During my time as council leader, amongst the ideas Crawley Labour developed but which never progressed very far was the idea of co-locating the Job Centre with the Town Hall.

The immediate benefit of this would have been a saving in building costs for the public sector, but the real goal was to try to change the way service-users’ needs were met, creating a more welcoming environment and delivering a holistic employment service.

It was not to be, and yet working with the Job Centre, Crawley Borough Council instead developed Employ Crawley in order to offer a service which could help people to access new job and training opportunities.

That recognition that instead of being a means for people to access work, job centres have instead often just become unemployment benefit processing centres, is tackled head-on by the Government’s Get Britain Working White Paper.

Job centres will no longer have a one-size-fits-all model, but instead be able to be redesigned to fit the needs of their local area, working in partnership with other public sector bodies within their localities to remove the barriers to employment, just as we achieved with Employ Crawley.

Central to ensuring that job centres work for service-users we need to ensure that they work for employers. At present very few employers advertise with Job Centres or engage with them to find the employees they need, regardless of any local labour shortages.

By transforming job centres into genuine employment services which help to support, train and supply workers to businesses we will have a transformative effect upon not only the lives of those accessing better employment, but on the economy of the country as a whole, helping to resolve the worker shortages which have developed over the last five years.

The top priority for this Government is delivering growth after 14 years of stagnation, not for its own sake, but because we cannot achieve anything without it. Growth means money in households pockets and the tax revenue we need to transform public services. The Government’s new white paper is going to help to deliver exactly that.

Peter Lamb MP