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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