Putting Workfare in Place E-Book

Peter Sunley

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Wissenschaft und neue Technologien
• Serie: RGS-IBG Book Series
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 437

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2011

Beschreibung

This book is the first comprehensive and authoritative analysis of the New Deal and examines how far the programme has succeeded in responding to the diversity of conditions in local labour markets across the UK. * Argues that profound differences in local labour market conditions have exerted a telling influence on the New Deal's achievements * Includes extensive new research data on the current conditions of local labour markets in the UK and local impacts of the New Deal * Illustrated by a large series of original maps and figures. * Based on numerous interviews with local and regional policy actors.

Leseprobe

Contents

Series Editors’ Preface

Preface

List of Tables

List of Figures

Chapter One Locating the New Deal

Reforming Welfare and Redrawing Responsibility

Activating Labour Market Policy

Introducing the New Deals

Inadmissible Evidence? Geography and the New Deal

Aims and Approach

Chapter Two The Geographies of Worklessness

Introduction

The Unemployment Problem

The Geographies of Worklessness

The Policy Challenge

Chapter Three Local Disparities in the Performance of Welfare-to-Work

Introduction: Residual Pockets and the Geography of New Deal

Mapping New Deal Outcomes

Local Labour Market Flows

Local Disparities in Other New Deals

Conclusions

Appendix

Chapter Four Welfare-to-Work in Local Context

Introduction: Employability and Local Context

Low Employability in Buoyant Labour Markets

New Deals in Big Cities: Job Search and High Volumes

Expectation Gaps and Job Quality

Workfare Recycling in Depressed Local Labour Markets

Moves to Inactivity

Conclusions

Chapter Five A Geography of Mismatch? Employers, Jobs and Training

Introducing Gatekeepers’ Tales

Variations in Job Opportunities and Recruitment

A Pool of ‘Cheap Labour’?

The Role of the Job Subsidy

Training Provision under the NDYP

A Typology of Employer Participation

Conclusions

Chapter Six Localising Welfare-to-Work?

Local Flexibility and the New Deal for Young People

Partnership-Building and Co-ordination

Policy Learning and Adaptation

Innovation and Experimentation

Resource Targeting

Work-First Flexibility?

Conclusions

Chapter Seven Conclusions

The New Deal Policy Paradigm

Geographical ‘Anomalies’ in the Performance of the New Deal

Increasing Local Opportunities

A Final Note on Geography and Workfare

Notes

Bibliography

Index

RGS-IBG Book Series

The Royal Geographical Society (with the Institute of British Geographers) Book Series provides a forum for scholarly monographs and edited collections of academic papers at the leading edge of research in human and physical geography. The volumes are intended to make significant contributions to the field in which they lie, and to be written in a manner accessible to the wider community of academic geographers. Some volumes will disseminate current geographical research reported at conferences or sessions convened by Research Groups of the Society. Some will be edited or authored by scholars from beyond the UK. All are designed to have an international readership and to both reflect and stimulate the best current research within geography.

The books will stand out in terms of:

the quality of researchtheir contribution to their research fieldtheir likelihood to stimulate other researchbeing scholarly but accessible.

For series guides go to www.blackwellpublishing.com/pdf/rgsibg.pdf

Published

Putting Workfare in Place

Peter Sunley, Ron Martin and

Corinne Nativel

After the Three Italies

Mick Dunford and Lidia Greco

Domicile and Diaspora

Alison Blunt

Geographies and Moralities

Edited by Roger Lee and David M. Smith

Military Geographies

Rachel Woodward

A New Deal for Transport?

