• Lack of recruitment and workforce development support mechanisms for SMEs

• Lack of awareness of assistance, services and support, including financial inducements

Lack of qualified applicants

• Extension of work trials/placements to reduce risks from employers point of view and increase customer confidence through workplace experience

• Enhance links with London Employer Accord and use their account managers. [??]

• Identify sectors involved in large scale recruitment and where flexible shift patterns might appeal where childcare is an issue [C1]

• Introduce a case worker to work with individual in to and whilst in work.


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NEET/18-24: Living in a hostel the customer is an ex offender and has not been able to find work. Has suffered with depression due to this.

The customer is also lacking in life skills and can be aggressive due to frustration.

The customer wants help with anger management and would like to take up a work trial to get some experience to put on his CV.

• Housing issues

• Lacks confidence

• Depression due to lack of work

• Anger management

• Employer’s attitudes

• Attitude (inc apathy and aggression)

• Family pressures

• Cultural issues

• Motivation

• Confidence (inc previous bad school experiences)

• Poor educational standards

• Mental health

• Basic skills

• Extension of work trials/placements to reduce risks from employers point of view and increase customer confidence through workplace experience

• Introduce single points of access to services featured in all 5 boroughs to improve link between housing, training and employment advice and other counselling or other condition management. [A2]

• Improving the quality, effectiveness and efficiency of work-focused vocational training (including Skills for Life training and ESOL). [A4]




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JSA – 25+: Customer born in this country but bought up in another country. Recently granted right to stay with their family. Currently living with family while waiting for their own accommodation.

The customer has limited spoken English and no written English. They have been improving their English on an ESOL course.

The customer was previously employed in the building trade but the English construction industry is very different to what the customer is used to. They are open to doing other work but lacking in confidence and qualifications.

• ESOL

• Lacking confidence

• Housing

• Skills mismatch/different requirement but in the same industry

• Unqualified for other work as no relevant experience

• No/poor work history

• Previous employment no longer available

• Unrealistic/inflexible work expectations

• Poor educational standards

• Health issues (but not sufficient to exclude from JSA)

• Domestic issues

• Language issues

• Debt

• Alcohol addiction/misuse

• Few transferable skills

• Attitude

• Confidence/motivation

• Improving the quality, effectiveness and efficiency of work-focused vocational training (including skills for life and ESOL provision) [A4]

• Introduce single points of access to services featured in all 5 boroughs to improve link between housing, training and employment advice including assessment for alternative employment [A2]




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Non-Claimant / Non-Engaged (illustrative as by

definition not involved/engaged with any agency) Customer not looking for work but not claiming benefit. Does not get the sign posting that benefit customers get from JCP. JCP Leaflets in a lot of cases are not relevant to the customer as they relate to benefit claimants. Do not have access to same range of services or advisory support as benefit claimants do. JCP Customer’s main access to job opportunities is via job points, internet and telephone (Jobseekers

Direct). There are other customers not engaged with any agency and whilst unable to provide case history the barriers shown opposite have been captured via reports/surveys and the experience of Action Teams and Ethnic Minority Outreach programmes

• Not engaged in the system so cannot be identified for support

• Potential cultural issues

• Childcare costs and access

• Family/Caring responsibilities

• Access to information and in work benefit advice

• Awareness of benefit entitlements and access to services/programme

• Implications on benefit/tax credit position • ESOL, Language issues • Basic Skills • Jobs with flexible work patterns • Poor work history • Transferable skills

• Confidence/motivation • Health

• Introduce single points of access to services featured in all 5 boroughs. [A2]

• Develop and introduce ‘New Deal for Parents’ (non-working partners and other workless people in families not currently included in any other New Deal.) [A1]

• Extend entitlements to childcare support to lower income parents, engaged in work-related activity. [A3]

• Improving the quality, effectiveness and efficiency of work-focused vocational training (including Skills for Life training and ESOL). [A4]

• Refocus the existing Job Outcome Target (JOT) criteria for JCP to reflect family priority, and test employment outcome targets for FE colleges.[B2]

• Trial joint contracting for services to parents, to include New Deal for Lone Parents [B4]

• Employer focused skills development and training provision and link with Train to Gain to progress in work. [??]



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Appendix 5 - Employment related funding and outputs for LSC and JCP in the 5 East London boroughs

Table 9: Employment related funding and outputs for LSC and JCP in the 5 East London boroughs16

Learning and Skills Council

Areas of funding Amount (£m)

% Outputs

Skills for Life/entry

55.4 28.7 94,804*

Level 1 28.9 15 22,565* Level 2 36.5 18.9 18,610* PCDL/ACL 4.8 2.5 n/a Unknown level 8.7 4.5 26,871* Total – all employment related provision

134 69.5 162,850

Remit: Funding for post-16 adult and further education, and basic skills (FE learners only)

Level 3/ 4 (majority school sixth forms)

58.9 30.5 21,424*

Jobcentre Plus Lone parents ** ** 2482 Incapacity benefit ** ** 770 Other inactive ** ** 136 Jobseekers Allowance - New deal

** ** 4321

EZ ** ** 922 Others with disabilities

** ** 1066

Unemployed over 6 months

** ** 1842

Remit: Employment support and job brokerage, benefit administration, financial advice. Outreach.

Jobseekers Allowance – short term

** ** 4605

Non-claimants ** ** 3236 Employed ** ** 286 Total

employment related spend (excluding benefit values)

£42.2 m

16

Estimated staff cost for agencies (as well as contract costs) included in funding profile.


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Source: UKRP, November 2006 * actual achievements for 2004-5 (latest available until February 2007) ** currently JCP data across the 5 boroughs does not allow for this data


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Appendix 6 – Staff role profiles

CITY STRATEGY PATHFINDER ROLE PROFILE

Job Title: Programme Director – INTERVIEWS IN PROGRESS The vision of the City Strategy Pathfinders is to achieve a sustainable increase in the number of people in employment, particularly families with children, and to reduce child poverty, through structural transformation in how support systems are designed and delivered. The demand led initiatives piloted by the London Pathfinders are intended to lead to sustainable employment for those currently out of work and who wish to work. To achieve this significant structural transformation, a wide reaching change programme must be designed and implemented, across all partner organisations. Purpose of the Role

• Lead and drive, with partners, the development and implementation of change management plans and the business process reengineering of the multi-agency systems, supporting residents to secure work in line with the strategic objectives of the London City Strategy Pathfinders.

