Welfare Reform, Employment and Skills in Barnet
Author: Localis |
Welfare Reform, Employment and Skills In Barnet
Welfare Reform, Employment and Skills in Barnet: A successful, cross-agency approach to helping people into work
Localis today publishes a pamphlet with the London Borough of Barnet that describes how the Council has successfully implemented an innovative cross-agency approach to helping people into work in the wake of Welfare Reform introduced by the previous Coalition government, and continuing under the current Conservative administration.
Written by Councillor Richard Cornelius, the Leader of the Council, the pamphlet explains how Barnet set up the Welfare Reform Task Force to help residents move into work. The Welfare Reform Task Force is a new model of local public services with a dedicated, co-located, multi-agency team which brings together Jobcentre Plus, the Housing Benefit service, the Barnet Group’s housing needs service, welfare benefits advisers and the voluntary sector. The model is now being rolled out more widely to tackle specific problems in specific communities, such as Burnt Oak, which has the highest rate of unemployment in the borough. The pamphlet argues that Barnet’s coordinated approach not only provides a better service for the user, but also that it has returned savings to the Council and partners of many times the money invested.
The pamphlet concludes with Councillor Cornelius’s hope that Barnet’s approach will be tried by other areas, on their own terms, as a model for the future of local service delivery.