ESF Actions to promote Local Employment Initiatives: country review United Kingdom

For the UK, and for each of the four national programmes, there is a degree of flexibility about what is considered local. For instance, there are local actions for people in that segment of the labour market where there is multiple deprivation and long-term unemployment and where many of the barriers to work are to do with other than their immediate employability. To assist them a highly localised model of delivery may be appropriate. For people in the secondary or dependent labour market who have a closer relationship with the world of work but who may find themselves frequently struggling to find jobs, it may be that more scale-efficient approaches set at the sub-regional or even regional level are more appropriate. Here while “local” action is essential the client group is generally more geographically dispersed. We can see evidence of both “local” models supported by ESF in the UK programmes.

ESF in the UK has therefore supported approaches to LEIs designed at the national and regional level – but implemented; i) by locally configured Intermediary Bodies (IBs) through large scale delivery contracts and, ii) at the local, neighbourhood level by smaller community-based organisations and their partners. The second set are normally run by and for their communities offering a range of activities designed to engage and assist those furthest from the labour market.

AEIDL – ECORYS (January 2011)

AEIDL is contracted by the European Commission in order to provide technical assistance related to the European Social Fund’s Transnational Cooperation and Innovation strands. The views expressed by AEIDL experts remain informal and may not in any circumstance be regarded as the official position of the European Commission.