Principal Accountabilities

1. Through understanding the environment in which the two Pathfinders are operating, proactively undertake needs identification / problem analysis and design and drive the implementation of a comprehensive and complete change management programme to alter the way services are delivered to better meet resident and employer needs;

2. Identify, secure and monitor funding to support the change programme

objectives from partners, to enhance or replace existing offerings within the Pilot geographical area, and build on existing good practice;

3. Identify and utilise external and internal intelligence to develop better

customer oriented systemic solutions for residents and employers;

4. Coordinate stakeholder and resident/employer engagement, communication, and PR associated with Pathfinder activity;


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5. Convince, inspire and motivate the multitude of stakeholders and partners

providing services to residents and employers;

6. Act as interface between Strategic Board and programme Office, and the accountable body for each Pathfinder;

7. Ensure that appropriate project management disciplines are in place.

Ensure all potential risks are identified, managed and reflected within the workstream plans;

8. Measure and improve the effectiveness of planned Pathfinder

interventions in line with the strategic objectives, and lead the development of processes to track and evaluate performance, share data across partner organisations, and drive delivery of Pathfinder objectives to ensure targets are achieved and delivered to time and quality.

Qualifications, Experience and Competencies Qualifications

- Degree qualified - Project Management qualification desirable

Specific Experience

- Prior experience of delivering a multi strand change programme with complex governance and policy structures

- Good working knowledge of employment training services

- Experience of having managed a programme of change by engaging at a

senior level in either the public/private sector

- Good understanding of barriers to securing employment for local people and how these barriers could be overcome

- Five years experience of developing, leading, managing and motivating

dynamic teams providing facilitation and coordination across diverse networks


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Person Specification - Strong leadership skills and qualities, with proven ability to lead

partnership working and stakeholder engagement with public and private sector organisations in a dynamic, constantly changing political environment;

- Experience in organisational change environment (including change

management, business process reengineering, organisational design and strategic planning);

- Broad overview and understanding of business processes, and ability to

apply systems and processes to create and manage solutions in a multi-agency context, with differing priorities and targets;

- Evidence of strategic thinking, whilst remaining results oriented and

maintaining a firm grasp on operational priorities;

- Strong relationship management experience at all levels;

- Significant experience of leading the planning and coordination of operational activity, including financial management and evaluation, preferably in urban areas;

- Ability to collect and analyse data from a variety of sources and present it

back in a meaningful way for decision making purposes; - Ability to work under pressure, manage priorities and meet deadlines,

working through people in other organisations;

- Excellent communications, persuasive and convincing skills;

- Strong understanding of London’s diverse communities and of equalities issues.

Key Relationships

- Consortium partners (including boroughs, London Development Agency, Greater London Authority, Jobcentre Plus, Learning & Skills Council, employers, voluntary and community sector, health sector, housing and academia);

- Strategic Board and Programme Office - Central government (including Department for Work and Pensions,

National Employment Panel, Department for Education & Skills); - Local service providers; - Pathfinder clients – residents and employers


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ROLE PROFILE

Senior Project Manager East London City Strategy Pathfinder (CSP) - APPOINTED

Directorate: LDA - Delivery

Reports to: East CSP Programme Director

Level: E

Location: Stratford

Key Accountabilities:

Accountable for successful performance of significant portfolio of complex, highly sensitive work streams, including achievement of outcomes in support of East CSP strategic objectives and change management programme Accountable for improving alignment with existing local employment and skills programmes, leveraging existing sources of funding and ensuring maximum returns against the CSP Business and Implementation Plan. Accountable for managing collaborative working between own local CSP team and other functional teams of LDA and partner organisations, ensuring that information and market intelligence is shared appropriately.

Key Result Areas:

Manage the performance of team activities and outputs in line with business plan, responding pro-actively to a changing, dynamic environment. Manage the life cycles of allocated project contracts i.e. financial and performance outputs, milestones, risk and audit, through to contract completion, closure and exit, resolving operational contractual and performance as they arise.


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Manage and develop effective relationships with stakeholders, partners and clients. Ensure that all corporate policies, standards and performance measures are followed consistently including financial processing, records management, variance and risk analysis, in collaboration with the East CSP Accountable Body (LB Hackney).

Oversee multiple programme budgets and resources, ensuring that resources are allocated and managed effectively to meet current and anticipated demand within partner constraints and budget limits. Ensure that Consortium reputation with external stakeholders is maximised and sound, by managing effective stakeholder communication. Ensure compliance with partner corporate systems to forecast, monitor and capture the delivery of cross cutting objectives of health, sustainability and equality and diversity against approved budgets and contractual documents. Ensure that best practice contract management processes, systems and procedures are managed to deliver targets from investment frameworks to time, cost and specification. Co-ordinate and provide relevant, accurate and timely information on contract performance, risk analysis and market intelligence to the 5 Borough Strategic Partnership Board to inform corporate decision making, promote integrated working and allow appropriate scrutiny of activities in compliance with accountable body policies and procedures. Ensure the production of accurate, well written and structured performance reports. Manage programme audits and highlight any financial, legal, regulatory and reputation risks, and recommend and execute timely remedial actions to provide auditable assurance over financial and output claims from delivery partners. Build and develop relationships with contractors and suppliers that will maximise project performance. Pro-actively manage risk in complex, high risk projects, personally taking responsibility for recommending and executing robust


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plans for recovery or exit (including resource and/or funding re-allocation or contract termination). Manage records management systems on all allocated programmes to ensure they are accurate and up to date. Ensure that contract management processes, systems and procedures are maintained for the successful, compliant and efficient management of all allocated contracts to time, cost and specification. Manage communication strategies for effective collection of data from external partners to inform contract performance reporting. Ensure that financial claims and supplier payments are processed in accordance with accountable body requirements. Provide guidance and support to project leaders and partners, to guide the management of multiple delivery programmes, acting as resource for specialist knowledge and experience.

Education/Qualifications, Experience, Knowledge/Skills , Behaviours and Other Essential Desirable Education Degree and/or qualification in relevant discipline eg business, financial management, political/social science, urban planning (or equivalent academic or experiential learning) to demonstrate ability to assimilate concepts, theories and principles and apply them to analysis and evaluation. Experience Good leadership skills and qualities with proven experience of managing a project team with evidence of ability to motivate and manage performance to achieve effective results. Significant experience of planning and co-ordinating financial analysis and evaluation preferably in an


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economically complex area or industry sector. Good experience and knowledge of legal framework at EU, national and regional level. Experience of developing and managing a significant process of change and transformation. Knowledge/Skills

Depth of knowledge and experience of one or more business processes including project planning and management, financial analysis and risk management with ability to achieve post graduate qualification. Significant demonstrable knowledge and experience of programme/project management processes and application of techniques to deliver multiple programmes. Good knowledge of principles of economic development, understanding of the business and political context of development agencies and the key drivers to deliver outputs for sustainable regeneration. Successful track record of managing multiple work programmes within strict time, cost, regulatory and policy constraints. Proven success of managing contracts/projects, with demonstrable outcomes, within complex multi stakeholder and multi functional environments. Strong track record (circa 3 to 5 years) in increasingly larger roles of planning and managing portfolios of multiple complex work streams aligned to project life cycles and annual investment plans. Proven track record of managing the performance of multiple programme budgets and resources within agreed targets to cost, time and specification. Good knowledge and depth of experience in one aspect of applying investment and financial tools and


