Birmingham City Council spends £46m to help 170 people find jobs
Birmingham City Council’s administration of the Working Neighbourhoods Fund is under attack again after it emerged that £46 million targeted to tackle unemployment in the poorest wards has helped only 170 people to find jobs in just over two years.
A further 5,290 people have been “engaged” and given advice about how to improve their skills and find work.
With less than a year to go until the three-year WNF ceases, it is becoming uncertain whether the ambitious targets will be met.
The council said when the programme began that 4,000 people would be found sustainable long term employment and 15,000 others given advice about finding work.
It’s also been confirmed that Be Birmingham, the council-led city strategic partnership, is struggling to spend its portion of the WNF. During the 2009-10 financial year, only 63 per cent of a £50 million budget was spent.
The City Housing Partnership spent 28 per cent of its £1.8 million share, while the Culture Partnership managed 43 per cent.
Officials admit that the council’s Constituency Employment and Skills Plans (CESPs) and Neighbourhood Employment and Skills Plans (NESPs), which are being used to allocate the £46 million, got off to a slow start. There were lengthy delays in letting contracts to the private sector firms bidding to carry out the job creating and skills work.
Full scale delivery only began in Ladywood, which has Birmingham’s highest unemployment rate, in January this year.
Difficulties in approving contracts in Ladywood and Perry Barr were partly the fault of “adverse weather conditions”, according to the council.
Seven people in Ladywood have been helped to find work so far, although the council expects that figure to rise when skills training kicks in.
Timothy Huxtable, the cabinet member for regeneration, chairs the WNF programme monitoring board, a body recently set up to speed progress.
Coun Huxtable (Con Bournville) promised to ensure “robust” management of the programme and accepted that mistakes had been made.
He added: “Performance has been accelerated significantly since November, with the programme achieving its WNF 2009-10 business plan expenditure targets. Considerable progress has also been made in achieving outputs.”
Coun Huxtable said the WNF had already supported 845 people to stay in work through a scheme that bridges the difficulties some people suffer when losing benefits to take paid work.
He added: “It is clear, with the benefit of hindsight, that NESPs and CESPs have in general not provided good value for money, although some aspects of the programme have proved to be very successful in tackling worklessness within Birmingham.
“The design of NESPs and CESPs has proven bureaucratic, inflexible and does not suit the very different economic conditions which exist today compared to when they were originally conceived.
“As part of our current and immediate review of area-based grants, the council is looking at what areas of these programmes have or haven’t worked, with a view as to whether or not to continue with individual projects moving forward.”
Liam Byrne, shadow Chief Secretary of the Treasury and Birmingham Hodge HIll MP said: “There has been a wholesale failure to bring work into Birmingham.
