Four months ago, when the political row over ‘workfare’ was at its peak, I wrote here on LibDemVoice that liberals needed to progress the debate beyond ‘the simple and simplistic ‘left/right’ attitudes currently on display, and start grappling with how best we can empower the individual to make the best of their own lives — including, and especially, those who appear to have settled for a life on benefits, and reject all other offers of help.’
Avoiding dogma, embracing evidence
Key to this, I suggested, would be avoiding the dogmatic approaches of the Tories — who appear to believe that every single long-term unemployed is a feckless, work-shy benefit dependent who just needs to jolly well pull their socks up — and of Labour — who seem to think every single private enterprise is on a ruthless mission to exploit the most vulnerable in society. Instead we should root our liberal approach in evidence:
To be clear, I’m not advocating the ‘workfare’ programme in its current form. Nor am I saying that liberals should be supporting wholesale mandatory ‘workfare’ programmes. The evidence to date is far too weak for us cheerfully to approve compulsion of citizens to take on unpaid work ‘for their own good’. But I would not be against pilot programmes to test and properly evaluate different initiatives, including those which do require mandatory, time-limited work placements for those whose CVs otherwise makes them unemployable. We would then have a much better idea of what is most likely to work.
To its credit, the Department for Work & Pensions commissioned — and published — an independent study of its mandatory work activity (MWA) programme this week. Unfortunately for the Government the study contained unhelpful news:
The government’s peer-reviewed study concluded that being referred by jobcentre managers to mandatory unpaid work for 30 hours a week was good at pushing people off jobseeker’s allowance in the short term. However, over a three to five-month period, those who did not eventually start mandatory work were more likely to return to out-of-work benefits when compared with those who had never been referred in the first place.
Overall, out of those being referred, there was no positive or negative effect on benefit claims between the different groups which were compared. DWP researchers said this total of people returning to benefits included a 3% increase in those claiming employment support allowance, a benefit given to those people suffering with serious health problems.
The study, which compared the outcomes of more than 3,000 MWA referrals and 125,000 non-referred jobseekers, also concluded that the scheme had zero effect in helping people get a job.
The study was led by the respected National Institute for Economic and Social Research, and reported in more detail on its director Jonathan Portes’s blog here.
Ignoring evidence, embracing dogma
And the Government’s response to this evidence? It’s expanded the scheme its own study concluded was failing to deliver any real benefit, with Conservative minister for employment Chris Grayling announcing:
I am also pleased to announce the Government has decided to expand the Mandatory Work Activity scheme. The expansion will enable Jobcentre Plus to make between 60,000 and 70,000 referrals to Mandatory Work Activity each year, based on the current experience of the scheme, at a cost of an additional £5 million per annum. This decision has been taken as the result of careful consideration of the positive impacts demonstrated within the Impact Assessment.
Liberals tend to be rational sceptics, who pride themselves on listening to, and respecting, evidence. It was, after all, that great liberal JM Keynes who famously declared, ‘When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, sir?’
Equally, there are some liberals who look a little askance at placing too much emphasis on evidence-based policy, regarding it suspiciously as an ideological cop-out which elevates faceless bureaucracy above genuine belief.
Personally, I’ve never had a problem in squaring this circle. Liberalism is about empowering the individual and confronting vested interests: that’s my philosophy. But there are of course a myriad of ways in which such a philosophy might be put into effect: evidence enables us to choose the most effective policy for realising that liberal philosophy.
Evidence and the ability to process it and adapt to its findings is what separates the ideological from the dogmatic politician. In politics, though, it’s so often easier to stick with dogmatism than to admit you’re wrong and try a new approach to achieve your desired outcome. The DWP, it seems, is more at home with dogmatism than evidence.
* Stephen was Editor (and Co-Editor) of Liberal Democrat Voice from 2007 to 2015, and writes at The Collected Stephen Tall.
16 Comments
Good post – spot on. What Grayling announced removed any shred of doubt about it. This policy is about punish people not helping them. And it handily provides free (forced) labour to employers as an aid to maintaining profitability and disciplining any paid employees who might be inclined to get uppity about wage freezes and the like.
