In a move to shift the focus of service delivery away from the provider and towards the customer, a pilot to join up local councils and Jobcentre Plus has been launched. Jobcentre Plus staff in Calderdale and Kirklees, Buckinghamshire and Gateshead and South Tyneside will collect information and verify new claims for Housing and Council Tax Benefit at the same time that they deal with applications for Jobseekers Allowance, Income Support and Incapacity Benefit. This will remove the need for claimants to answer the same questions twice.The pilot supports the drive to provide a single seamless benefit service, but there is uncertainty about how effective it will be in practice. Jobcentre Plus staff have no knowledge of Housing Benefit and cutting out the expertise of the staff in council offices may lead to increased fraud. Because of the fraud risk, council office staff may be reluctant to accept claims verified elsewhere. It is also unclear whether moving the responsibility for verification will actually speed up the processing of claims overall.
Speakers at a conference organized by the Institute for Public Research will today pledge cross party support for proposals to build community at the local level. They will back a new IPPR report ‘Making Sense of Community’ which sets out research findings on the relationship between public policy and the community. The report makes recommendations across the key policy areas of: planning and development, provision for young people, crime reduction and policing, design and liveability and methods of delivery. They include requiring MPs and councillors to spend time living in the areas they represent, rewarding developers who embraced the sustainability agenda and modernisation of what was the youth club movement.Shadow Home Secretary Oliver Letwin will say that: ” We need to understand community as a natural society, spontaneously created, which can flourish only if the state provides a framework that prevents disorder and fear from inhibiting natural social activity. We need to understand crime and community as two opposing forces, one of which will overwhelm the other. If crime wins the struggle and criminals take possession of the street, the neighbourhood decays, the young are corrupted, people who can get out, people who can’t live blighted lives. We have to ensure this does not happen.”
By Annette Boaz Reproduced by permission of the Public Management and Policy Association The public sector has widely adopted an evidence based approach to the development of policy, but gathering the evidence and making use of it is proving difficult. The author explains the work going on in the field of medicine, including the systematic reviews of existing research. She outlines the lessons from this work that can be transferred to other policy areas.