UK One of the welfare-to-work successes of the 1980s recession – the community programme – needs to be reinvented and updated to cope with the rapid rise in unemployment, the providers of government funded training and skills programmes said on Friday.
Their call came as they warned that the so-called “flexible new deal” – the flagship £1bn-plus programme to get the long-term unemployed back to work – needs “radical revision” with some of its elements simply “placed on the back burner” until the economy improves.