There is one huge aspect to this issue which no-one has addressed, and its this – what do we believe should be the purpose of the welfare/benefits system? Should it be a system which keeps ordinary people from starving in the streets, from the cruelties of being powerless in the face of crises, in short from avoidable suffering? Or do we believe that welfare is a justification for trying to alter claimant behaviour, by various degrees of coercion?
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It’s a difficult one,. Welfare is so heavily propagandised against that it it’s easy to forget that its has expanded because the markets failed. The only reason we have relative poverty instead of real poverty is the safety net it provides.
The other thing and the thing that bothers me most is that the mandatory work idea is being used on sections of the disabled public , notably those with mental health issues
As for Labour. They were pretty nasty to the disadvantaged in power, planned to be nearly nasty as the Tories if reelected and are being deceitful on the issue now, But it’s nice to know some Lib Dems are still uncomfortable with what the Coalition is doing.
Just a word of warning, Stephen! “Evidence based policy” is everybody’s mantra these days. But not all “evidence” carries the same weight, and often those steeped in an overall understanding of a subject can quote you more truth from a so-called anecdotal base than can someone blindly taking a dogmatic stance and quoting you the studies they wish to select.
The Blairite mantra “we do what works” is another chimera. Question – what does it achieve, and under what circumstances? Yes, we can say for definite that if dogmatic assumptions are made, and searches for studies which meet those assumptions are carried out, that is hardly objective evidence – as no doubt would be the case in the example you give. Howevr, Lib Dems are not very discriminating in the evidence they use on occasion, and I think this is an area we should be tightening up our act.
You use the term “workfare” but I understood that as people having to contribute to society while claiming benefits. As I understand the example I have heard about this is an opportunity to do work for companies, work that if outside the scheme would have to be paid for by those companies. The companies get paid for looking after these people and giving them a chance of saying they have done some casual unskilled work although they couldn’t convince anyone to pay them. There is no direct benefit to the community that “workfare” often implies, only the possible indirect benefit of experience getting up on the days of the unpaid work. Possibly not that compelling at a job interview, but the evidence would obviously be very useful.
I can see the logic of other “coercive ” schemes if not their moral justification but this is a cheap version that does not appear to be fit for purpose. It still costs that state but it’s only benefit is the economic stimulus of almost free instilled casual labour.
Is there a better way for people to gain access to the world of work or do we just forget about these people, keep calm and carry on? The longer people are out of the workplace the less attractive to employers they will become compounded by their lack of confidence. This isn’t helped by countless negative news stories about ‘youth of today…’ or those ‘…scroungers’ or the opposite ones of companies using ‘…slave labour’. Emotional claptrap.
No one is saying that there are lots of jobs but there are many small businesses trying to set up and medium businesses needing to expand. They have been squeezed by the banks and so don’t have the money to pay someone, right now. So why not let them have people for four weeks for free. And it’s not really free in that they have to invest time. Not all of them will succeed but some will and if they are, they will remember those who helped them on their way.
You should never dismiss any chance to network when you are looking for a job. The saying that it’s easier to get a job when you have a job is true because you can network and get your name out. A start like this gives you a time to shine and all business people are on the look out for talent. Not necessarily for them but they speak to others.
I think we need something like this but maybe a change in language. The guide http://www.dwp.gov.uk/docs/pg-part-p.pdf to providers uses the term ‘customers’ which always leaves me cold. “Mandatory’ is also a word to use advisedly.
Mind you, I fail to see why we we need organisations like A4E who just cream off badly needed money. Surely the DWP could have created jobs to administer the scheme. Or is that a whole different discussion?
Glen,if some lib dems are uncomfortable, what are they doing about it. Pat
The evidence I’ve seen tells me that coming off benefits is a dangerous thing to do. I’ve watched my friends take that step and then lose their jobs only to find themselves evicted from their homes in which they would have been secure had they stayed on benefits.
I watched this government launch its ‘Iain Duncan-Smith’ plan to completely reform benefits with horror. I grew up in Longbenton, home of the DSS and had asked the same questions and made the same suggestions he was making to directors there as a young adult. The explained to me the sociological aspects of benefits (in particular the interaction between the nature of the individual and the household) which prevented the mechansistic way I was thinking then and this government were thinking in 2010 being valid.
