Channel 4’s new series Benefit Busters has reopened the debate on how (depending on your point of view) we best support the most vulnerable people find work, or stop wasting billions on a welfare system that has engendered a culture of dependency.
Last week the Telegraph and Express revealed that the UK Exchequer will pay out more in benefits this year than it receives in Income Tax. As the recession continues it is inevitable that this huge area of public spending will come under further scrutiny and is likely to be a major battleground in next year’s General Election.
This is a great opportunity for our party, because we have a package of policies that would make the greatest difference.
Firstly Nick Clegg and Vince Cable have led the calls for a fairer tax system; notice that the Telegraph did not focus on tax avoidance by the city bankers (treating income as capital) as a reason for the declining Income Tax yield.
We also have promised to take the lowest earners out of paying tax altogether, and no one would pay Income Tax on the first £10 000 they earn: saving huge amounts of time and resource currently spent administering the complicated tax credit system. Plus we would abolish Council Tax and so do away with the need to pay out millions in Council tax benefit.
Despite our excellent package of policies I am greatly concerned that the Liberal Democrats are getting dragged into a battle with the other main parties over who can appear the toughest on welfare reform. Lone parents should be forced to seek work when their children reaches the age of 16? It should be 12. No, 7. How about 5?
Before I am accused of being sentimental and unrealistic I should point out that the first part of my career was devoted to setting up a charity, Aspire Foundation (now operating in several cities across the UK), creating full-time employment for homeless people.
There is little doubt that productive work can be rewarding and empowering. It promotes independence and it gives meaning to the remaining leisure time. As a party we should support incentives to help people off benefits and into work, and provide a stronger support structure of training and child-care support to enable that.
However current Government policy beats people with the carrot as well as the stick.
Individuals are given little meaningful choice; they are treated with suspicion; their financial options are restricted, and their ability to care for their children potentially compromised by the demand to seek work.
As Jenni Russell pointed out in Wednesday’s Guardian, it is rarely as simple as swapping benefits for a minimum wage job, where, in theory, you should be clearly better off. Instead many are forced to take employment that pays on commission, or agency work, or jobs with zero-hour contracts where what you earn can fluctuate wildly from week to week.
There is a lack of compassion in welfare policy, and this is a gap the Liberal Democrats must fill.
Of course it would be seized upon, and twisted, by our opponents. Many of us have been on the receiving end of outrageous distortions of our party’s policies on drugs, on prisoner rehabilitation, on the age of consent.
So it is understandable why many in the Liberal Democrats, from senior policy makers down to PPCs, should fear being labelled as “soft on spongers” or dread an opposition leaflet outlining why the Lib Dems are quite happy to keep doling out benefits to work-shy layabouts.
But we know it is not as simple as that, and we should trust the public to recognise that too.
I would love to campaign across north Bristol for a more compassionate welfare policy. To explain that we are the party prepared to be the most radical in helping people into work again. By providing greater incentives for businesses to take on, for example, disabled people, or to encourage local authorities to set up large-scale job creation schemes for some of the hardest to reach – a model that my charity Aspire successfully deployed.
People should be in no doubt that the party of Gladstone, and of Lloyd George and of Beveridge wants to see meaningful employment for anyone who seeks it!
However that solution is not for all. It never has been, and it never will be.
We should not force a single mother to juggle multiple childcare options around a minimum wage job that leaves her exhausted, unfulfilled and miserable.
We should not ruthlessly narrow down the options for an adult with long-term health challenges until they feel compelled to take an unsuitable job for fear of losing benefits.
Nor should we allow successive Labour (and perhaps future Conservative) secretaries of state to rehash policy announcements on benefit clampdowns to placate the right-wing media without a clear voice of rebuttal from our party saying that we will have no part in coercing the most vulnerable people into a course of action that does not suit them or their children.
There is an opportunity out there for the Liberal Democrats to show that we will champion the right for all those who can find work to do so: but that we understand that a significant group of people need compassion and support, not to have their difficulties compounded by an unyielding bureaucracy.
