Giz a job

Redundancies loom over job creation programme

Heard the one about redundancy notices being issued to staff helping jobless people get into work, education and training?

Sadly, it’s no joke for at least 70 folk employed in various community-based organisations currently supporting jobseekers in the most deprived areas of Hull.

Even worse, their immediate futures appear to be hanging by a thread through no fault of their own.

Instead, they’re caught in a perfect storm fermented by successive governments, the region’s two local councils and the new Mayoral Combined Authority led by Luke Campbell.

Bernard Hill as Yosser Hughes in Boys from the Blackstuff

To understand this big fat mess, let’s go back to an even bigger one - Brexit.

Remember all that guff about Britain being able to stand on its own two feet again after taking back control from those meddling EU bureaucrats?

One of the fabled Brexit benefits was supposedly being able to end the reliance on traditionally generous, long-term evidence-based EU-funded programmes in towns and cities across the UK by replacing them with our own versions instead. What could possibly go wrong?

Enter Michael Gove who, having been one of the political architects of Brexit, somehow omitted to tell us his plans to do exactly this were actually built on sand.

What better way to avoid any serious scrutiny of these shaky foundations than to come up with a frankly ridiculous title for this magical crock of gold at the end of the Brexit rainbow? Ladies and gentlemen, let’s give a big warm welcome to the UK Shared Prosperity Fund.

As Gove announced at its launch in April 2022: “We have taken back control of our money from the EU and we are empowering those who know their communities best to deliver on their priorities.

“The UK Shared Prosperity Fund will help to unleash the creativity and talent of communities that have for too long been overlooked and undervalued.

“By targeting this funding at areas of the country that need it the most, we will help spread opportunity and level up in every part of the United Kingdom.”

Buried in the small print was an overlooked but important detail. Gove’s £2.6bn budget for this new era of prosperity was only for three years.

The previous certainties around much longer EU funding programmes, which typically rolled into equally-lengthy securely-funded new ones thanks largely to the structural and economic stability of the EU as a whole, had actually been replaced by a short-term fix in an unstable country led by the same bloke who falsely claimed Brexit would pump £350m a week into the NHS every week.

Then, as the reality of Brexit unravelled, the self-inflicted economic damage it unleashed was so bad that any acknowledgment of this inconvenient truth became forbidden in certain political circles.

After Labour won power in 2024 it was still the elephant in the Downing Street room while the Shared Prosperity Fund was two-thirds of the through its intended budget cycle.

With substantially less Brexit-related prosperity around than originally envisaged in Gove’s fevered imagination, Labour quietly extended the fund for 12 months until a substantially less prosperous alternative could be cobbled together.

The one-year extension covered the current 2025/26 financial year with local responsibility for approving and overseeing UKSPF programmes resting with the region’s two councils as it had done since 2022.

Then along came devolution and local responsibility switched from the councils to the new Hull & East Yorkshire Mayoral Combined Authority which was launched last May.

By then, the one-year £7m UKSPF programme in Hull and East Yorkshire was already up and running under the auspices of the two councils. The Mayoral Authority’s immediate task, you might have thought, would be to ensure some kind of continuity for 2026/7 when whatever new government funding programme came into effect.

As early as last summer some recipients of current UKSPF support were understandably trying to clarify what was likely to happen beyond the end of funding cycle in March 2026.

In Hull, questions along those lines were being raised by members of the Exploring Opportunities partnership. Having been awarded just over £2.5m worth of UKSPF financial support for the current year, the EO partnership of 13 different community organisations was providing support for unemployed and low-skilled people into work, further education and training.

They include Cat Zero, The Warren, Giroscope, Unity in the Community, Probe, Humber Learning Consortium, the Citizens Advice Hull & East Riding, Goodwin Development Trust, the Tigers Trust, the Hull KR Foundation, the Hull FC Community Foundation, the City Health Care Partnership and Enviromail.

