Interesting times - The year ahead for welfare to work practitioners

With the winding down of various contracts across the country, and the start of new FND prime contracts in October, many welfare to work practitioners are so worried about their own jobs that dealing with people on the dole right now is in danger of becoming secondary. To (hopefully) provide some reassurance, we've put together a guide to let industry workers know what to expect over the coming year.

Will I lose my job?

Maybe, but you'll probably get another one. If you're delivering a contract that's due to be replaced by FND in October, then your existing contract will finish winding down before the new one starts. This means that there'll be a gap in delivery where your job simply doesn't exist.

However, once the new contract does kick in, you'll probably be transferred across to the new provider because your job was protected by TUPE, even if you were made redundant during the wind-down. There's an article with more detail on TUPE here. The key things you need to consider when figuring out whether your job is likely to be protected include:

• Are you working on project(s) that will be replaced by FND? - Employment Zones, PSLs, New Deal for Young People, New Deal 25+, New Deal 50+, New Deal for Musicians, and New Deal Self Employment should all be protected. If you're working on a Programme Centre or NDLP, then you'll probably TUPE across to JCP Support Contracts when they come in. If you're working on an ESF contract that's due to end, the story's less clear as ESF contracts are by-and-large meant to be one-offs, rather than regular funding streams.
• Is all of your work based in these projects? - If you work across multiple contracts, some of which are not due to TUPE across, then things get complex. There's no such thing as TUPEing 40% of someone, so a decision has to be made about which part of your job you travel with.
• Are you in senior management? - If so, then TUPE may not apply

So what does this transfer do? Well, it gives you the legal right and your present and future employers the legal responsibility to transfer your job from your current deliverer of a contract to the new deliverer of a contract. This may not necessarily be the prime; it could easily be a subcontractor if the subcontractor has the nearest analogue to your job, e.g. they're delivering something close to your specialism in your area. When your job transfers, your pay and conditions (e.g. holidays, working hours, pension entitlements and statutory redundancy pay) also transfer across.

There are some strings attached to the transfer. Your performance expectations don't necessarily transfer across, as otherwise providers wouldn't have a hope of managing across all the different individual targets. Rather more immediately, if there aren't enough jobs of a particular type (e.g. admin) for the number of staff, then the TUPE process is followed by a formal redundancy process. The redundancy has to follow fairly strict rules, including treating all staff equally regardless of whether they were TUPE'd in or not, and also offering the opportunity to transfer across to relevant job roles in other areas. If you get made redundant at the end of this, it's actually your new employer who makes you redundant (under the same terms and conditions) rather than your old one.

As discussed below, there are unlikely to be a huge number of people affected by a lack of appropriate jobs in the new providers, as there will be substantially more jobs in total.

Disclaimer - I am not a lawyer, and even if I were, I wouldn't be able to give general advice that covered your specific circumstances. If you have concerns about TUPE, you should make use of the advice agencies recommended in this article.

Will there be enough jobs to go round?

Short answer: yes, but not necessarily for every job role. For example, the introduction of PRaP may actually reduce the total number of administrator jobs (or it might not).

The longer, more convincing answer is based on the following staffing rates in the industry, which I worked out using the DWP business plans and a certain amount of mathematical voodoo:

In the current financial year, the total number of provider staff on DWP-funded employment programmes is likely to average not far off twice as much as two years ago. That's a sensational growth rate for any industry, and means that experienced welfare-to-work practitioners are going to be in very high demand in the immediate future. This doesn't include demand for staff from other funding routes, such as LSC employment-related funding, local authorities or RDAs. Note also that these are the figures for the whole country - New Deal areas will also see big increases in the number of staff, as well as FND.

What's happening in the longer term?

To get an idea of what's happening longer term, let's look at the DWP budgets:

The above table is for Departmental Expenditure Limits (DEL)1, which cover costs like staffing, programmes, and keeping everything running. It does not cover paying benefits to people – that comes under the AME budget. Judging by these figures, the increase in money and staffing will continue into 2011 as the DWP work to stop this recession's unemployed from dropping into the life-long unemployment that awaited people hit by the 80s and 90s recessions.

Now, the above budget figures only hold true if the Conservatives don't change them after coming into power. The Conservatives are already committed to the same welfare reforms and contracting approach as Labour. One possibility they would very likely try to use to lower the DEL budget is to start paying for employment programmes out of the AME budget, essentially offsetting the cost of helping an unemployed person against the benefit savings from getting them into a job. This could theoretically result in truly huge amounts of investment in the industry, since the welfare budgets are far, far larger than the delivery ones. However, AME-DEL (as it's called) relies on being able to get people into a job, and during a recession there simply aren't enough jobs to go round.

In other words, projections are that the welfare to work industry will keep growing for some time, but nothing's absolutely certain given the state of government debt.

How will the job roles change?

Your own job role could change in any number of ways, but there are some general themes to FND that are likely to shine through:

• Harder targets - According to industry rumour from multiple sources, the attempt by Serco, Wise Group and others to push for realistic job entry targets was not successful. The new FND contracts are by and large promising 50-55% sustained job entries at 13 weeks for very low unit costs, about half again as many as the highest performer was managing before the recession. This could make for some fairly brutal performance targets, but rumour also has it that the DWP may make contracts deliverable by modifying the targets over time to reflect how people are actually performing across the country
• More flexibility - The old New Deal framework of GtW, ETF, VSO, IAP etc. is no longer relevant. The primes have complete flexibility in how they deliver their services, so you may (or may not, if your provider thinks otherwise) have a lot more freedom in deciding how best to move someone towards employment. One potential limiting factor is the tightness of the contracts - FND has very tight margins, which could force providers to adopt a low-cost 'sausage factory' approach. Either way, the delivery structure may not bear much resemblance to what you're used to
• Less paperwork - ND4 timesheets and their ilk will not exist in the new contracts. FAM teams are being reconfigured to look at ensuring value rather than correct paperwork. You'll only spend lots of time filling out forms if your provider is a fan of it

For more background on how the contracts will work, you could try looking at the original articles on Flexible New Deal and the Commissioning Strategy, bearing in mind that they were both written before a dirty great recession blew in.

So what do I do now?

Incoming providers will probably want to determine their TUPE liabilities sooner rather than later, so things could start rolling within a month or so. However, it's possible that nobody will give you a solid, 100% answer that your job's safe for a while yet. This is because of the sheer complexity of the process, which generally means that a phalanx of lawyers and HR people have to go through and figure out who goes where, and handle redundancies if necessary.

Industry managers have already started shuffling around following the FND phase 1 awards, and will continue to do so over the coming year as providers find out whether they've got a place at the welfare to work table. If you're involved in delivery, the best advice might be to keep an eye out for new opportunities, prepare for a short gap in employment, but remain confident about the future of the industry.

Another disclaimer - Just to make this absolutely clear, nobody knows for certain what will happen to your job, or to the industry, or what the outcome of TUPE will be in your individual circumstances. The only thing that can be said for certain is that we're in a much better position than people in many other industries.