Skip to content or view screen version

Welfare Reforms - Govt found to have misquoted research findings

copyleft | 07.10.2008 15:24 | Culture | Repression | Social Struggles

The Government has been exposed as completely misquoting a couple of researchers whose report they have used to justify the new workfare proposals in the Green Paper — “No one written off: reforming welfare to reward responsibility”, where the report based on a study of the effect on the labour market in Australia of the introduction of a workfare scheme there actually found that as a result, the very long term unemployed in fact grew by 68%!

The Labour government is currently gathering responses to their proposals to reform the welfare system - the main feature of which will involve the sub-contracting of welfare services to private contractors. The government calls this a transformation of the benefit system to enable more training and support for access the jobs market for those who have been out of work for a long period and those with disabilities, to end what it deems as some peoples' exclusion from having remained within the benefits system. Nowhere, as you'd expect, is there any political realism that this legacy was largely the result of a combination of structural unemployment, the failed social policies of the Thatcher years, and the continued wealth divide in the country largely consolidated by New Labour.

The Green Paper — “No one written off: reforming welfare to reward responsibility” — will allow firms in the private sector (who may or may not also involve the voluntary sector) to be awarded contracts and bonus incentives to find work for those on benefit. Companies that currently deal with the mentally ill provision will, for example, be allowed to run schemes aimed at finding them work. They will then be paid a bonus for each person who finds employment.
 http://www.dwp.gov.uk/welfarereform/noonewrittenoff/

The new Green Paper follows the Welfare Reform Act 2007 which will phase out Incapacity Benefit and replace it with a new 'Employment Support Allowance'. All 2.7 million recipients of Incapacity benefit will be forced to undergo tests by doctors other than their own to determine whether they can work. Anyone who has claimed Job Seekers Allowance for more than two years will be made to take full-time community jobs in return for their benefit payment and will be required to “sign in” each day. This would mean claimants working a full 35-hour week to earn a £60.50 Job Seekers Allowance payment. This equates to £1.70 an hour, less than a third of the minimum wage.

However, on Page-44 of the Green Paper, where it outlines the proposal to enforce compulsory work-for-benefit for those on Job-Seekers Allowance (to be replaced by Employment Support Allowance) who have been out of work for 2 years, it quotes a report which cites a scheme in Australia where there was a 7% net increase of participants going into jobs compared with non-participants. However, this is quite different to the complete picture provided in the actual report, which in the same paragraph that contains the DWP quote, goes on to say that the workfare scheme was ineffective in helping participants find sustainable employment, and that the scheme had little impact on the very long term unemployed which in fact grew by 68%!

The government in pursuing their proposal do not want to consider the Swedish, Danish and Netherlands model of a basic income scheme.
The original research and report
was undertaken by the Centre for Regional Economic & Social Research (CRESR)
at Sheffield Hallam University by Dr Richard Crisp and Del Roy Fletcher.
 http://www.shu.ac.uk/research/cresr/sp_richard_crisp.html
 http://www.shu.ac.uk/research/cresr/sp_del_roy_fletcher.html

They are reported to not be happy with the way their research has been intepreted by the DWP in their Green Paper. Upon representation from Stephen Fisher from RSI Action, the Cabinet Office published the full report on the DWP website on 29th August 2008.

The Green Paper states, “We will enact powers in the Welfare Reform Act 2007 to require new customers in the Work Related Activity Group to undertake general work-related activity. Customers who do not meet these requirements will have their benefit reduced. We will also extend throughout the first two years of a claim, the period during which new customers are required to engage with us by introducing Work Focused Interviews.”

On September 15th, the DWP held a Consultation Forum in London. During a seminar on the subject of "the next steps for the Work Capability Assessment" (WCA), several participants from a range of disability groups raised concerns about the DWP's record in recognising all disabilities and the rigour of assessment procedures they have formulated in the past, and they further raised concerns about the thoroughness of the new WCA in properly recognising these conditions and the Healthcare professionals who will carry out the WCA on behalf of the DWP. Atos Healthcare currently provide this disability assessment service for the government at present. Amongst the disability awareness professionals who raised these concerns were representatives of the following: RSI Action - a national charity for the prevention of RSI conditions, the National Autistic Society, and a group representative of people suffering from ME who raised the issue that those who suffer from ME have a fluctuating condition which can change on a daily basis (a similar trend within those who suffer from Hypoglycemia). The latter representative also drew attention to whether imcomplete awareness of this condition may lead to a lack of sensitivity in the WFHRA process within the WCA (the WFHRA stands for the work-focused health-related assessment).
Ref:  http://www.dwp.gov.uk/healthandwork/esa.asp

The new work for your benefit measures are to be implemented in six pilot areas before being introduced nationwide. These include Greater Manchester and Lambeth, Southwark and Wandsworth in London, inner city areas which have been blighted for generations by poverty, unemployment, an increase in mental illness, low mortality rates and other social ills. Earlier this year statistics released by the Conservative Party, based on Department of Work and Pensions’ Neighbourhood Statistics, found that 820 out of 1,074 working-age adults in Falinge and College Bank, two districts of Rochdale in Greater Manchester, were claiming out-of-work benefits. The figure of 76.4% was the highest in the country. According to the figures there are 60 wards (local districts) of Britain in which more than half of all adults are unemployed and on benefits. The statistics were seized on by the national press and highlighted as an example of “welfare culture.” The Sun described Rochdale as the “the
scrounge capital of the UK.”

