Nicola Smith
The Government’s ‘work experience’ programme has been moving up the news agenda, with the FT, the Express and the Daily Mail among those whose reports of yesterday’s ‘error’ (when an unpaid placement was advertised as a ‘vacancy’ on the Jobcentre Plus website) defined the programme as a ‘workfare scheme’. And even the Institute for Economic Affairs has recognised that the schemes provide free labour.
How has this happened?
Richard Exell
As we know, the government thinks too many homes in the social rented sector are “under-occupied.” They’re so worked up about the issue they plan to restrict Housing Benefit for working age people with a council or Housing Association property that is “larger than their household size requires.” (Full discosure: my boss signed a letter to the Guardian opposing this.)
Today’s statistics from the English Housing Survey throw an interesting light on the government’s concerns. There’s a useful table that looks at owner occupiers, people in private rented properties and social renters and says what proportion of each live in homes that are at standard, 1 room above, under-occupied and over-crowded (an issue the government keeps quiet about.) Most people in all types of tenure live in properties that are either at standard or just one bedroom above, but look at the extremes:
Richard Exell
Today the Commons will ‘consider’ the amendments to the Welfare Reform Bill passed by the House of Lords Amendments. They are (courtesy of the Guardian):
These are all humane and necessary amendments. As Sue Marsh has pointed out, disabled people’s and carer’s organisations are united in opposing the Bill and it’s hard to find even individual disabled people who don’t support these amendments. Yesterday, the Children’s Commissioners for England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland united to express their “deep concerns” at “the serious negative impact of the proposals in the Welfare Reform Bill on hundreds of thousands of children.” Shelter, the National Housing Federation, Homeless Link and Crisis have warned that the Bill will increase the number of homeless families.
Richard Exell
Today the Department for Work and Pensions published the latest statistics on the results of the Work Capability Assessment – the eligibility test for Employment and Support Allowance (which is replacing the old Incapacity Benefit). The newspapers today are full of stories about social security after the government’s defeat in the Lords, but I can’t find any mention of these figures.
Which is strange – these figures come out every three months and previously the tabloids have had a field day with them.
Nicola Smith
Without much fanfare, the Government has recently launched its New Enterprise Allowance scheme which aims to ‘give extra help to unemployed people who want to start their own business’. The scheme provides a package of support worth £1,274 over 26 weeks, with access to a volunteer mentor. What’s the catch? Although, as CIPD have recently shown, most newly self-employed people are undertaking odd jobs and would perfer to be paid employees, what could be wrong with helping those who want to to make a little extra cash and remain in some form of work rather than claim JSA?
The answer is that the package is in fact meaner than it first appears, apparently comprising a weekly payment that is slightly less than JSA for 13 weeks (£65) and which falls to £33 a week for the remaining 13 weeks, leaving someone on the scheme who isn’t successfully making any cash with less than they would have had on benefits. But even more worrying is the option that all participants will have the opportunity to take out a loan of up to £1,000 repayable at a 10 per cent interest rate to support their businesses.
Richard Exell
People with memories of politics the seventies and eighties will have been taken back in time by today’s front page lead in the Daily Telegraph:
370,000 migrants on the dole
On the one hand, the paper plays up “concerns that the country has become a destination for ‘benefit tourists’”. Then, towards the end of the article, there is equal outrage at the fact that “90 percent of new jobs created in Britain over the past decade have gone to foreign -born workers.”
All those arguments where you ended up asking “are you angry because they have got jobs or because they haven’t?” It’s like being back in my twenties.
Richard Exell
I suppose a lot of people will have welcomed yesterday’s Impact Assessment of the Welfare Reform Bill by Dr Maggie Atkinson, the Children’s Commissioner for England simply because it adds to the case against the Bill; but the report raises some profound issues that shouldn’t be forgotten once the Bill has passed or been rejected.
That’s not to downplay the significance of the challenge to the Bill:
Richard Exell
There, I bet you didn’t expect to read that headline! But the revelation that London Mayor Boris Johnson submitted comments to the consultation on Disability Living Allowance reform prompts an unusual response.
It isn’t just the political frisson that comes from knowing that BoJo’s submission had to be feretted out with a FoI application, it’s the fact that he criticises the plans to replace DLA with Personal Independence Payment for exactly the right reasons:
Richard Exell
Responsible Reform is a report launched today about the government’s plans to replace Disability Living Allowance with a new benefit called Personal Independence Payment. The report marks a new stage in the campaign against social security cuts.
For decades, disabled people have been campaigning against policies that affect our lives being decided entirely by non-disabled people. Today’s report was entirely written, researched, funded, and supported by sick and disabled people, their friends and carers.
Owen Tudor
Apologies for not having commented on this until now, but earlier this month, the OECD issued “Divided we stand”, a seminal report on growing inequality that put the final nail in the coffin of the theory propounded in the 1980s by Thatcher and Reagan that the wealthier the rich got, the more money would trickle down to the lower paid. What the report showed was that over the last four decades, the rich have grown staggeringly richer in countries like the UK and the US (and the super rich have got even richer than that), but the poor have, well, sort of stayed where they were (which in terms of keeping up with the Joneses means they got poorer). In the UK, the gap between the richest 10% and the poorest has widened since the 1980s from 8:1 to 12:1 – and what’s driven this change has predominantly been the super-remuneration of the top 1% who have increased their share of national wealth from 7.1% in 1970 to 14.3% in 2008. There’s a lot more detailed information like that in the report.
Does this rise in inequality matter? Yes, for three reasons, two of them economic and one of them moral (the co-existence of conspicuous consumption and lavish lifestyles with poverty and squalor is, I think most people would agree, obscene).
