Rescaling employment support accountability: From negative national neoliberalism to positively integrated city-region ecosystems

Abstract

Waves of successive Devolution Deals are transforming England's landscape of spatial governance and transferring new powers to city-regions, facilitating fundamental qualitative policy reconfigurations and opening up new opportunities as well as new risks for citizens and local areas. Focused on city-region's recently emerging roles around employment support policies the article advances in four ways what are currently conceptually and geographically underdeveloped literatures on employment support accountability levers. Firstly, the paper dissects weaknesses in the accountability framework of Great Britain's key national contracted-out employment support programme and identifies the potential for city-regions to respond to these weaknesses. Secondly, the article highlights the centrality of the nationally neglected network accountability lever in supporting these unemployed individuals and advances this discussion further by introducing to the literature for the first time a conceptual distinction between what we term 'positive' and 'negative' forms of these accountably levers that currently remain homogenised within the literature. Crucially, the argument sets out for the first time in the literature why analytically it is the positive version of network accountability that is the key -and currently missing at nationallevel -ingredient to the design of effective employment support for the priority group of 'harderto-help' unemployed people who have more complex and/or severe barriers to employment. Thirdly, the paper argues from a geographical perspective that it is city-regions that are uniquely positioned in the English context to create the type of positively networked integrated employment support 'ecosystem' that 'harder-to-help' individuals in particular require. Finally, the discussion situates these city-region schemes within their broader socio-economic and political context and connects with broader debates around the lurching development of neoliberalism. In doing so it argues that whilst these emerging city-region ecosystem models offer much progressive potential their relationship to the problematic neoliberal employment support paradigm remains uncertain given that they refine, embed and indeed buttress that same neoliberal employment policy paradigm rather than fundamentally challenging or stepping beyond it.

More than marketised? Exploring the governance and accountability mechanisms at play in Social Impact Bonds

“…The analytical framework of accountability mechanisms for unpacking the design and performance of social programmes is a potentially powerful lens but one that has yet to be formally applied to the understanding of SIBs. Building on the broader public service governance literature (Considine 2001;Bovaird and Löffler 2009) as well as the emerging literature which focuses specifically on accountability mechanisms in employment support (Jantz et al 2015;Whitworth and Carter, 2017), five stylized overarching accountability mechanisms can be distilled, as summarized in Table 1.…”

“…This may involve the 'coproduction' of outcomes. Whitworth and Carter, 2017 These five accountability dimensions can be understood as 'ideal types' each with distinctive reference points, rules, tactics and norms. Considine (2001) and others helpfully trace the evolution of these accountability levers, noting that the first three (procedural, corporate and marketised) broadly correspond to the development of public bureaucracy from its post war origins to more recent waves of 'reform'.…”

“…The behaviour, relational dynamics and experiences of staff members, agencies, and crucially, service users are profoundly shaped by the degree to which differing combinations of accountability levers are leant on within any given programme. Any public programme on paper may incorporate elements from across each of these five accountability types (Whitworth and Carter, 2017) and in practice the degree to which the governance matrixthe respective mix and dominance of any one levermay shore up or displace the ability for a programme to successfully deliver policymaker (or service user) ambitions.…”

Spatial Creaming and Parking?: the Case of the UK Work Programme

“…Work Programme deliberately offered extensive flexibility for providers over the type and frequency of support for participants. Minimal prescription over delivery existed and provider flexibility was enhanced further in practice by the combination of weak and frequently unenforceable service guarantees alongside light monitoring and oversight by the DWP below the aggregated Prime provider and CPA levels (Whitworth and Carter, 2018). Instead, the key policy lever that the DWP relied on was an unusually aggressive payment-by-results model that was heavilyand since 2014 entirelyweighted towards payment for employment outcomes only (Whitworth and Carter 2018;Carter and Whitworth 2015).…”

“…Unfortunately, this differential payments model has been widely evidence to be an overly crude basis on which to proxy distance to the labour market and, as a consequence, an ineffective basis on which to calibrate provider incentives (Lane et al 2013;WPSC 2013;Carter and Whitworth 2017). Unsurprisingly given its weak performance levers (Whitworth and Carter 2018), Work Programme's live running was marred by constant political, media and academic evidence of poor quality support and, particularly, seemingly endemic creaming and parking (Newton et al 2012;Lane et al 2013;Meager et al 2013;PAC 2013;WPSC 2013;Rees et al 2014). Such creaming and parking practices are problematic at an individual level because they undermine the experiences and outcomes of already more disadvantaged service users.…”