I hope we will seize it.
Paul Harrod is the PPC for Bristol North West
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11 Comments
A nice article. Are you aware that the Government is planning to scrap Attendance Allowance, and that these proposals may also see the end of Disability Living Allowance and other benefits which have a care component?
I have blogged about the proposals here. Unfortunately not many people are aware of these proposed changes.
Introduce a national Land Value Tax in place of NI (immediately reducing employers’ costs and saving jobs), allowing local authorities the choice of precepting this OR adding to the burden on jobs via LIT. Then extend our Citizen’s Pension by phasing in a universal Citizen’s Income to replace all benefits and tax allowances. Simple.
While this is true enough, I think it worthwhile to add something. I’ve been unemployed for a few months now (bad year plus complex issues that give me a low probability of getting jobs), so I’ve seen how the system deals with people.
Every two weeks, you have to go in to the jobcentre. You’ll see a low-grade paperpusher. They will rattle off the same statement and series of questions each time (clearly memorised from a policy document), and you respond to each with one-word answers. You sign your name on a form. They inspect the piece of paper where you have written down the six jobs you applied for in the past fortnight, and scribble on it. Then they tell you to come back in a fortnight.
And that’s all they do. No thinking happens. If you want to stay on benefits for your whole life, you could:
– apply for jobs that you won’t get because they’re too high-level
– apply for jobs that you would get, but don’t bother responding to any employers who ask you to call them
– do nothing and just write down whatever you like on the sheet, lying about what you’ve been doing
From time to time you have a “review”. I was told “expect to be here for about half an hour next time, as your three month review is due”. I was expecting them to go into what I was doing, ways to improve, etc (wasn’t expecting them to be useful, just spout the usual stuff from the pamphlets, but still). What actually happened: I was told to apply for 8 jobs each fortnight instead of 6 from now on, given half a dozen pre-printed forms to sign, and sent home after no more than five minutes had elapsed.
The system is a completely ineffective bureaucracy. The grunts behind the desks are strongly encouraged to process you as quickly as possible, because the jobcentres are busy. I once overheard a supervisor telling them “Don’t spend five minutes reading their history and chatting to them about what they’ve been doing, just call them and sign them”.
So, while Labour have crafted policy with the intent of creating a strict, merciless system, what has actually been created from these policies is a complete waste of time and money. It’s keeping a lot of bureaucrats busy, but has had no impact on my actions or my ability to find work.
Andrew Suffield’s experience probably represents what usually happens. Like a great many New Labour schemes, this sytem looked un-administrable from the start. Rising unemployment has made it completely impossible to do what Ministers said they wanted, it was always almost impossible.
Compassion is also hard to administer. It does not fit easily into rule books; and may be best concentrated in people and organisations who are not bound by too many rules rather than in government officialdom. That officials could deliver. That is the objective which makes social and economic sense. It is what we should go for.
Good article Paul 🙂 . I would suggest a slightly different penultimate paragraph though, which I think you probably meant anyway: we will have no part in coercing the most vulnerable people into a course of action that does not suit them or their children. I think in place of “suit” you probably meant “benefit”. We do need to maintain the difference between desires and needs.
Good article. I think the way around the negative opposition attacks you mention is for the party to emphasise its policy of reducing the threshold of tax to encourage people back to work. Surely the best way to entice people off benefits is by slashing income tax on low pay. Complicated tax credits only serve to put people off getting a job – not least because the Government is still very much in control of your pay. Keeping all the money you have earned is important to people on very low wages. After all, they pay proportionately far more of their income on VAT and Council Tax than anyone else, so, logically, they need some kind of incentive from the Government if they are going to come off benefits without a fight.
But this isn’t just about selling a policy idea to the public. There is also a moral issue, which is that millions of British people are now in a miserable trap of low pay, worthless qualifications and spiralling debt as they struggle to meet their rent and bills, while the super-rich rake in the proceeds and use clever financial arrangements to avoid paying tax. The party should show that it is on the side of the forgotten majority, who increasingly feel that their work and labour – their LIVES in fact – only serve to fund the expensive lifestyles of the fortunate few.
