Unlocking our wealth: Report of Commission on Community Resilience, Jobs and Growth

• 26th Feb 2015
• Jobs

This report, from the Cooperative Council Innovation Network’s Policy Commission on Community Resilience, Jobs and Growth, shows how a cooperative approach, based on firm partnership with business and individuals, could help more workless people into jobs, at lower cost, increase small business growth to create thousands of jobs, and significantly increase private sector investment in employment and skills.

It pledges the commitment of Cooperative Councils to implement significant new deals with citizens and business to unlock the wealth of our communities, and it calls on government to give us the power to make it happen.

The evidence received by the Commission suggests that:

• An impersonal, poorly designed system is systematically failing to recognise, and respond to, the needs of individuals. The Work Programme is not effectively supporting those that are hardest-to-help into sustainable employment.
• Programmes related to skills, business support and local economic growth are far too centralised and fragmented, exacerbating skills shortages and constraining effective business and employer engagement
• Locally-led and cooperative approaches – which are co-designed, build on genuine partnership and unlock the assets of local places – can achieve significantly better economic and social outcomes. If the programmes we used for our economic analysis were applied nationwide, they could reduce the cost of employment support by 25 percent, create 90,000 jobs and increase the contribution of private sector developers to employment and skills by a factor of 15.

In addition to the main report, we have also produced an accompanying document which summarises the key evidence gathered and analysed through the course of the Commission.

• Unlocking our wealth: Report of Commission on Community Resilience, Jobs and Growth

  Publication PDF