In my impressions what’s needed is not a completely new benefits system, it’s a wrap around option for those who are on benefits but are available to work and are able to take insecure and part time employment which allows them to earn legally while staying on benefits.
Essentially people who are working in this way should be able to receive part of their payment directly from their employer to directly cover reasonable receipted costs they incur through working (transport to work being the most obvious cost in this category). The rest of their pay should be paid through a state system which will pay them a small proportion (say 30%) of what they earn.
At present those the temptation for those on benefits to work illegally is strong – for very understandable reasons associated with the complexity of being a low earner on benefits and the risks of coming off benefits. It is understanding and tempting for people to want to employ people illegally for short term, casual or minimum wage work and this skews the labour market in favour of those businesses which do this and against those who pay honest taxes.
Under a scheme like this the only motivation for working illegally would be greed and all employer should be on a simple level playing field.
Such a scheme should be robustly simple so people know where they are. At the end of the week if they’ve earned some money they should get a small portion of that as a bonus to their benefits and that’s that. Working tax credits and s on are far to complex for many of those who’ve been on benefits long term.
“‘When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, sir?’”
Though this has long been one of my favourite quotes (ever since I heard Neil Kinnock use it to justify some u-turn back in the ’80s), I’m afraid to tell you that it appears to be apocryphal. Nobody has ever turned up a primary source confirming that Keynes ever said it (though he said a few things that were vaguely similar).
I wonder if anyone has ever worked out how many people fall into the category of “those who appear to have settled for a life on benefits, and reject all other offers of help.”?
I have no doubt there are some, but how many?
The real problem I think is that there is a number of people that employers will not employ unless they have no choice in terms of who else is available. This latter condition simply does not apply at a time of high unemployment, employers can now choose the best available. Just imagine what it is like being forced to apply for jobs having experienced rejection so many times?
As far as the politics of all this is concerned, the government is relying on negative stereotypes of unemployed people as cover to imposing spending cuts that hurt the poorest members of our society. The Liberal Democrats should be vehemently opposed to those kind of policies.
I just love the idea that all small businesses need to succeed is ‘free’ labour. I am not against ‘workfare’ per se but there are far more downsides than up.
The benefit system can’t cope with those who leave and shortly return; it takes weeks to sort out payments, umpteen forms and, in the meantime “NO BENEFITS”.
Stuart – You are right, but apparently a lot of Keynes quotes came from lectures which were then passed around by word-of-mouth. So apocryphal but I don’t think we can rule it out.
First of all, I completely agree with the article.
On the issue of the Keynes’ quotation, I think that it’s what has happened in many cases with the sayings of famous people: someone says something witty and memorable but not as neatly as they could have and then in the retelling the phrase gets burnished somewhat to make it sound better. For example “we will fight them in the hills, we will fight them in the streets, we will fight them on the beaches. We will never surrender.” – that’s actually a fairly bastardised paraphrasing of what Churchill actually said but it involves a much shorter and more memorable list of the places Churchill said we would fight and leaves out an intervening sentence to skip right to the “we will never surrender bit”. So the gist of it is still there but it’s not verbatim. The same thing probably happened with Keynes.
Evidence-basing is fine. But evidence has to be selected, weighed, validated, interpreted, and contectualized. All of these processes privide opportunities for pre-judgment to creep in.
The study claimed that the scheme has “had zero effect in helping people get a job”. But does the scheme have other benefits? And are the practical alternatives better or worse?
Very happy to see more discussion on this.
It is clear that mandatory work, and other forced, unpaid work schemes do not improve outcomes. This has been shown in the US, Australia, and now the UK.
Time for Liberal Democrats to stop supporting this nasty scheme, and to continue with policies that make work pay,
Rebecca, one of the main strengths of the Universal Credit system, and the main reason I’m prepared to give it a chance (though it’s clear that it needs tweaking before further rollout) is exactly that it allows people on benefits to take short-term and unstable jobs without losing out by having to reapply from scratch at the end of the employment.