Bringing together employment and skills with a wider range of services, particularly for lone parents or people on Incapacity Benefit
The Government is also looking at more innovative ways to bring together an even wider range of providers and local partners; to create truly integrated packages of support involving health, childcare, and other relevant services. Again, many leading areas are at the forefront of these efforts. We will work with the Glasgow City Strategy Partnership, which has developed a wider strategy for tackling inactivity, bringing together skills, employment and health services into a single package of support, to explore what further flexibilities may be needed for the hardest to reach individuals. The Greater Manchester MAA Partnership will work with departments to develop a pilot programme for increasing support for longer-term inactive benefit customers. The project aims to engage all Incapacity Benefit customers who are not currently receiving Pathways to Work support with a range of local services.
Other examples of local initiatives will test incentives towards ever closer working. For example, the Liverpool City Employment Strategy Partnership will be testing out the 'duty to cooperate' principles. This will explore the joint roles of LSC and DWP and other partners in shaping and managing the strategic decision-making on employment and skills priorities. We will also work with the South Yorkshire City Strategy Partnership to develop joint performance management and provider capability arrangements for programmes that align funds from a number of sources.
CLG, DWP and DIUS will work together through learning networks to extend existing and future good practice identified in these and other local areas on joining-up commissioning to the whole of the country.
Embedding closer working within the incentives of the system
The current incentive regimes still tend to drive delivery organisations in one of two directions: either getting people into jobs or getting them qualifications. The government is committed to bringing these two worlds together, so all our services are lined up behind the combined objective of getting people into sustained employment with skills progression.
The Government will be introducing a series of groundbreaking commissioning trials that will have at their heart shared outcomes and goals. These will develop and test new success measures with providers, building on approaches in the integrated employment and skills trials. In particular, we will explore the scope for moving beyond the current measure of sustainable employment (that someone is employed for six months) to one that looks over a longer time period, say 18 months, and includes some measure on how they have shown skills progression. This work will inform future contract discussions, including around the flexible New Deal, Pathways and LSC-funded skills provision, such as Skills for Life.
As set out in Budget 2008, the Government will also explore using a new funding mechanism to reward private and third sector specialist providers for investing in helping long-term Incapacity Benefits claimants to return to work.
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