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current investment vehicles at EU, national and regional levels. Evidence of using strong influencing and negotiation skills to promote organisational objectives and achieve successful agreement with a range of complex and varied stakeholders. A well developed understanding of London’s diverse communities and commitment to LDA’s cross cutting themes of equality and diversity, health and safety. Proven ability to manage multiple stakeholder relationships with public and private sector organisations. Demonstrates sound knowledge of wider business factors or sector development in own specialist arena. Key Relationships: Individuals or groups with whom the post holder has significant working relationships – both internally and externally, including briefly their nature and purpose. CSP Clients – residents and employers 5 Borough Strategic Board Executive Sub Group (or similar) CSP Project Team and partners DWP Job Boundaries and Decision Making: Legal / Financial / Element of risk-taking Under direction from East CSP Programme Director

Dimensions: Budgets controlled by the post holder, number of staff for whom they are directly accountable and/or other key statistics related to the job


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To be confirmed Additional information: (For example suitable for job share / part time, located off site) Located in offices with 5 Host Borough Unit in Stratford for fixed term of 2 years


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Appendix 7 – Focus Groups

East CSP – Resident Focus Group Draft Specification

1. Background

The East and South East CSP proposes a radical change to the way in which welfare to work services are to be delivered in order produce a step-change in employment and therefore a significant impact on child poverty. Below is a summary of the interventions proposed to date in the CSP Business Plan. It is proposed that work is developed to focus on redesigning and extended services for all workless people and will be the basis for the focus group discussions.

• Introduce a ‘New Deal for Parents’ (non-working partners and other workless people in low income families not currently included in any other New Deal).

• Introduce single points of access to services featured in all 5 boroughs by a) extending services in existing locations, and b) introduce new service centre in key locations.

• Extend entitlements to childcare support to lower income parents, engaged in work-related activity.

• Improving the quality, effectiveness and efficiency of work-focused vocational training (including Skills for Life training and ESOL).

The CSP business plan states that in order for the changes to the system to be effective they will need to be informed by focus groups that are representative of the target groups identified within the CSP’s business plan. This includes lone parents, low skilled, BAME groups and in particular those people who are not currently in contact with the ‘system’ but are a priority for the CSP, namely non-working partners in single earner low income families.

2. Focus Group Recruitment and Make up The focus groups must be representative of the local population of the 5 borough area in terms of gender, ethnicity, family/household type and include those who are not on benefits as well as those who are. In particular, the New Deal for Parents represents a departure from existing welfare to work policy by including people who are not currently in touch with the system, and for this reason the focus groups must include parent couples where one parent is not working. However, having both members of the couple present may not be appropriate as there is potential for disagreement (we will take advice from the contractor on this), and also possible childcare constraints. Each focus group should consist of 6-8 people. The experience and issues of those currently in the system and those out of it will be very different, and thus the focus groups should perhaps be separated down these lines. Established local mechanisms and networks will be utilized to engage with residents from all target groups. One Parent Families are currently conducting similar focus group research using the respondents to a recent Jobcentre Plus online survey to draw participants from. This is a potential source for these focus groups, however it


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does not include people who are not in current contact with the system and whose input is vital to the CSP. Also, in terms of residents who are in touch with the system, this would only include those who have access to the internet and have shown an interest in research before. Therefore, the contractors engaged to design and run these focus groups will need to consider different ways of recruiting participants, especially those who are not in touch with the system – this may be through voluntary/community groups for instance, and through maximising on contacts known to Consortium partners, such as Jobcentre Plus and the boroughs. If the group is to gain meaningful insight into issues around ESOL, then sessions in community languages will be necessary.

3. Topics for Discussion The discussion is framed around workstream A; this is purely for ease of interpretation of the results and their integration into the workstream design. However, it may not be the best framework for discussion; for example it may be better to discuss childcare along with other barriers discussed under the New Deal for Parents heading below. Discussion around access to services as a barrier and best ways to get more ‘in-reach’ for people not in the system should lead onto discussion around the single point of access. There is a possibility that the topic guide set out below is too prescriptive - the contractor is invited to suggest the best ways of covering all the topics below: New Deal for Parents • Barriers to work for non-working partners (childcare,

skills, cultural, geographical access to services like JCP)

• Advice as how and where to get in contact and encourage non-working partners who are not in touch with services at present, for instance through children’s centres, libraries, RSLs is very important.

• Better-off calculations - do these take full account of the costs and benefits (not just financial) of moving into work i.e. travel time, stress etc, commuting etc.

• Knowledge and opinions around in-work credit and other in-work benefits. Is advice on this easy to get hold of and understand? Is the advice perceived to be reliable? How can this information be better disseminated? How can it me made easier to understand?

Single Point of Access • Where do people currently get information (benefits,

jobs, housing etc)? To what extent is the lack of a single point of access a barrier - for example receiving benefits advice at JCP and HB/CT advice from the LA or RSL, debt advice from CAB etc. Confusion over different sources and different geographical locations?

• Would a high street presence outside of JCP be useful and encourage people to enter and get advice?

• Knowledge/opinions of existing services that combine various agencies under one roof with a voluntary, easy access, high street presence? (present existing example of one-stop-shop)

• Which services are most used (IAG, debt advice, job brokerage, better-off calculations) and why? Which are the most useful, which are perceived to be inaccurate,


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where would improvement make the most impact?

• What services would ideally be under one roof and available from one advisor so a ‘package’ of benefits, advice and training can be together that suits a family?

Extended Childcare entitlement

• All focus group attendants to be asked about their child care needs and how it would best tailored to partners entering work through the New Deal for Parents (cost, location etc)

Vocational Training • Are residents aware of training opportunities available to

them? Opinions of training and the likelihood of getting a ‘good’ job i.e. pay high enough to get around benefit trap, hours to suit family/other commitments, long-term, chances of progression etc.

• Views on the variety of training available - is it difficult to understand/navigate and therefore value?

• Explore language as a barrier to work, evidence suggests that ESOL demand far outstrips supply – is this the case?

• Free ESOL training available to those on benefits, is this an incentive to get people from single earner BAME groups in contact (in-reach).

• Residents understanding of the effect on benefit entitlement of training?

4. Timetable & Outputs

This research is purely qualitative in nature and it is therefore not intended to evaluate the interventions outlined in the CSP business plan, but to give more detail on individual experiences and highlight certain issues to inform the design and delivery of CSP interventions. The outputs of the research should include a report detailing all the views and opinions reached on the day and how participants came to those views. In particular any differences of opinion within the groups (especially between partners if they are both present) should also be noted. It is proposed that these focus groups be run on a 6 monthly basis.


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East CSP – SME Focus Group Draft Specification

1. Background It has been identified that engagement with employers (public and private sector) is required to develop the CSP engagement strategy, particularly with SMEs. In order to develop thinking, the following areas have been considered:

- How can SMEs be effectively advised of the wealth of public sector opportunities, services and activities that are available to support them recruit and retain staff?