I would just like to add to what Stacey has said.
As part of an online campaign to help protect disability Benefits, over 60 MPS from all parties have been contacted during the last few weeks.Steve Webb has been the ONLY one to date to show an interest in these matters and his response can be found on this link http://carerwatch.com/cuts/ . Scroll down to his name and then click for his full reply.
Although his reply has actually created more questions from us that we will be taking up with him, it has been appreciated that he took the time when none of the others did.
You will also find ‘statements’ on that link from other groups/organisations.
It has also been the LibDem Lords who have shown the most understanding regarding issues with the Welfare Reform bill and its passage through parliament.
For those interested please read the following blog http://carerwatch.com/mhealth/ , several pages long.
Could people be aware that some online carer groups actually pass their details to other groups regardless of their statements of denial to the contrary. There are some connected to hate sites that are reviled by the majority of carers and the group above are active on the hate site.
Regarding Carers, a good starting point would be to have a definite definition of what a Carer actually is. The present definition is obtuse, there is no way the stated 6 or 7 million “Carers”. That is based on flawed/biased/slanted statistics. Until that is rectified Carers are fighting a loosing battle
excellent article, and some very interesting comments. both from my own personal experience and with my local gvt hat on, the biggest barrier in a lot of places is high rents and housing benefit. if rents are almost £300 per week in temporary accomodation, which was what it was at when i was there back in 2000-02, and average waiting times for social housing are measured in years rather than months (oxford has an average wait of about 2 years for smaller properties, 5 years for 3 beds, 10 years for larger properties) then it’s a massive barrier to getting back into employment, especially if you have few qualifications. so two things i would suggest would be a tapering system for housing benefit and building more affordable homes.
It is difficult to separate how you feel about the government drive which DWP Ministers admit was designed to drive feckless 22 year old fit young men in to work from the way that vulnerable people have been caught up in it.
I’m not going to comment on the methods being brought in to pressurise the fit and healthy. At carerwatch we are concerned about the seriously and enduringly sick – in particular those with severe mental illness like schizophrenia and bi polar. Professor Gregg designed a ‘support’ group under ESA for people with severe illness and disability and the government is refusing to allow almost any one in to it. So the really sick are going to be subject to threat and harassment and ‘conditionality’. The ‘support’ group woudl allow them to access all the back to work help without fear of sanctions and this is surely the right way to respect people with severe illness.
This is really a very simple issue and what ever you feel about pressurising other groups please support us in trying to get the government to extend protection from sanctions to the really vulnerable.
NewLabour and the Tories are in collusion on this one. The only people who have been helping us are the LibDems. Baroness Thomas of Winchester has been wonderful – fighting day after day in the Grand Committees in the Lords (links on carerwatch campaign blog at – http://carerwatch.com/mhealth/ if you want to watch the LibDems leading the way on an issue of compassion and humanity).
The final amendments are going to be decided in October and what we want is for people with severe and enduring mental illness to be offered the protection of the ‘support group’. Any kind of harassment or threat for this group may make them more ill and be counter productive as well as causing distress. Service users with mental illness need to keep as well as possible to achieve their goals and our role as a community is to support them in keeping well. Pressure is not useful or safe.
We are very appreciative that the LibDems are helping with this. Protecting the most sick and vulnerable is a simple place to start while you worry about what should be done about other welfare claimants.
benefit scrouners, should be brought o book, why should me and my partner work up to 60 hours a week each just to make ends meet, when i see unemployed living the life of riley its a joke, no country should encourage a life on benefits at all. its morally wrong , it really gets my goat all these campaigners crying child poverty, where all you see are fat kids stood around playing with their i phones or blackberry phones, unemployed people are better off than working people, and have better things, all the trappings that come from working, but hey all our taxes are paying for them makes me sleep easy. people on benefits do not want to work they are given everything they need, courtesy of the britsh tax payer, what a joke,