The community programme revisited

This paper examines the lessons for the New Deal era of some older strands in UK and European labour market measures; the Community Programme of the 1980s and the experience of “entreprises d'insertion in France, Spain and the Netherlands. It considers whether the institutional infrastructure of the New Deal is appropriate for the realisation of “intermediate labour markets”. This raises some further questions; whether ILMs are about creating employment or merely redistributing it, and whether it would be preferable to use the “benefit transfer principle” to produce social wealth without regard for commercial viability.