In short, they’re good people doing good things. Between them, they’ve already supported around 900 people through the programme and achieved a 72 per cent success rate in progressing participants into a job or further education.

However, as I’ve reported previously, the Mayoral Authority didn’t exactly hit the ground running despite Mayor Campbell’s stated intention immediately after his May election victory to, er, hit the ground running.

Instead, I’m told the issue fell into a such a decision-making vacuum that now, eight months on from those original concerns being raised, redundancy notices are being issued to support staff at some of the organisations because a decision on succession funding has yet to be made.

This is despite the Mayoral Authority having been allocated £5m for the next financial year starting in April from the government’s new Local Growth Fund, the replacement for the UKSPF.

To be fair, the government didn’t announce the Local Growth Fund allocations until late November but it seems there was no earlier move by the Mayoral Authority to understand what was already happening on the ground to get ahead of the game.

As chief executive Alan Menzies told a meeting of the authority’s executive board this week:

“The issue is that a number of community-based organisations are reliant on this funding to continue their activities.

“We approached both constituent authorities in November last year to ask for details on what the UKSPF funding was actually being spent on and what outcomes and outputs are coming back from this.

“That information came back in January and since then there has been a little bit more clarification from both authorities and a lot of background work going on to understand what that money is being used for.

“Some options have been drawn up and we will be putting a report to the next meeting (of the Mayoral Authority’s executive board) on March 4 with some proposals on how we intend to deal with it.”

Menzies then went on to add what he described as “a note of caution”. Perhaps you’ve already guessed what he had to say next.

“The funding that has been put in place to follow UKSPF from central government is only 62 per cent of the UKSPF revenue funding for this year so it does cut down the options quite a bit and makes life very difficult.

“There will be, however we deal with this, some very difficult decision that will have to be taken.”

Yes, in the less-prosperous UK, what was a £7m annual programme budget for Hull and East Yorkshire is being trimmed back to £4.7m with slightly lower amounts in each of the following two years. Yes, it’s also another time-limited three-year funding programme.

Those “difficult decisions” will almost certainly mean deciding who loses their funding and, as a result, who has to follow through with making people redundant.

Councillor Rosie Nicola, whose ward is where Unity in the Community is based, said: “UiC has already had to issue redundancy notices to 15 staff who provide essential training to around 160 people in HU6 who face multiple barriers to employment. As an Orchard Park Ward Councillor I am appalled that we might lose this provision simply because of bureaucratic ineptitude.”

Are job losses inevitable? A couple of Labour city councillors have already called on the Mayoral Authority to use money from its reserves to plug the funding gap.

It’s not a bad shout because the Mayoral Authority’s budget for the coming year includes the transfer of £5.7m worth of “unallocated” cash into its reserves from a separate annual funding pot known as the Investment Fund which was part of the original devolution deal.

In layman’s terms, unallocated actually means unspent - another sign of the authority’s sluggish start.

Of course, there is another way to plug the gap but for that to happen Campbell would have to break his election pledge not to raise additional funds for the authority by setting a council tax precept or a business rate supplement despite having the devolved powers to do so.

At this week’s board meeting, next year’s budget was agreed without any precept ending any prospect of increased revenue from that being used to offset the loss of £2m worth of central government funding and avoid the potential loss of local jobs.

Instead, I’m hearing rumours of an alternative option currently being considered ahead of next month’s meeting - ditching local providers in favour of appointing a single training company (possibly a national one) to run the show. We shall see.

Meanwhile, what of Michael Gove? No redundancy worries for him. After standing down as an MP before the Tory wipe out in the 2024 General Election, he walked into the lucrative role of editor of The Spectator magazine just three months later. While his salary has yet to be disclosed, the reported £150,000 annual sum he commanded at The Times for just eight hours of work per week as a columnist back in 2016 suggests his current wage packet is the very epitome of the prosperity he once vowed to share with us all.