- What further support is required to make this process easier, more

accessible and more cohesive?

- What specific needs do SMEs have that could inform the service offering from public sector agencies?

- To what extent do SMEs use private sector recruitment agencies, and why?

- What networks are in place to support SMEs, and that may be used as a

channel to market CSP objectives and opportunities/initiatives to SMEs?

- What funding is available to support SME engagement and the provision of assistance to ensure the recruitment process meets their needs?

- What programmes currently exist with partner agencies that could be

corralled in the first instance to compile a suite of services for promotion?

- What communication / marketing strategy is required (method, regularity, format, originator etc)?

- How can SMEs be engaged to drive the development of our plans?

2. Focus Group Recruitment and Make up

It is proposed that the following workshops be set up, to progress thinking and ensure engagement with SMEs is maximized to inform development of the strategy and alignment with the wider initiatives being developed by the CSP Consortium. Established local mechanisms and networks will be utilized to engage with residents from all target groups.


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Workshop

Attendees

Objectives

Outcome

1. Providers

JCP LSC LDA Serco PRP Working Links

- Define services available including grants, tax

benefits, accreditations, in work training support etc

- Determine current points of access and communication

- Investigate use of presentation space at JCP offices

- Identify SMEs for engagement in workshop 2 below

- Overview existing contacts, methods of contact and areas of overlap/gaps

Inform 3 below

2. SMEs

Contacts from above agencies from a range of sectors (incl The Innovatory) Plus facilitation

- Review current experiences and recruitment

methods - Determine industry specific requirements - Explore possible communication channels such

as radio, Chambers of Commerce etc - Explore how the use of personal networks can be enhanced and widened

Inform 3 below

3. Providers & SMEs

All of the above

- To review outputs from workshops 1 and 2, and

develop programme of actions and activity to broaden engagement with public sector and SMEs

- To establish future programme of engagement with attendees to maintain engagement with design and delivery

First draft of engagement strategy

3. Topics for Discussion In line with the areas of focus outlined in 1 above, the following experiences should be probed further:

- SMEs tends to use personal referral networks as opposed to agencies for recruitment needs, (whether they be public or private sector run agencies) – why?;

- SMEs do not know where to access information – it is a case of not knowing

what you don’t know – how can this be improved?;

- Many SMEs are specialized so services offered may need a degree of tailoring to meet specific needs – how can this be achieved?;

- There can be a perception by SMEs that local people are not qualified /

committed / desirable employees – what is the basis for this perception and how can it be rectified?;


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- It is difficult for an SME to reach large number of potential employees – how can JCP and other agencies help?;

- SMEs often lack the time and resource needed to undertake a

comprehensive recruitment process, so even if there were services available, ease of access and usability would be key requirements – how can public sector agencies help?.

4. Suggested way forward Initial discussions are required with ELBA to identify a facilitator for the workshops, plus potential invitees for workshop 2. In addition, providers are to be identified by the CSP Consortium Senior Project Manager through collaboration with partners in JCP, LSC and the boroughs. It is proposed that this focus group be convened on a quarterly basis, with the first being scheduled ASAP post April 2007.


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East CSP – Provider Focus Group Draft Specification

1. Background The nature of the CSP demands better, more proactive engagement with service providers across the 5 borough area. This should not only achieve greater engagement and understanding as to the CSP and its objectives, but allow the CSP Consortia to align its commissioning of providers to secure better value and more creative contracting protocols. The purpose of these focus groups is to facilitate a dialogue with providers who are :

• currently delivering employment related services to CSP clients;

• able to adapt their services to support the objectives of the CSP programmes;

• in the process of securing contracts to deliver relevant services to CSP clients in the near future (such as organisations short listed to deliver Pathways to Work Phase 1).

The outcome of the workshop is to:

• test the CSP policy approach developed as part of the business planning process;

• identify current best practice in service delivery;

• re-align current service provision in order to meet objectives of CSP;

• identify organisations who would be suitable to deliver/tender for new provision to be developed as part of the CSP programme.

2. Focus Group Recruitment and Make up Services providers are organised under:

• delivery areas - in terms of the clients they are supporting (e.g. mental health, homeless etc)

• funding sources - particularly government funding to support employment and training

• sector - such as basic skills, jobs brokerage etc. To be able to quickly and effectively engage service providers it is proposed to engage with service providers under the various funding sources, relying on organisations involved in the CSP programme to identify providers. Key funding areas and method of engagement providers therefore cover the following key areas of activity: 1. Pathways to Work Phase 1. Organisations short listed following the PQQ who are currently working up full tender. List of relevant organisations to be provided by DWP Pathways to Work Team - Michelle Alton.


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2. Ethnic Minority Outreach Programme. List of relevant organisations to be provided by London Procurement Unit - Tim Andrews.

1. JCP Providers. Key employment providers delivering New Deal and

other special programmes supporting CSP clients - to be identified by District Mangers

2. LDA providers delivering under Opportunities Fund and Skills for Life

funding. Appropriate providers to be identified by the LDA.

3. LSC providers to be identified by the LSC.

4. Borough providers to be identified by each of the 5 boroughs. Managing the collation of this data falls under the remit of the Programme Office. Individual organisations have approached the LDA to express an interest in becoming involved in the CSP programme and a master list is being held for the future. 3. Topics for Discussion It is proposed that the providers be engaged to discuss and explore the following:

• CSP’s policy approach and its potential impact on them as providers;

• Challenges for Boroughs and providers if commissioning occurs across 1 or more Boroughs;

• Anticipated benefits from alignment of commissioning for residents;

• Barriers to engagement;

• Benefits of local contract management. 4.Suggested way forward The process of identifying suitable providers can be initiated immediately by members of the Consortium, directed by the CSP Senior Project Manager. It is proposed that these focus groups convene every 6 months to monitor performance, evaluate effectiveness of joint commissioning strategy, and ensure ongoing provider alignment with CSP objectives.


