Welfare Reform

The Government Must Be Smart, Not Vindictive On Welfare

Samuel HooperLeave a comment

dwp

The Conservative/Liberal Democrat coalition government is already waging a war on two fronts when it comes to welfare reform, with the combined forces of the Catholic and Anglican churches having just taken up one flank and Ed Miliband’s Labour Party menacing from the other. Given this state of affairs, some people might reasonably believe that they had bitten off about as much as they could chew, having now taken on God in addition to David Miliband’s politically fratricidal brother. But apparently not this government.

Already under fire for paying insufficient regard to the suffering of those living on welfare, the Department for Work and Pensions is now plotting to charge people for appealing the rejection or cancellation of their benefits claims. The policy is packaged together with a number of others which collectively manage to do very little to solve a real welfare or fiscal-related issue while sounding very tough and decisive.

The Guardian reports:

Critics said the proposal, contained in an internal Department for Work and Pensions document leaked to the Guardian, would hit some of the poorest people in Britain, who have been left with little or no income.

In the document about the department’s internal finances, officials say the “introduction of a charge for people making appeals against [DWP] decisions to social security tribunals” would raise money.

Other ideas include selling off child support debt to “the private sector to collect”, though civil servants remark that the government would be unlikely to raise more than 5-7p in the pound from the £1.4bn currently owed to the DWP. The department currently collects arrears.

It is depressing indeed to see the government obsessing over the smallest and most insignificant line items in the budget whilst ignoring the parade of elephants in the room. Why look at the billions upon billions of pounds that can (and must) be saved by means-testing pensions and increasing the retirement age when one can look very busy and important (but much less politically brave) saving scraps of money here and there by implementing a pay-as-you-go benefit appeal process?

Of course it would save money to charge people for appealing their adverse benefit claim decisions – by definition, most benefit claimants don’t have much money to splash around taking the government to court. And the only precedent in existence for charging for this kind of appeal would see claimants having to pay in the order of £250 to have their case heard:

Last year the Ministry of Justice (MoJ) which sets policy in the area, brought in charges for employment tribunals of up to £250 to lodge a claim, depending on the kind of case being brought. The union Unison asked judges to review the policy, saying the number of claims had dropped by more than half after fees were introduced. High court judges declared the policy lawful this month.

This smacks of government simply hoping to bully and intimidate people into not pursuing legitimate claims. If a short term claimant for Jobseekers’ Allowance is denied their claim, it will hardly be worth their while appealing the decision, no matter how egregiously wrong it may have been. If the claimant can reasonably expect to return to work within a month, the value of the benefit claim in question would barely cover the cost of making the appeal. At best (if the application was approved on appeal) the claimant would break even, and it would be as though they had done nothing at all. And at worst (if the rejection was upheld) the claimant would be £250 in the red.

With the claimant’s potential options so skewed against them, it would create an enormous incentive for the authorities to reject as many applications as possible out of hand, knowing that only a small fraction would likely make it to appeal. The government might accomplish its goal of drastically reducing the welfare rolls, but at what price?

Regardless of whether the majority of decisions end up being upheld or overturned, making people with no money pay to appeal decisions can only hurt some of the poorest people in Britain.

Those people who are generally supportive of the coalition government’s attempts to tackle the ongoing British budget deficit and make meaningful reforms to the welfare system can only be immensely frustrated by this development. The introduction of the Universal Credit and other associated reforms are proving contentious enough, and their implementation has been beset with difficulty. The government has not successfully implemented a new IT system on time or on budget since the days of 5.25 inch floppy disks, and this track record shows no sign of imminent improvement.

The scale of the task already underway was challenging enough, and faced enough opposition, so why was there such an urgent need to make its progress even more treacherous? True, the plans only came to public knowledge because an internal document was leaked, but at some point these proposals would have seen the light of day and been formally announced. When was the government saving this kick-the-poor-while-they’re-down announcement for? One year before the general election? Six months? Just before the start of the official campaign, as a surefire way to help Ed Miliband win back power for Labour?

