The big benefits shake-up coming to Greater Manchester

A big shake-up of the benefits system is set to come to Greater Manchester.

The mayor wants to take control of government cash used to get people back into work, through a new programme called Live Well.

If it gets government approval, it would mean Andy Burnham would control Greater Manchester’s portion of the £6 billion employment support budget, rather than the Department for Work and Pension (DWP). 

Effectively, it would mean the mayor would fund local community and voluntary groups, the NHS, and Job Centres to provide more holistic support for benefits claimants seeking work to get them back into employment, so they’re helped by people who know their area - and the issues in said area - best.

It’s an arrangement which offers potential benefits to both the government and people seeking work.

Andy Burnham believes devolution can get 150,000 Greater Manchester residents back into work over the next five years, a potentially huge win for the DWP.

Burnham also believes devolution could end the ‘formulaic system that can feel remote and transactional’ job-seekers are currently subjected to.

“Building on the innovative work our NHS has done around social prescribing and in partnership with our fantastic community organisations, we will help residents to improve their health and get a decent job,” the mayor said on October 3, when DWP minister Liz Kendall visited Salford’s Loaves and Fishes centre.

“Not only will this reduce the inequalities in our city region and boost life chances and wellbeing, but it will also cut the benefits bill and ease pressure on our NHS.”

In the past, Mr Burnham said Job Centres could eventually be renamed ‘Live Well Centres’, and has already pledged ‘every neighbourhood’ would ‘have a local Live Well service’, regardless of their home.

But the mayor has batted away suggestions Live Well is just a rebranding exercise.

“If we - working with a DWP moved in to the Job Centre Plus with a Live Well approach and even maybe call them Live Well Centres with our local community and voluntary partners - the money that we’re currently seeing disappear out of Greater Manchester, if we rooted it back into our own economy, into our own community and involuntary sector, the benefits would multiply of doing that,” he said. 

“There’s a better approach here that doesn’t cost the government anything more. But what we are saying is you then hold us to account to get more people into work.

"I’ll be on the spot and I don’t mind that. I’m ready to face that pressure.”

It’s an approach which some long-term jobseekers think can work - if cash is consistent.

One is Wayne Fernandez, who credits the Loaves and Fishes support centre with keeping him alive to see his grandchildren.

He said: “If the government and Andy funded places like this, it will [work in getting people working again].

"This should be a government-funded initiative. 

“They fund it for 12 months and they stop the funding to review where that money is going for three to six months.

"Now in that mean time, that three to six months, people haven’t had a service to go to whether it be [for] mental health problems, addiction problems, homeless problems, they haven’t got a place like this to get help and know where to go - so you end it back in the same position.”

However, even with support from some service users and a mayor willing to take political flack, ultimate control of the employment support fund hasn’t been handed over by the DWP yet.

Publicly, Burnham is hopeful that could be done in the budget which will be announced on October 30 by ‘confidently making a case to the Treasury’.

However, sources have indicated it could be more likely the cash comes when Greater Manchester gets a ‘single settlement’ from the government in April next year, which means the mayor’s Combined Authority will be run more like a Whitehall department.

Live Well, therefore, is a policy with promise to both the government and Greater Mancunians - and remains a core part of the mayor’s manifesto, on which he secured a landslide in May.

But it’s something which needs time to work.

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