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Appendix 8 – Single Points of Access

The following is further developmental work on the Single Point of Access proposed intervention outlined in section 3.2.2. 1 Introduction The introduction of Single Points of Access for services to the workless including lone parents and families on low incomes is one of the central actions of the Business Plan. It is the intention of the CSP consortium to introduce single points of access across the CSP area in the first six months of the CSP Pathfinder building on existing provision and premises. It is proposed that the access point will initially focus on different CSP target groups. There will be no single prescribed approach. Working with local partners who have close knowledge of clients in each target group, we will pilot different approaches reflecting local circumstance, what exists at present and the needs of clients. Whilst a core service will be defined, a key purpose of the approach will be to vary the service offer, delivery and location of services to enable comparisons to be made across the 5 borough area. This will be used to inform the roll out of Single Points of Access in the next phase of the Pathfinder. The intention is to use the Single Points of Access to validate and test many of the actions proposed in the Business Plan. In other words, the Single Points of Access will become a focus for the full range of changes to service delivery outlined in the Business Plan. This is properly so. Whilst a fundamental principle behind the Single Points of Access is to improve the physical accessibility of services it must also cover the comprehensiveness and effectiveness of the service that is provided. Consequently, a great deal of focus will be given to the alignment of services, the need for flexible funding that can be used to respond to the needs of individuals, and the overcoming of institutional barriers that stop an individual receiving the best possible service based on their individual needs. The intention is to design services around different target groups and local circumstance and provide a series of pilots which can be monitored and evaluated and be used to assist the consortium further develop of CSP. The Single Points of Access will be developed in close association with the relevant Local Strategic Partnership. The LSP will also help ensure the focus of the service is linked to and complements the existing Local Area Agreement. This will also ensure that services across each of the four LAA blocks can be utilized to help deliver CSP objectives. For example, to align services relating to teenage pregnancy, community safety and housing. The following proposals represent a ‘drilling down’ of the actions that sit behind the concept of Single Points of Access. The precise actions have


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merged from discussions within the CSP workstreams, experience on what works on the ground and informed by the application of case studies drawn from specific target groups. These actions will be further refined following discussions with Local Strategic Partnerships across the area and local stakeholders. The proposals also indicate how the high level actions set out in the CSP Business Plan will be brought together and piloted across the CSP area. 2 Proposed Approach The Single Points of Access will initially be designed and piloted around specific priority groups. In some cases the pilots will cover just one borough, in some cases all boroughs. But the approach will vary to reflect local circumstance and experience. The initial pilot will focus on four target groups:

• Lone Parents and low income families with dependant children (to be piloted across all 5 CSP Boroughs);

• IB Claimants with mental health problems (to be piloted in Greenwich);

• Young people under the age of 25 (to be piloted in Tower Hamlets (this will cover lone parents, IB claimants etc. will give an opportunity to focus on NEETS and actions to prevent the next generation of workless and those living in child poverty.);

• Homeless families (to be piloted in Newham and Waltham Forest).

Whilst the above priority groups have been identified it should be noted that one of the key objectives of the CSP is that services will be available to all workless residents. Each Single Point of Access will be developed locally by CSP Partners and local stakeholders within the framework set by the CSP Business Plan and the CSP Consortium. LSPs or LSP sub groups will be utilized to oversee the process. Each local group will:

a. Identify core partners who can inform the design and delivery of services at both a ‘strategic’ and delivery level.

b. Identify where the single point of access is best located. This will take

account of the target group, what exists at present and how it relates to outreach / satellite offices. In the case of lone parent / low income families target group for example, it is presumed that the service will be located in Childrens Centres but may also wish to utilize schools, libraries, health workers, mother and baby groups, FE colleges etc (see below).

c. Identify what services need to be colocated and / or aligned. The CSP

Business Plan suggests a core offer: job brokerage, better-off calculations, benefits advice, financial and debt advice, access to training, affordable childcare, specialist counseling (e.g. debt, alcohol, drug abuse, access to legal advice. Consideration will be given to how services can be adapted to ensure they are responsive to clients’


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needs (this may for example include discussing with funding agencies how ‘outputs’ the individual organisations are contracted to deliver can be changed, how referral routes changed and so on).

d. Identify how a flexible funding pot can be created to complement (c)

above to ensure appropriate services can be secured to meet an individuals needs. Initially the focus will be on using a proportion of the DAF money potentially complemented by other funds (e.g. NRF) and also ensuring that new programmes are commissioned to closely complement the approach. In the longer term, and once the value of the approach is proven, it is hoped that mainstream funding can be top sliced and added to, to create a much larger ‘single pot’ which is allocated through the single points of access.

e. Linked closely to the above, identify opportunities for local

commissioning of services to secure increased value for money and effective engagement with providers.

f. Refine understanding of individuals’ and institutional barriers with the

intention of redesigning services, removing arbitrary eligibility criteria and ensuring flexibility. This will include utilizing DAF to design new programmes (e.g. in the case of IB mental health, condition management and motivational training), and ratchet up services to the best possible offer and make it universal.

g. Develop a CSP ESF co-finance for the next round. This will involve the

main ESF co-financing partners (LDA, LSC, JCP and the London Councils) agreeing to allocate specific funding to a jointly managed SCP ESF programme to be overseen by the Consortium, with a focus on filling gaps and to provide a structured pathway into work programme.

h. Develop a ‘case worker’ approach for a set number of clients.

i. Work with employers (through existing job brokerage services) to

identify suitable employment opportunities, target specific job vacancies and link to case workers to ensure ongoing support.

j. Identify milestones and outcomes linked to evaluating framework to be

overseen by Board 3 Sure Start Children’s Centres Focus on training and employment for parents and carers of children under five. As an example of the approach, the proposed role of Sure Start Children’s Centres will play in developing services to parents is described below. Similar approaches will be developed for other target groups identified above.


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Children’s Centres are seen as a key asset that will be utilized in the delivery of the CSP. The represent an important routeway in accessing parents of young children. They represent not the only routeway but can play an important coordinating role. The Single Point of Access pilot targeting lone parents and families in low income households with dependant children will extend across all 5 Boroughs. Sure Start Children’s Centres are key to making changes to the delivery of services for children under five and their families that will reduce child poverty and will break the cycle of disadvantage experienced by so many families. Sure Start Children’s Centres will be as universal as schools by 2010 when there will be a centre for every community. The integrated and extended services being developed around Children’s Centres and Extended Schools are intended to better meet the needs of children and their families as they move through different phases of their lives. All local authorities and their partners are now engaged in the development of Sure Start Children’s Centres and those boroughs involved in this pilot have been working on the programme since 2004. Sure Start Children’s Centres are expected to contribute to the national targets for reducing the number of children living in workless families, for promoting the take-up of formal childcare amongst lower income families, for helping lone parents back into work and for improving the literacy, innumeracy and language skills of parents and carers. Sure Start Children’s Centres are working to raise aspirations by supporting parents on what often may be a long journey from where they are through informal and formal training and development and into employment. The reduction in the number of children under five living in workless households is a key performance indicator because children in this position are more likely to have poor outcomes and not realize their potential. To be effective there must be significant investment in outreach services to the community to ensure those who are not currently accessing services are encouraged and supported to do so. Sure Start Children’s Centres are well placed to do this and to provide a focus for the integration of support including childcare, essential skills, confidence building, skills training and financial advice. Children's Centres play a key role in networking with other community based services and activities such as libraries and faith groups to maximise the impact of outreach services. For Sure Start Children’s Centres to improve the employability of parents there needs to be effective collaboration with local agencies and partners including Jobcentre Plus, local education and training providers, LSC and others. This needs to take place at both the strategic level and in the day to day working with parents to support them to make changes in their lives. This will be a prime focus of the CSP Single Point of Access. The services to be provided through the Single Point of Access, and how they are to be provided will be identified by local CSP partners and stakeholders. Using the LSP targets will be set that complement LAA targets and CSP