Edited by Iain Docherty and Jon Shaw

Geographies of British Modernity

Edited by David Gilbert, David Matless and Brian Short

Lost Geographies of Power

John Allen

Globalizing South China

Carolyn L. Cartier

Geomorphological Processes and Landscape Change: Britain inthe Last 1000 Years

Edited by David L. Higgitt and E. Mark Lee

Forthcoming

Living Through Decline: Surviving in the PlacesofthePost-

Industrial Economy

Huw Beynon and Ray Hudson

The Geomorphology of Upland Peat

Martin Evans and Jeff Warburton

Peoples/States/Territories

Rhys Jones

Publics and the City

Kurt Iveson

Driving Spaces

Peter Merriman

Geochemical Sediments and Landscapes

David Nash and Susan McLaren

Fieldwork

Simon Naylor

Mental Health and Social Space

Hester Parr

Natural Resources in Eastern Europe

Chad Staddon

Complex Locations: Women’s Geographical Work and the Canon1850—1970

Avril Maddrell

Climate and Society in Colonial Mexico

Georgina H. Endfield

Consuming Ethics: Markets and the Globalisation of Care

Clive Barnett, Nick Clarke, Paul Cloke and Alice Malpass

©2006 by Peter Sunley, Ron Martin and Corinne Nativel

BLACKWELL PUBLISHING

350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148–5020, USA

9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK

550 Swanston Street, Carlton, Victoria 3053, Australia

The right of Peter Sunley, Ron Martin and Corinne Nativel to be identified as the Authors of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs, and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, except as permitted by the UK Copyright, Designs, and Patents Act 1988, without the prior permission of the publisher.

First published 2006 by Blackwell Publishing Ltd

1 2006

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Sunley, Peter.

Putting workfare in place: local labour markets and the new deal/Peter Sunley, Ron Martin and Corinne Nativel.

p. cm. — (RGS-IBG book series)

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN-13: 978-1-4051-0785-3 (hard cover: alk. paper)

ISBN-10: 1-4051-0785-5 (hard cover: alk. paper)

ISBN-13: 978-1-4051-0784-6 (pbk.: alk. paper)

ISBN-10: 1-4051-0784-7 (pbk.: alk. paper)

1. Youth-Employment—Government policy—Great Britain. 2. Welfare recipients-Employ- ment—Government policy—Great Britain. 3. Labor market—Great Britain. I. Martin, Ron. II. Nativel, Corinne. III. Title. IV. Series.

HD6276.G72S868 2005

331.3’412042’094109049—dc22

2005013100

The publisher’s policy is to use permanent paper from mills that operate a sustainable forestry policy, and which has been manufactured from pulp processed using acid-free and elementary chlorine-free practices. Furthermore, the publisher ensures that the text paper and cover board used have met acceptable environmental accreditation standards.

Series Editors’ Preface

The RGS/IBG Book series publishes the highest quality of research and scholarship across the broad disciplinary spectrum of geography. Addressing the vibrant agenda of theoretical debates and issues that characterise the contemporary discipline, contributions will provide a synthesis of research, teaching, theory and practice that both reflects and stimulates cutting-edge research. The Series seeks to engage an international readership through the provision of scholarly, vivid and accessible texts.

Nick Henry and Jon Sadler

RGS-IBG Book Series Editors

Preface

The move towards workfare policies represents a fundamental change in the welfare states and labour markets of many industrialised countries. Such a shift represents a process of activation in which the receipt of benefits and assistance are made conditional on the active fulfilment of job search and other work-focused obligations. Across the industrial world, politicians are identifying such policies as the solution to the entrenched problems of worklessness that have plagued their economies during the last few decades. Within Western Europe the UK has led the way in the adoption of workfare and the New Deal for Young People has been at the forefront. Buoyed by favourable national economic conditions since 1998, this flagship New Deal programme has been held up as a model to be emulated. While it has received much abstract and aggregate attention, there has been relatively little research into the uneven geography of the New Deal. The aim of this book is to look beneath the model and understand how this set of active policies has had quite different challenges and impacts in different local and regional labour markets. It attempts to contribute to the understanding of the role of geography in the constitution of labour markets, and to highlight the need to incorporate such understanding in order to construct effective and efficient policy interventions.