Following the release of the figures, Paul Rowen, the Liberal Democrat MP for the town, commented on the widespread poverty and social misery, “You cannot destroy British manufacturing and expect it will not also destroy some of our working-class communities.” “Falinge scores highly in all the wrong ways—deprivation, joblessness and ill health. The large-scale shutdown of factories in the ’80s and ’90s has decimated the area.” Even while posing the question as to whether the residents of Falinge were “feckless scroungers,” the right-wing tabloid newspaper the Daily Express had to acknowledge that a council estate visited by its reporter in Falinge was “a depressing warren of poverty.”

Rochdale, as with most of the towns in south Lancashire, once employed tens of thousands of workers, mainly in textile manufacturing and other industries. Over the past 30 years these have closed, leaving a legacy of unemployment, poverty and ill-health. According to figures by Rochdale Borough Council, “life expectancy for men and women in the Borough is less than the national average and in some wards is ten years less than in other parts of the Borough.”


copyleft

Comments

Hide the following 3 comments

means-testing the poor - bankrolling the rich

07.10.2008 16:33

These measures reek of the escalation of the means-testing of the poor while the rich get bankrolled with the financial bailout

copyleft


Upon reading the Green Paper

09.10.2008 14:45

There is a lot in this green paper that your article misses. That is neither here nor there - the Green Paper is a complex document. As a Green Paper it is a consultation and only a first step to changing the law. So, action now might (behold the flying pigs) have some effect.

One critical element of the Green Paper is that the will be a positive enforcement of an "obligation to work" which, essentially, ends any right to welfare benefits. That is a huge legislative proposal that is being slipped past. With an "obligation to work" it becomes a criminal offence to refuse to work. The welfare benefits system is, overnight, transformed into an open prison administration system.

Which might be explained by the list of people consulted: many of them are "Prison Service" related Contractors.

The proposals are a lengthy outline of Prison Based learning and "rehabilitation" that have - according to their supporters - resulted in reduced recidivism. Given that most people have little control over their employment status, this is an arbitrary, cruel and unusual criminalisation of one group of people for the actions of another. In short, the working class is about to be put into an open prison because managers and directors are incapable of running a business properly. That kind of arbitrary punishment is like shooting one in ten random people dead because you suspect one of their village broke the law. As the Romans called it: decimation.

The Consultation for the Green Paper is open until the 22 October. Download the Questions the Government want answering and you can see, quite clearly, the whole consultation is just the ironing out of a business model proposal for private contractors. Even if you are a rabid monetarist libertarian, there is no value in the kind of contracts being modelled. They are all prison contracts. Which hinge on the obligation to work.

Many of the questions lead along a line of reasoning which effectively suggest that the government is, either willingly or through blind stupidity, being lead into creating large, private, open prisons for the unemployed. Given that the contractors have both experience of running prisons and of wanting to make profits, there is legal framework being suggested that creates a form of bonded labour that is becoming, gradually, illegal in India:


"[Bonded labourers] are non-beings, exiles of civilization, living a life worse than that of animals, for the animals are at least free to roam about as they like… This system, under which one person can be bonded to provide labour for another for years and years until an alleged debt is supposed to be wiped out, which never seems to happen during the lifetime of the bonded labourer, is totally incompatible with the new egalitarian socio-economic order which we have promised to build…”


--Justice PN Bhagwati, Indian Supreme Court, 1982

The Green Paper seeks to Criminalise and Bond the Unemployed to Private Contractors. Fundamentally, the response that should be made, bofore the 22nd of October is to demand no involvement of prison contractors in the welfare system.


A Green Paper reader


Benefit fraud by the DWP

09.10.2008 19:09

The Indymedia piece sent to me by a Green Party colleague and cited below indicates that the DWP has been guilty of misselling by overstating the benefits of workfare in Australia. This gives a different slant to the term 'benefit fraud'.

When my social landlord, Peter Bedford Housing Association, rewarded my own responsibility by 'Community Spirit, Sharing Skills Award Runner-up' recognition and £10 Argos values to trump my JSA allowable earnings limit, I said, "It's one thing to be a star, and yet another to be part of a constellation." In the DWP's overstating of advantages to workfare from the Australian study, I am reminded of Margaret Thatcher's, "There is no such thing as society, only individuals and their families."

As my home-made placard for the 'Keep the Promise' march said: "POOR FAMILIES NEED BREAKS, NOT WORKFARE." One of my Green Party contacts in Warwickshire is a single parent with an adolescent autistic daughter who needs extra parental caring. They now live on a boat for financial reasons and have to keep moving on to satisfy the waterways authorities. That does not satisfy the access requirements of a person with autism;the mother has received Jobcentre pressures; and the social workers needed reminding at one time that the whole family needed breaks.

The Green Party policy of a Citizen's Income -- a non-means-tested benefit based on citizenship and freeing beneficiaries to do other things -- is more in line with my friend's requirements. She also leads a network of parents with autistic children who would benefit from not being obligated to do paid work once their child reaches the age of 7.

I would describe her as one of my great heroes.

Alan Wheatley, Green Party of England & Wales Disability Spokesperson
- Homepage: http://www.greenparty.org.uk/