by Neil BatemanThe welfare reform green paper (published on 21 July) contains yet more proposals for toughening up the benefits system. It seems there is no turning back when it comes to these ideas that Tebbitt, Lilley and Co only dreamed of and now being wafted through by Brown, Purnell Associates.
One must ask whether it was coincidence that the green paper is published in the middle of a joint DWP/BBC TV series about benefit fraud? After all, having a few folk demons chanting in the background always helps the public swallow radical benefit changes.
Central to the proposals is the concept that work is the best route out of poverty. Of course, secure, well paid work is an important right and having personally seen the destruction caused to communities, families and individuals from mass unemployment in Liverpool in the 1980s, I need no lessons about why work matters.
Bucket loads of help
But is work any solution if it still keeps people in poverty? If they still need bucket loads of state financial help to get by and if it means doing a job of the type that government ministers wouldn't get out of bed for?
Given that over 60% of those on incapacity benefit have no skills or qualifications and that unemployment is rising, what sort of job opportunities will emerge from the cull of IB? More dole more like.
Most worrying of all are the Workfare proposals - compulsory work in return for benefit after two years unemployment. Government is ignoring the reality of this punitive American Neo-con idea. Even on its own terms, Workfare doesn't work. For example, free labour provided by Workfare distorts the labour market and replaces paid jobs thus adding to unemployment, it prevents claimants from looking for work and litter-picking type jobs do little to enhance their skills.
No work, no welfare
Worst of all, in the US it has created a huge "no work, no welfare" group who fund themselves though begging, stealing and borrowing. Drill down through the UK's worklessness statistics and there are already signs of a similar phenomenon developing.
Local authorities and voluntary bodies could be key providers of Workfare, so they need to think long and hard before embracing it. This really is a test of whose side your organisation is on.
Having ratcheted up conditionality in the benefits system, finding that it inevitably doesn't work the government just wants more. When will the penny drop with this lot that you get the best out of people by encouraging, empowering and caring for them than by penalising and threatening them?
And how about sanctions for senior DWP officials for not delivering a decent service or for employers who prefer not to employ the long-term jobless?
Neil Bateman is a welfare rights specialist
Click here for Neil Bateman's analysis of employment and support allowance and the demise of incapacity benefit
Community Care report on the green paper
Sky News report on the leak of the green paper (21 July 08)
BBC coverage of the green paper
Comments (1)
Neil Bateman writes that under implementation of the Freud Report, "ESA [Employment and Support Allowance] will allow some individuals to do certain types of work for less than 16 hours a week. The amount which can be earned before affecting income-related ESA will be the same as contributory ESA — up to £88.50 per week at current rates (expected to rise in October)."
Meanwhile, for disabled and non-disabled Jobseekers Allowance (JSA) claimants, the allowable earnings limit is £5 per week — viz, less than an hour on the national minimum wage, and unchanged since 1988. Resultant JSA admin melt-down keeps JSA claimants who do part-time work with fluctuating hours are kept waiting several months for the benefits top-up to which they are officially entitled. Can that be good for anyone's mental health?
This is a restraint of trade, especially as meals and travel expenses between shifts have to be covered by the worker themselves out of that £5 per week earnings limit if their income falls below the JSA threshold of about £60 per week. Too much is made of the resentment of 'decent hard working families' and too little of the resentment of decades long single jobseekers whose efforts to find paid work have gone unrewarded and under-supported.
Alan Wheatley
Disability Spokesperson for London Green Party
Posted by Alan Wheatley | July 28, 2008 9:51 PM
Posted on July 28, 2008 21:51