The geographical concentration of unemployment and worklessness has become one of the most problematic and stubborn features of the UK labour market. The book aims to consider how far the New Deal has been able to respond to and resolve this problem. How far have local flexibility and policy decentralisation allowed the programme to address dramatic differences in local labour market contexts? Despite the complexity of local outcomes, the book argues that the spatial variation in the New Deal tells a clear and systematic story in which the policy typically works more effectively in more dynamic and tighter local labour markets.

The geography of non-work is not a problem that has been virtually eliminated. Instead, the limitations and imbalance of supply-side active labour market policies, focused on raising individual employability, are most apparent in distressed local labour where there is less opportunity to find rewarding and stable job opportunities. The book discusses some of the implications of this finding for the idea of a new contract between unemployed individuals and the state. It outlines some of ways in which the local responsiveness of the policy could be improved, and some of the possible means of raising the demand for labour in depressed local areas. The need to do so remains pressing.

The research for this book was funded by the Economic and Social Research Council's Grant R000237866 (The Geography of Workfare: Local Labour Markets and the New Deal) and we would like to thank the ESRC for their financial support. We would also like to thank the many Jobcentre Plus (formerly Employment Service) officials, other local labour market agents, programme participants and employers who helped by providing information. We are especially grateful to those individuals who agreed to be interviewed in Cambridge, Edinburgh, Tyneside, Birmingham and North London. An earlier version of Chapter 3 was published in the Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 2001, NS Volume 26, pages 484–512, and an earlier version of Chapter 6 was published in Environment and Planning: Government and Policy, 2002, Volume 20, pages 911–932. We are grateful to the editors and referees of these journals. We would like to thank Tim Aspden and Bob Smith in the Southampton Cartography Office and Philip Stickler and Owen Tucker in Cambridge for their help in producing the figures. Finally we would like to acknowledge the late Pam Spoerry who drew many of the original maps for this project and provided much good-natured, professional help.

Peter Sunley

Ron Martin

Corinne Nativel

Southampton, Cambridge and Paris, August 2004.

Tables

2.1Unemployment, employment and inactivity across the OECD economies2.2Average net interregional migration in the UK and selected other countries compared (per cent of regional population)2.3Regional extremes in unemployment across EU-15 member states, 2002 (NUTS2 regions)2.4Twenty lowest and highest unemployment localities in the UK at the end of the 1990s (ILO-based unemployment rates, 1999–2000)2.5Twenty lowest and highest youth unemployment localities in the UK, 2003 (average annual claimant count rates)3.1Proportions of NDYP cohorts into ‘all jobs’ by UoD cluster type, at April 20003.2Balance of options by cluster type, first seven cohorts at April 20003.3Employment rates among 18–24 year olds for selected unitary authorities and counties, June–August 20003.4Outflow rates by cluster, quarterly averages for second quarter in each year, 1997–20003.5Immediate destinations for New Deal 25 Plus to December 20034.1The case-study Units of Delivery 1024.2Percentages of NDYP leavers going on to other benefits, by selected JCP district to December 20034.3Percentages of enhanced New Deal 25 Plus leaving to other benefits, by district, JCP to December 20035.1Vacancies offered through the subsidised employment option5.2Occupational breakdown of subsidised job vacancies offered under the NDYP5.3Rates of pay and weekly hours of work in subsidised New Deal 18–24 jobs, by local Units of Delivery5.4Percentage of New Deal 18–24 recruits receiving different hourly pay rates5.5Estimates of additionality and deadweight effects in New Deal subsidised placements (percentage of vacancies)5.6A typology of employer participation in the NDYP and its outcomes for young people6.1Employment Service managerial responsibilities in NDYP6.2Numbers of Units of Delivery by type of delivery model7.1New Deal reforms and related initiatives