Now is the time when the coalition government needs to circle the wagons around welfare reforms that are coming under increasing attack from the Labour Party and the more hand-wringing, less cerebral ranks of the church.

Finding out, instead, that the DWP has essentially been writing another six months worth of unfavourable headlines for the government in The Guardian and The Daily Mirror was not the decisive response that welfare reform proponents were looking for.

When David Cameron and Iain Duncan Smith have finished giving the bishops remedial lessons in economics and social policy, they would also do well to bring the DWP to heel. Self-inflicted wounds of this kind are not helping to advance their agenda.

The Church vs Welfare Reform

Samuel Hooper2 Comments

The Archbishop of Westminster, Cardinal-designate Vincent Nichols, has inserted the Catholic church squarely into the centre of the debate about welfare reform and deficit reduction.

The accusations that he makes are serious, and are directed squarely at the current Conservative/Liberal Democrat coalition government – namely, that the social safety net has been ripped up in the period following the 2010 general election:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QuAx2ykQSWY

 

The Telegraph reports on their interview with the Archbishop which launched the story into the news cycle:

Britain’s most senior Roman Catholic cleric has accused the Coalition of leaving increasing numbers of people facing “hunger and destitution”.

Cardinal-designate Vincent Nichols, the Archbishop of Westminster, said that while the need to reduce spending on benefits is widely accepted, the Government’s reforms have now destroyed even the “basic safety net”.

Archbishop Nichols, the leader of the Catholic Church in England and Wales, said the welfare system had also become increasingly “punitive”, often leaving people with nothing for days on end if they fail even to fill a form in correctly.

He said it was “a disgrace” that this was possible in a country as rich as Britain.

The Guardian follows up with a report detailing the extent to which Archbishop Nichols has been ‘inundated’ with messages of support:

In his Telegraph interview, published on Saturday, Nichols accused ministers of tearing apart the safety net that protects people from hunger and destitution. He said since he made those comments he had been “inundated with accounts from people … saying there are indeed many cases where people are left without benefits, without any support, for sometimes weeks on end”.

The criticism has clearly rankled the government, and not just the Work & Pensions Secretary, Iain Duncan Smith (himself a practicing Roman Catholic). Indeed, the rebuke was such that David Cameron himself felt the need to respond to the church’s criticism. Writing in The Telegraph, Cameron made a convincing argument in support of his government’s welfare reform:

For me the moral case for welfare reform is every bit as important as making the numbers add up: building a country where people aren’t trapped in a cycle of dependency but are able to get on, stand on their own two feet and build a better life for themselves and their family.

Let’s be clear about the welfare system we inherited. It was a system where in too many cases people were paid more to be on benefits than to be in work. A system where people could claim unlimited amounts of housing benefit – in London there were people claiming truly astonishing sums of £60,000, £70,000, £80,000 a year. A system where hundreds of thousands of people were put on Incapacity Benefit and never reassessed, essentially taken off the books and forgotten about. None of these things is defensible. And it is right both economically – and morally – to change them.

The founders of our welfare system believed in the principle of responsibility – and so do we. As I said on the steps of Downing Street on my first night as Prime Minister, “those who can should, those who can’t we will always help”. Those who can’t work will be always supported, but those who can work have the responsibility to do so. The welfare system should never take that responsibility away.

In all of this, one gets the sense that the two sides are talking at cross purposes with one another. The government is eager to stress the need to work pay for the majority, while the Church is more keen to focus on any potential iniquities in marginal cases, stemming from welfare reform. And while these marginal cases often deserve full attention and consideration, there is never any real acceptance by the Church that the welfare system requires fixing of any kind in the first place. For all of the noise generated in the wake of the Archbishop’s interview we are no closer to understanding what the Church would prefer to see in place of the coalition government’s reforms.

How much stronger would Archbishop Nichols’ intervention have been if he had proposed something radical to replace Iain Duncan Smith’s incremental reforms? Some might argue that it is not the Church’s place to propose new policy, but if an organisation as large and respected as the Catholic Church disagrees with current government policy on welfare, it would only benefit the country if they made public their best thinking as to how to move forward with reform given the current economic constraints.