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objectives. Use will be made of the Childcare Affordability Programme (CAP) to provide access to flexible childcare for those parents on low incomes who are undertaking work focused training or in their first weeks of paid employment. It is planned to make use of DAF monies in the first year to fund Childcare case workers who can work with parents looking to enter the labour market and to validate the approach. The case workers will help to identify all relevant services and agencies and will work ensure their alignment. They will log organizational barriers and other factors that assist / impede a successful outcome as well as providing ongoing support to individual clients. The service will be overseen by a management group made up of CSP local partners, LSP members and other key local stakeholders. The local management group will, wherever possible, be responsible develop options for the local commissioning of services and in informing the design of consortium wide commissioning. A flexible pot of funding will be created using DAF monies in first year so that gaps in mainstream funding can be plugged and that the right kind of support can be procured to meet each individual’s circumstance (rather than requiring the individual to fit the criteria of a set programme). The Service Point of Access personnel will feed directly into the design of a new CSP Co-financed ESF round to ensure ESF funding is co-ordinated and aligned with the CSP objectives for this target group. Other funding streams will be aligned with or contribute to the single flexible funding ‘pot’. Each Single Point of Access will develop appropriate marketing and outreach activities. Activities & Milestones Identify criteria for ESF CSP Co-Financed Round & secure proportion of funds to complement work of single points of access May 2007 Key local services & stakeholders agreed for each single point of access covering each for the four target groups June 2007 Creation of local area management team & agreement of lead local partner June 2007 Design local single point of access

• Services to be provided – directly or through referal

• Delivery partners

• Location(s) of single pint of access

• Satellite Offices / outreach provision

• Funding and programmes available to support target groups


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• Barriers – institutional and client July 2007 initially (by some elements ongoing) Agree local targets that complement LAA targets and contribute overall CSP targets July 2007 Identify where other LAA blocks can support CSP objectives July 2007 Secure DAF monies / agree criteria for

• Flexible pot

• Case workers July 2007 Identify other funding opportunities – either alignment or adding to single pot & make recommendations to Consortium for their allocation / commissioning – including local commissioning where possible. July 2007 Agree evaluation framework July 2007 Single Points of Access pilots operational From September 2007 (some elements of the service may be operational earlier depending on starting point in each location) Recommendations to CSP Consortium for roll out of Single Points of Access. December 2007


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Appendix 9 – Interventions

Workstream A Specific proposals

Code Intervention Features include Impact Cost ENABLING MEASURES Earl

y

Win

?

A1 Introduce a “New Deal for Parents” (non-working partners and other workless people in families whether or not currently included in any other New Deal.)

� Pilot a work incentive payment modeled on In-Work Credit but with a longer entitlement period (18 months) and possibly more generous entitlements.

� Initially to a group of 100 parents � Pilot work related activity premium for non-workers in families

who engage in the New Deal. � Eligibility – Work incentive payment open to all parents in

families (includes lone parents and IB claimants) receiving WTC/Child Tax Credit above the family element. Work related activity premium open to parents on out-of-work benefits and in tax credit families as above.

� Access to information, advice and guidance and other local existing provision

� Integrated with Childcare Affordability Programme � Personal Advisors to run programme

High High DWP/HMT to agree, budget, eligibility criteria set, tax office segmentation scan, pas to deliver it, payment process and agent for top up of in-work credit & incentive premium.

A2 Introduce single points of access to services featured in all 5 Boroughs by: a) extending services in existing location, and b) introduce new service centres in key locations (where capacity is

� These centres should be located outside existing Jobcentre Plus offices to maximise take-up by those not in the benefit system, and target parental employment in particular. Centres would actually offer packages of services across a range of barriers on-site and provide direct access to services which need to be delivered off-site (e.g. Through Children’s Centres, Libraries or FE colleges), not simply signpost clients to other agencies. Existing premises could be used, or new high street shop fronts – and involve the Voluntary and Community Sector (VCS) where there is capacity to do so.

High Medium None, unless there are issues regarding PVCS contracting to provide some elements of JCP advice service

�


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y

Win

?

insufficient) � Open to all, offering a range of services based around a core offer of job brokerage, better-off calculations, referral to benefit advice, financial and debt advice, access to training, affordable childcare, education, specialist counselling including debt/alcohol/drug abuse and access to legal advice.

� Will need qualitative performance regime to encourage joining up of services

A3 Extend entitlements to childcare support to lower income parents engaged in work-related activity

� Establish a consistent and flexible offer of supported childcare to parents in low income families over the period of transition to employment, drawing on LDA Childcare Affordability Programme funding and LSC funding complementing Children’s Centres and school-based wrap-around care. This will support part-time childcare for low income parents, including out-of-work benefit recipients who are seeking employment / undertaking training.

� Reduce perception and reality of affordability of childcare by modifying current benefits and extending provision

� All parents on benefits to be asked about their childcare needs and information recorded to enable the Local Authorities to endeavour to meet the demands/needs for childcare in the CSP boroughs.

� Encourage employer take-up Childcare Voucher Scheme. � Link in with new childcare sufficiency assessments.

High High None required �

A4 Improving the quality, effectiveness and efficiency of work-focused vocational ESOL provision.

� Build on improvements to ESOL in London to ensure there is sufficient supply and quality to meet the high levels of need - especially for those where language is a major barrier to work. Particular focus on non-working parents. GLA estimates that 60% of non-employed fathers in London have English as a second language.

� Promote customized vocational ESOL, specific to and ideally linked with employment opportunities.

High

Medium Joint contract management/ commissing, flexibility in LSC targets


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y

Win

?

� Establish a clear entitlement to ESOL for all lower income parents (in receipt of tax credits above the family element).

� Tough contract performance regime that is visible to CSP Consortium

� Establish an East London CSP “ideal” unit cost for ESOL and support delivery agents to reduce costs and work toward the “ideal”.

� Identify ineffective providers in both cost and quality, and divert budgets to other better performing providers

� Incentivise ESOL in the work-place through the use of a training premium/grant/tax relief for the employer

� Introduce a robust handover of ESOL class room training with a job brokerage

� Extend Hackney Skills for Life pilot to other CSP Boroughs. � Tie in with Olympic-related skills initiatives (LETF)

A5 Increase and improve employer involvement

� Work with LSEB, ELBA and through Employer Accord to maximize benefits to East London.

� Ensure a full range of business involvement, particularly through networks and organisations of SMEs.

� Enhance current engagement with key public sector employers, such as the Health Service and Local Authorities.

� Directly involve employers in the design of training provision and better induction to jobs brokers so they are able to fully understand employer’s recruitment needs.

� Build on the current Job Centre Plus engagement process with large employers (making use of JCP employers consortia).


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Workstream B Specific Proposals Code Intervention

Features include Impact Cost ENABLING MEASURES

Earl

y

Win

?

