1. The Rural Perspective Welfare to Work Thursday 20 September 2012
Dawn Redpath
Employability and Skills Manager
Dumfries and Galloway Council

2. Are we getting more joined up? Team DG!
Scale
Private / Public Sector
We have to be!
Opportunities
Very often we simply don’t have the scale required to support the models and project opportunities that are presented to us by national agencies. We have a smaller employer base and often the interventions that have the most impact often rely on the presence of bigger employers with a degree of capacity that is not there.
This means that contracts that are offered on an outcome based payment model are not appealing to contractors and often rural areas may get a reduced level and quality of service as resources are concentrated on the more lucrative geographical areas.
The role of the Public Sector then becomes central in delivering employability services to the more remote areas of Scotland and some level of subsidy becomes essential. This becomes harder at a time of recession and diminishing public sector resources. National agencies need to understand the rural perspective and to acknowledge that the national models and products are not flexible enough to deliver what rural areas need. We need actions that make an impact without trying to fit square pegs in round holes.
Rural areas often have great experience of partnership working because historically, due to the geography and cultural nature of rurality, they have had to! Often there is good partnership working happening anyway but the establishment of Employability Partnerships has improved the position further and led to consolidated joint working.
Often, joining things up is easier in rural areas, for example, as a result of the raising of the profile of youth employment as an issue, D & G has been able to galvanise its partnership working activity. Closely aligning its youth employment agenda alongside its programme for adult employability and increasing the opportunity for agencies to work jointly on projects such as our Work Placements in the Public Sector initiative. This project is is going to improve coordination of and access to work placements across all public sector agencies including police, fire and NHS.

3. Can it save money and improve effectiveness?
Rural areas can be…
Creative!
But we also need to be…
Realistic
Access to services is always going to be an issue – both in terms of ensuring that national provision is available to people living in rural areas and the costs of direct delivery of services in a rural area. Provision is therefore often delivered in creative ways for example, within the council, arranging for financial education training to be delivered to clients in partnership between Revenues and Benefits staff and Employability workers.
We also need to begin to look closely at the idea of Community Capacity building, empowering our more remote rural areas to be able to support activity that links to our Strategic Skills Pipeline
Touch of realism… We need to be careful that the aspirations of enhanced partnership working are contextualised within the reality of what we are able to deliver. We need to deliver on interventions that are bespoke to rural communities within rural areas and we need to be sure that the theory of partnership working is able to be translated to practice…
In order to directly answer the question posed – the reality is that the cost of delivering services in rural areas is higher. More joined up working will almost certainly be more effective but we may well need more resources to deliver the programmes that rural areas need!