Figures

2.1Some of the key forces of change and their labour market impacts.2.2Employment rates of working-age men and women in the UK, 1959–2003.2.3Total and long-term claimant count unemployment, 1948–2003 (quarterly data, not seasonally adjusted)362.4The positive relationship between unemployment and inactivity across OECD countries.2.5Working-age claimants of sickness, invalidity and incapacity benefits (long term – over six months) UK.2.6Regional claimant count unemployment rate disparities in the UK, 1974–2002.2.7Increasing local variation (Inequality) in unemployment rates across local authority and unitary authority districts in the UK, 1994/5–2001/2.2.8Local ILO unemployment rates (by local and unitary authority areas) across the UK, 1999–2000.2.9Local Working Age Employment Rates (by Local and Unitary Authorities) across the UK, 2001–2.2.10Local (UA/LAD) rates of long-term claimant unemployment, sick/disabled, and economically inactive, by census unemployment rate, males, April 2001.2.11Processes of hysteresis in high-unemployment localities.3.1Long-term unemployment rates, 18–24 year olds, by Units of Delivery, 1997.3.2Relative incidence of youth unemployment across the New Deal Units of Delivery areas (annual average for 1997).3.3Proportion of New Deal participants entering unsubsidised jobs, April 2000.3.4Proportion of New Deal participants entering subsidised or unsubsidised jobs, April 2000.3.5Job-entry rate for all Units of Delivery to March 2002.3.6Percentage leavers into jobs, Job Centre Plus Districts, January 1999 to June 2003.3.7Percentage leavers into unsubsidised sustained jobs, January 1999 to March 2003.3.8Proportion of participants remaining in jobs 26 weeks after leaving New Deal, at April 2000.3.9Proportion of participants leaving New Deal for unknown destinations, at April 2000.3.10Youth unemployment rates by local authority districts, 2003.3.11Long-term 18–24 year old claimant unemployment stocks, by selected Units of Delivery.3.12Long-term 18–24 year old claimant unemployment stocks, by selected Units of Delivery.3.13Unemployment outflow rates for selected Units of Delivery, March 1997 to June 2000 (18–24 year olds).3.14Unemployment outflow rates for selected Units of Delivery, March 1997 to June 2000 (18–24 year olds).3.15Unemployment inflow rates for selected Units of Delivery, March 1997 to June 2000 (18–24 year olds).3.16Unemployment inflow rates for selected Units of Delivery, March 1997 to June 2000 (18–24 year olds).3.17Inverse relationship between New Deal 25 Plus leavers returning to JSA and leaving to jobs, by JCP District, at December 2003.4.1Percentage of starts that are second and above, averaged between January 1998 and September 2003.7.1The relationship between unemployment and vacancies across local labour markets.

Chapter One

Locating the New Deal

Reforming Welfare and Redrawing Responsibility

There is little doubt that welfare states across the industrialised world are facing a set of unprecedented pressures and challenges. The globalisation of capital and trade, together with the intensification of global competition, have raised profound questions about states’ fiscal capacities and the optimum levels of public spending and taxation. Technological change has been widely blamed for increasing levels of poverty and exclusion among unskilled and poorly educated groups, and the ageing of demographic profiles has raised serious questions about the viability of public pension schemes and welfare services. On top of all this, welfare states have suffered a relentless barrage of criticisms from neoliberal theorists accusing them of being thoroughly inefficient and counterproductive. European welfare states, in particular, have been targeted as sources of economic rigidity and have been charged with promoting social equality at the expense of employment growth. There is no doubt that welfare states are under stress.

But this does not mean that the welfare state is about to disappear. In fact, there is a widespread consensus that welfare states have shown remarkable resilience and continuity (Pierson, 2001; Taylor Gooby, 2001; Swank, 2002; Huber and Stephens, 2000). Neither does it mean that all welfare states are converging on a single model of residual or minimal welfare (Cochrane et al., 2001; Liebfried, 2001; Scharpf, 2001; Swank, 2002; Huber and Stephens, 2000). Conservative-corporatist, social democratic Scandinavian and liberal minimalist welfare state regimes continue to follow different trajectories, albeit with some complications and common trends (Esping Andersen, 1996; Taylor Gooby, 2001; Hall and Soskice, 2001).