B1 Develop and agree a Joint Investment Plan

� Develop and agree a Joint Investment Plan for employment-related services for Consortium partners, approved by the Consortium Board – and aligned with other joint employment investment plans, including LCS, JCP, LDA, NRF and specific initiatives such as the LETF

� Must include clear targets and establish a framework for use, building on and amplifying the successes of the LSPs and LAAs.

� 'Mainstreaming’ CSP's focus on child poverty and worklessness into core business planning in each organisation

� Share performance information around existing providers and contracts to ensure future contracting of delivery is with the best value / most effective providers and is to a reasonable and consistent standard.

Medium Low Possible changes to business plan timetables set nationally by JCP and DFES

B2 Refocus the existing Job Outcome Target (JOT) criteria for JCP to reflect family priority, and employment outcome targets for FE Colleges.

� New weighting in JOT to whether a client has children. � Will redirect some support / activity of JCP and its

providers towards people with families. � Requires measurement of family status as standard –

could take up to 18 months to develop for JCP, and may be difficult to do if not part of a national roll-out.

� Prove the concept starting with contracts outsourced to providers – e.g. Pathways 1 and 2 contracts.

� New employability outcome for FE Colleges, using evidence of additional measures which increase the employability of adult learners (derived initially from a Demonstration Project).

High – on child poverty aspect of the CSP

Medium – no programme budget impact but potentially high it budget needed, unless rolled out nationally

DWP to agree to put this change to the top of its LMS release schedule


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Code Intervention


Earl

y

Win

?

B3 Consortium partners to report – for Board approval – details of all forthcoming contracts for any priority services

� Aim is to avoid duplication in provision and achieve efficiencies and economies of scale through an aligned procurement process.

� Services include: childcare, training, basic skills, debt advice, health support, job search and brokerage.

� Board to receive a monthly report from the CSP about future contracts about to be offered and contracts recently offered on any employment-related services, to confirm that they are consistent with this plan and deliver the Joint Investment Plan agreed by the Board.

� Provides streamlined and non-bureaucratic leadership for the Board over service delivery.

� Provides opportunity for sharing good practice within the Consortium.

None Medium Possible flexibility on the timetables for contracting to give board time to be consulted

�

B4 Trial joint contracting for services to parents, to include the New Deal for Lone Parents.

� Identify where it is necessary to jointly contract services between two or more Consortium partners - where there is clear potential to improve the efficiency and impact of spend on an area and improve clients’ experience of integrated service delivery, which cannot be delivered by joint planning (see B1).

� Services to be wider than just JCP programmes, including LSC support for parents, LDA and boroughs programmes.

� Approach should be streamlined and bottom-up, not looking to create large standardized provision.

� Approach needs to be designed to ensure that VCS groups can inform the development of the contract, and its optimum method of delivery, and be able to bid for provision.

� Start with specific services where contracting and delivery can be most easily aligned. Use DAF funding,

High None/Low DWP to agree to new contracting arrangements


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Code Intervention


Earl

y

Win

?

and Pathways to Work to prove concept of this approach. Then aim for:

I. Joint contracts between JCP, LDA, LSC and boroughs for NDLP alongside new provision for non-working parents, and other specific employment programmes for parents. Need links with existing Employment Zone providers, for NDLP services already offered in an Employment Zone

II. Joint contracts for childcare services where possible III. IAG services – develop joint contracts where

possible between main Consortium partners � A flexible approach to the service offer to ensure

appropriate response to specific client needs � LETF contracting to be part of this approach? To be

investigated. � Strive to establish a joint approval process agreed by

the Board, which supports simple, efficient and fast procurement processes.

B5 Devolve decisions on national contracting on priority services where possible – especially Pathways to Work and ESF

� Pathways to Work – the first phase of Pathways procurement is already well advanced with the ITT issued to short-listed providers in October 2006 and bids due in by early February 2007. The second phase of Pathways will include some differences in design and procurement requirements, including factoring in, where possible, considerations to support joint working with CSP in these phase 2 areas and CSP input to the phase 2 specification. For both phases, aim to reflect new family target in the contract, and for phase 2 aim for as close to joint contracting as possible.

� ESF – maximizing impact of available resources in East London – Consortium to explore potential for co-

Medium /High

Low Government to agree


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Code Intervention


Earl

y

Win

?

financing itself with ESF. DWP/GOL to remain Managing Authority, but the Board to set the strategy.

B6 Reward payments to Consortium to incentivise performance improvements from existing resources

� Separate from the LAA reward system, as this is against delivery of the Business Plan, covers all 5 boroughs and is focused tightly on worklessness and child poverty.

� Need to be clear about added-value of the CSP over individual LAA plans.

� Needs to be linked to specific employment initiatives driven through the Plan.

� Payments to Consortium budget holder, on behalf of the whole Consortium, from Government for delivering agreed outcomes and milestones in the Plan.

� Resources for re-investment in priority services as set out in the Business Plan.

� Crucial for funding the capacity to deliver the new and extended services, especially to non-working partners and others in families in poverty not currently receiving support.

High Medium – efficiency built into the funding model, as reward payments will only be made if milestones are delivered

Budget needs agreeing by Government

B7 Map East London and London-wide skills initiatives and business support provision e.g. Employer Accord, Train2Gain, LEST, LSEB, Business Link


- 109 -

Workstream C Specific Proposals Code Intervention


Earl

y

Win

?

C1 Identify and disseminate examples of employers improving their competitiveness by addressing barriers to work, e.g. flexible working, childcare provision

� Research into and potential partnering with high-performing organisations that successfully turn assistance with perceived barriers to work into competitive advantage

� Dissemination of good practice to local employers and into London-wide employer groups and employment intiatives, such as the London Skills and Employment Board

Medium Low None

C2 Establish a Performance Management Framework

� A common set of principles on delivering interventions for service providers and partner organisations whose implementation can be tracked using existing data sources

� Measurement of partnership development (going beyond the initial two years of the CSP)

� Robust evidence on ‘what works’

High Medium Allow data sharing between partners


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Appendix 10 – Detailed Plan

2007-2008 2008-2009

Co

de

Intervention Q1 Q2 Q3 Q4 Q1 Q2 Q3 Q4

A1 New Deal for Parents 100

Parents

A2 Single points of access Extend current services

A3 Extend childcare Extend current services

A4 Vocational ESOL provision.

