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Party Conference: Welfare reform should be about more than just cuts - Community Links blog
Interesting blog piece from Maeve McGoldrick of Community Links, titled ‘Party Conference: Welfare reform should be about more than just cuts’:
It’s extremely unfortunate that each of the parties conflate the need to cut expenditure with welfare reform policies. There is a real need for reform which is distinct from the need for a reduction in expenditure. Investment is needed to modernise the support services available to both unemployed people and people in low-paid employment.
In particular Community Links strongly believes that we need to invest in an improved, personalised jobcentre and employment support programmes. All of the political parties are shying away from the obvious – that support services still need reform. Yet we have no evidence from any of the parties of worked through polices on how to do this.
We have brought together experts from the welfare-to-work world and we’ve been briefing ministers on our personalisation agenda; an idea we believe would transform employment support services into excellent and effective provision.
Simply repeating the same cuts narrative for the next three years is unsustainable. The test for welfare reform at the 2015 election is innovative, solution-focused thinking – at the moment we are not getting this from any of the political parties.
We have a wealth of knowledge and experience from successfully delivering frontline employment services, and along with other fantastic organisations in this sector; we have come up with a number of suggestions on personalisation of welfare reform that we believe each of the parties with a serious desire to should be including in their election manifestos.
It’s also worth clicking through their Personalisation of Welfare briefing, linked to above, which expands on some of their thinking about how reform could be more usefully approached.
For the whole article, see Party Conference: Welfare reform should be about more than just cuts