City Deal £9m jobs help scheme set for huge fail
Political Correspondent A £9M City Deal programme to get people back into work is on track to fail due to a lack of referrals.
In August, the Evening Times reported how it was feared the DWP was “dragging its heels” on sending people from Jobcentres to the Working Matters programme in Glasgow and the west of Scotland.
Council bosses had asked the DWP to increase referrals to try and meet the targets for getting people into jobs.
Now, with less than six months to go, the scale of the failure can be revealed.
In total, the programme for the eight City Deal councils had a target of engaging with 4000 clients and positive job outcomes for 600 by the end of the project, which will be March next year.
With six months of the 36 month programme remaining, Working Matters has engaged with 2455 people and produced 215 j ob outcomes.
It has produced an average if seven jobs a month over two and a half years and would need to get 64 people a month into work for the rest of the project to hit the target.
In Glasgow the total number of people involved in the programme is 1138 against a target of 1927 and 84 people have got jobs against the target of 289.
Council bosses are now resigned to the programme not achieving its targets.
In a report to councillors Kevin Rush, City Deal Director of Economic Growth, said: “At the meeting between Glasgow City Council, City Deal PMO and DWP on August 25 the discussion considered the likelihood of the project achieving the overall engagement and job outcome targets within the context of the low number of client referrals.
“It is evident that based on performance to date, achieving the targets would require a significant increase in the number of DWP client referrals by the end of March 2018.
“It was therefore considered that the current project targets are unachievable.”
The report states that the DWP was unable to say how many more referrals it could make and referred the issue to the DWP at a national level.
The DWP provided half of the funding and if the targets are not met will be due a refund.
It is projected that the DWP, as a result of targets being missed due to the DWP itself not referring enough clients, will get almost a quarter of the cash back.
The DWP said in August it was working with local authorities on an improvement plan to refer eligible people to the programme.
A spokesman said today:“We continue to work closely with local authorities on the improvement plan to refer eligible people to the Working Matters programme.”