The major shake-up to benefits announced by DWP minister Liz Kendall on Tuesday (March 18) is being examined by Andy Burnham's office, it's understood.

Reforms to social security are designed to save £5b by the end of the 2020s after Ms Kendall claimed the welfare system is 'failing the very people it's supposed to help'.

Changes include merging jobseekers allowance and employment support allowance, 'rebalancing' universal credit payments, scrapping work capability assessments, and guaranteeing a 'right to try' work which prevents jobseekers' claims being reassessed.

And another key government reform is a commitment to spend an extra £1b per year on employment support, the service which helps people get back into a job, as ministers hope to create a 'high quality, tailored help to support you on a pathway to work'.

Now, the Local Democracy Reporting Service understands officials at the mayor's office is working through details in the government's reforms and what it means for employment support in Greater Manchester.

That's because the extra £1b for employment support in the reforms could be a big boost for Andy Burnham. 

The mayor currently has some control over Greater Manchester's portion of DWP's £6b employment support budget.

With that national pot of funding dramatically increasing in size, it means the mayor could have more cash to fund his 'Live Well' programme, his project to get 150,000 Greater Manchester residents back into work by 2029.

He hopes to do so by funding local community and voluntary groups, the NHS, and Job Centres — which could be renamed — to provide more holistic support for benefits claimants looking for a job to get them back into employment.

The mayor's thinking is that those claimants will be helped by people who know their area best.

"If we — working with a DWP moved in to the Job Centre Plus with a Live Well approach and even maybe call them Live Well Centres with our local community and voluntary partners — the money that we're currently seeing disappear out of Greater Manchester, if we rooted it back into our own economy, into our own community and voluntary sector, the benefits would multiply of doing that," Mr Burnham said last October, when Ms Kendall visited Salford's Loaves and Fishes centre.

The mayor is not expected to secure any further control when Greater Manchester's new 'integrated settlement' comes into effect in April, which effectively means his Combined Authority will be run more like a Whitehall department.

It means, with detail on how the reforms will impact Greater Manchester limited, and no further power for Andy Burnham on the horizon on employment support, it remains to be seen if the government's reforms represent a boost to Live Well as the headline figures suggest.

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