Govt puts ceiling on employment schemes

Press, 1 June 1985, Page 2

Govt puts ceiling on employment schemes

Wellington reporter A new management system for fully subsidised employment programmes, under which district offices of the Labour Department will work to allocations for the numbers of people on programmes, will begin on June 4.

The Minister of Employment, Mr Burke, said that until now numbers of people on employment programmes had been openended. This had had unpredictable results in terms of costs and the numbers helped. This new system would enable the Government to plan the help it gave to identified target groups, and to allocate resources accordingly. Under the new system, he said, each Labour . Department district would work to an allocation he had set for the total number of people on three fully subsidised employment programmes. These were the Project Employment Programme (P.E.P.), the Work:Skill Development Programme (W.S.D.P.), and the Voluntary Organisations Training Programme (V;O.T.P.). Mr Burke said the allocations would take into ac-

count local needs and conditions, such as the level of long-term employment, and were related to the use being made of the programmes now so that no district experienced a major change. Within the allocations, districts would be able to plan their activities through the year, using their knowledge of local factors such as seasonal fluctuations. The Minister said he would write to employers of fully subsidised workers to explain how the allocations would affect them,

The system would form one part of the whole structure of assistance provided by the Government to people seeking work. The fully subsidised programmes were intended for those who were having difficulty in finding unsubsidised work and who had not been placed in partially subsidised jobs (under the Employment Incentive Scheme) or for whom vocational training was not appropriate. ;; An immediate benefit of the new system was that it would enable a planned transition to new measures for employment subsidies, training, ; and help' for emplpyrpent initiatives for

minority populations, Mr Burke said. Details of these measures were being developed by an officials committee. Numbers on existing programmes would be reduced gradually, to make room for the phasing in of new assistance measures on the same planned basis. The fall in unemployment during recent months meant that fewer people than before were in need of support, he said. So starting reductions now would cause little disruption. No individual P.E.P. workers or W.S.D.P. or V.O.T.P. trainees supported by the programmes would be affected by the reductions. The small decline in the numbers on the programmes could be achieved by managing the number of placements during the rest of the year. ; *rt. The monthly average allocation for districts in the norther South Island in 198586 (with the 1984-85 allocations in parentheses) will be: Nelson, 440 (501); Blenheim, 240 (283); Greymouth, 220 (248); Christchurch, , 1680 (I 860 and Timaru, 290 (328). The 1985-86 national monthly average total will be’ 19,400 compared with 21,951 in 1984-85. -