Long-Term Unemployment in Northern Ireland

Author(s): David Donnison and Paul McGill
Document Type: Report
Year: 1996
Publisher: Northern Ireland Council for Voluntary Action
Place of Publication: Belfast
ISBN: 0 903087 37 5
Subject Area(s): Unemployment
Client Group(s) : Unemployed

Abbreviations: NICVA - Northern Ireland Council for Voluntary Action, ACE - Action for Community Employment, DED - Department for Economic Development

Background to the Research

  • In December 1995, the budget for the ACE scheme was reduced by 25%, amounting to a cut of £12.5 million. In an effort to challenge this decision, NICVA called for an inquiry into the whole question of long-term unemployment in Northern Ireland by an independent advisor. This report compiled by Professor Donnison makes a very significant contribution to the debate on long-term unemployment and suggests directions in which policy should evolve in the future.

Research Approach

  • The report draws heavily on written evidence submitted by a total of 65 individuals and agencies. Thirteen of them gave formal evidence at open meetings held in Belfast, Omagh and Derry and eight others made informal contributions. Evidence is also drawn from meetings held in Dublin.

Main Findings

  • Although the issue of long-term unemployment is clearly moving up the political agenda, powerful interests still feel they cannot, or need not, trouble themselves about it. Unemployed people themselves have never had the political clout to move government.
  • Unemployment is particularly concentrated among Catholic men with few skills or qualifications, often with several children and no other earners in the household, living in generally deprived areas. Such statements are a description of its victims, not an explanation of its causes.
  • Continuing investment from a buoyant private sector in a growing economy is essential to provide the economic and political environment for an effective attack upon employment.
  • Retraining, confidence-building programmes and temporary employment projects can play an important part in helping unemployed people to move to work.
  • Jobs will be needed for women as well as men, and particularly for those families which cannot afford to abandon the safety net of social benefits unless there are two earners in the household.
  • Urban renewal programmes also have an important part to play, as creators of job opportunities, as generators of local economies, and as re-builders of public confidence in deprived areas which are being abandoned by their more successful people.
  • There may also have to be changes in the tax and social benefit system to ensure that they do not deter people from moving into work.
  • In the most deprived areas there are many people - pensioners, lone parents, the sick - for whom jobs are temporarily or permanently out of the question. For them, and many others, an effective welfare rights service is needed to ensure they get all of the benefits they are entitled to.
  • Democratically credible civic leadership is needed at regional and city scale to bring in groups long excluded from the political process.
  • There must be an assurance that if new initiatives reduce the social security budget, savings must be diverted to reducing long-term unemployment. It would be both unjust and short-sighted if projects to help people who have been out of work for a long time could only be funded at the expense of other valuable services.

Recommendations

  • A forum should be created, with real power, which brings together official agencies, the voluntary and community sector, trade unions and representatives of unemployed people to decide on new programmes. This should be part of a wider initiative to develop civic leadership and social partnership.
  • Experimental, radical initiatives should be mounted and monitored in a number of deprived areas with a special focus on helping those who have been out of work for a long time.
  • As a first step, consideration should be given to a new programme offering benefits plus £50 per week to 20,000 people who have been out of work for a long time, at a total cost of approximately £170 million per year.
  • Government should take a cross-departmental view of the problem of long-term unemployment and the associated Targeting Social Need strategy. It must avoid the narrow division underlying the ACE cuts by which the DED and its agencies are responsible for job creation but not for community development, strengthening community infrastructure or social security.
  • The new forum should look at ways of streamlining and co-ordinating the many initiatives on unemployment at regional and local level.
  • The community and voluntary sector should examine the priority it is giving to long-term unemployment as opposed to service delivery.
  • Trade Unions must take the issue more seriously in practice than they have done up to now.
 

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