COUNTY COUNCILS should harness the skills of the unemployed to improve local areas, a meeting of the People Before Profit Alliance heard yesterday.
Instead of having people “languishing” on the dole, direct labour units should be set up by the local authorities to undertake upgrades to the area, Richard Boyd Barrett of the alliance said.
“A lot of people with computer skills have lost their jobs recently and we know that the schools are lacking computers and lacking people to teach computer skills to young people. It seems to us obvious that it should be possible to match people with skills and the will to work with the things that need to be done in the area.”
Hugh Lewis of the alliance described the waste of skills as “obscene”. He said a lot of work previously done locally is now going out to tender which takes “a long time and is highly inefficient. Thousands of socially useful jobs could be paid for, if we banned the hiring of consultants and stopped the expensive and inefficient outsourcing of council work,” he said.
The group called for apartments empty because developers had defaulted on bank loans to be taken into public ownership. They could be used to house people and alleviate the need for rent allowance, said Mr Boyd Barrett.