A5 Increase and improve employer involvement Build on ELBA activiities

B1 Joint Investment Plan Submit

JIP to Board

B2 Refocus the Job Outcome Target

B3 Report all forthcoming contracts for priority services

B4 Joint contracting for services to parents

B5 Devolve decisions on national contracting on priority services

Engage with Govt

B6 Reward payments to Consortium

B7 Map East London and London-wide skills initiatives and business support provision

C1 Identify employers improving their competitiveness by addressing barriers to work

C2 Performance Management Framework

Stages: EARLY WINS DESIGN AND REFINE TESTING IMPLEMENTATION


- 111 -


- 112 -

Appendix 11 - Partnership Board Members

Organisation Name Title Job Title Ethnic Origin

Job Centre Plus Ann Lines

Ms Head of External Relations

White British

LB of Greenwich Chris Roberts

Mr Leader of the Council White British

LB of Newham Conor McAuley

Mr Councillor White Irish

LB of Tower Hamlets Denise Jones

Ms Leader of the Council White British

London Development Agency

Geoff Newton

Mr Director of Olympic Opportunity

White British

LB of Hackney Guy Nicholson

Mr Councillor Any other White Background

Olympic Delivery Authority

Jean Tomlin

Ms HR Director Black British Caribbean

Greater London Authority

John Biggs

Mr Assembly Member White British

East London Business Alliance

Liam Kane

Mr Chief Executive White British

Learning Skills Council Mary Conneely

Ms Regional Director Regeneration London

White Irish

Olympic Delivery Authority

Morag Stuart

Ms Head of Procurement White British

Greater London Authority

Neale Coleman

Mr Director of Business Planning and Regeneration

White British

South East Region – TUC

Roy Lockett

Mr White British

LB of Waltham Forest Terry Wheeler

Mr Councillor White British/Irish


- 113 -

Appendix 12 – Supporting data for Section 2 Local Context

Table 20- Workless households in the Olympic Boroughs shows household level worklessness in each of the boroughs. There are over 100,000 workless households in the area. Of these, some 45% – over 44,000 - include dependent children. There are nearly 30,000 workless lone parent households and nearly 14,000 workless couples with children, and nearly 6,000 other household types which include children. Nearly 60% of lone parent households are workless, and 19% of couples – both rates which are much higher than at national level. However the latter problem is particularly concentrated in Tower Hamlets, Newham and Hackney where one in five couples with children have nobody working – rising to a third of couples in Tower Hamlets. Worklessness is also concentrated in single person households, although the rates here are not as far above national level as for households with children. Table 20- Workless households in the Olympic Boroughs

All Hackney 72,964 12,690 8,354 4,357 24,466 23,097 25,401

All Newham 78,204 17,043 10,722 6,395 21,102 22,942 34,160

All Tower Hamlets 67,085 12,178 5,422 4,072 21,895 23,518 21,672

All Greenwich 74,104 14,929 9,483 3,247 21,006 25,439 27,659

All Waltham Forest 73,800 16,301 8,459 3,224 18,670 27,146 27,984

All All 366,157 73,141 42,440 21,295 107,139 122,142 136,876

Workless Hackney 21,551 2,633 4,825 1,353 9,081 3,659 8,811

Workless Newham 24,132 3,499 6,595 1,671 8,370 3,997 11,765

Workless Tower Hamlets 19,641 4,091 3,526 1,265 7,376 3,383 8,882

Workless Greenwich 18,764 1,509 5,496 818 7,623 3,318 7,823

Workless Waltham Forest 15,525 1,985 4,498 678 5,227 3,137 7,161

Workless All 99,613 13,717 24,940 5,785 37,677 17,494 44,442

Rates

Workless Hackney 29.5 20.7 57.8 31.1 37.1 15.8 34.7

Workless Newham 30.9 20.5 61.5 26.1 39.7 17.4 34.4

Workless Tower Hamlets 29.3 33.6 65.0 31.1 33.7 14.4 41.0

Workless Greenwich 25.3 10.1 58.0 25.2 36.3 13.0 28.3

Workless Waltham Forest 21.0 12.2 53.2 21.0 28.0 11.6 25.6

Workless All 27.2 18.8 58.8 27.2 35.2 14.3 32.5

Composition

Workless Hackney 100.0 12.2 22.4 6.3 42.1 17.0 40.9

Workless Newham 100.0 14.5 27.3 6.9 34.7 16.6 48.8

Workless Tower Hamlets 100.0 20.8 18.0 6.4 37.6 17.2 45.2

Workless Greenwich 100.0 8.0 29.3 4.4 40.6 17.7 41.7

Workless Waltham Forest 100.0 12.8 29.0 4.4 33.7 20.2 46.1

Workless All 100.0 13.8 25.0 5.8 37.8 17.6 44.6

Other

without

children All

All with

children

Couples with

children Lone parents

Other with

children Single person


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Reasons for being workless (Meadows, 2005), notes the following core factors that increase the probability of being workless in London: Having dependent children People within this group are more than likely workless through having to care for dependents, whether it be the family in general or whether they have dependent children. Levels of care required for those that do have dependents is more acute in East London, with approximately 76.8% of workless households in East London having 2 or more dependent children, compared to the 57.3% percent for London on the whole. Being sick or disabled Employment rates vary dependent on disability, with the highest levels of worklessness associated with those whose disability is work limiting. For the majority of this these groups, a significant source of income is through claiming Incapacity Benefit and/or Severe Disablement Allowance. Based on the data for reasons claimed, the main reason for just over half (58%, 32,900) of all IB claims are either mental health or Musculo-skeletal problems. Having low qualifications There is clear evidence that the labour market penalty for having low skills is greater in London than in other areas of the country (Meadows, 2005). And evidence suggests this is a key factor behind levels of worklessness in East London, with around 36.5% percent of the workless population having no qualifications compared to only 11.8% of working age residents in work. Being a migrant from a less developed country Amongst migrants, those from less developed countries are more likely to be workless than their counterparts from more developed countries. London accounts for around half of all England and Wales residents born outside the UK, and so this is a specific regional problem. A key feature here is likely to be the education systems of the residents’ country of birth, in many cases not providing the individual with the appropriate skills set that a developed world working environment requires. Being female Worklessness is much higher amongst women than men in London and the UK generally. Employment rates amongst women with children are exceptionally low. As women receive lower wages for similar work, their ‘returns to work’ (i.e. the net financial gain of working compared to receiving benefits) are also lower. The combination of these factors increases the risk of women living in poverty and is a key factor behind high levels of child poverty. BAME disadvantage One of the most distinct features of employment levels in East London is the massive variation between ethnic groups, ranging from a high of 68% amongst the white population (54.1% of the working age population) to 41%


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within amongst the East London Bangladeshi population (accounting for around 9% percent of the working age population).

Table 21 - Qualification of the working age population in East London Olympic Boroughs - by whether working

Source: Local Area Labour Force Survey (Mar 2003 to May 2004)

Chart 1 - London child poverty by family type and economic status 2002/05 (Source: HBAI)

0% 10% 20% 30% 40% 50% 60% 70% 80% 90% 100%

Working

Workless

No Quals Other quals NVQ 1 NVQ 2Apprenticeships NVQ 3 NVQ 4

couple, workless

20%

couple 1 full-time,1 not

working

11%

couple, 1 or more part-

time only

9%

lone parent working

8%

couple, self-employed

8%

couple, 1 full-time, 1 part-

time

4%

couple, both full-time

1%

lone parent, workless

39%

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