The Catholic Church is deeply embedded in communities throughout the entire United Kingdom. What if they were to use that proximity and understanding to propose some better reforms, rather than engaging in fruitless hand-wringing from the sidelines?

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If the Church feels that it is the right time to make a contribution to the debate about welfare spending, then this should be welcomed and taken seriously. But it becomes harder to do so when the intervention is so piecemeal and one-sided in nature, failing to look at the historical context of the welfare problem or proposing alternatives when specific policies are to be attacked. The Church has a responsibility to pay attention to the debate from the start and to at least attempt to gain an understanding for the reasoning behind government policy, and not just to repeat Labour Party talking points.

A sense of missed opportunity now pervades the coverage of the entire debate.

It is certainly the case that living on standard benefits – Jobseeker’s Allowance or Employment Support Allowance – is practically impossible in many parts of the country, particularly for those who unexpectedly fall on hard times and who are unable to trim their expenditures with the same brutal speed at which their income evaporates. This is worthy of discussion, and sensible changes could be made along lines previously suggested on this blog.

It is also true that new measures recently put in place can make benefit claimants subject to sanctions for failing to comply with what are sometimes confusing and arbitrary procedures. This too could have been discussed seriously and in detail. Nichols goes so far as to call this a ‘disgrace’:

[Archbishop Vincent Nichols] said the welfare system had also become increasingly “punitive”, often leaving people with nothing for days on end if they fail even to fill a form in correctly.

He said it was “a disgrace” that this was possible in a country as rich as Britain.

While it is true that such sanctions do exist, what is missing from Nichols’ interview is any acknowledgement of the problem that the sanctions exist to counter – the number of claimants who do (or did) not make sufficient efforts to find new employment. If it is the Church’s position that those who do not make reasonable efforts to find work should never be penalised for their inaction, this is something that should be explicitly admitted.

In short, it is all well and good to attack the impact of austerity on welfare recipients here and now in 2014, but one wonders where was the Church’s criticism when Gordon Brown and the Labour Party made so many millions more people dependent on state assistance and more vulnerable to the cuts in government spending which would always have been inevitable in the event of recession?

There is a strong sense – at least from Archbishop Nichols’ first intervention in the debate – that the strategy of the Church will be to attack the people now trying to fix the budgetary mess left by the last government, and to accuse them of cruelty and neglect, while turning a blind eye toward the misguided politics and personalities of the people who did so much to make the poorest Britons more vulnerable and dependent on the state.

It will be a shame if the Labour Party really is to get a free pass in this debate, as the Conservatives are not the only ones who stand to benefit from the guidance and prompting toward social justice potentially offered by the Catholic Church. In the past, too many from the Labour Party have been content to parade around loudly talking about how compassionate they are (and that the other side is heartless by virtue of their lack of faith in government provision by default), and so are given a free pass when their badly conceived ideas inevitably go wrong during implementation.

On this, though, the Cardinal-elect is absolutely right:

He concluded: “The moral challenge roots back to the principle that we have to regard and treat every single person with respect. That’s one of the great geniuses of Pope Francis – that he manages in his gestures to show that respect to even the most unlovely of people.”

Absolutely. And where the welfare system or the austerity programme is helping rather than hindering this effort, it is absolutely right to point it out. It is all too easy to begin reducing human lives and human suffering to statistics, to black and white numbers on a  pre-budget report or a policy paper, and if nothing else, Archbishop Nichols did service to the debate by pointing this out and giving voice to some of the unheard suffering.

But if there is a war on poor people currently underway in Britain, it has been waged just as much by those on the ‘compassionate’ left who sought to make more and more people dependent on government benefits and tax credits as it has been by the new coalition government which had the unenviable task of repairing the economic damage wrought by thirteen years of Labour rule. If the Conservatives are to be blamed for undermining the social safety net, why should Labour escape censure for vastly overfilling it in the first place, causing the weight of the full net to threaten the buoyancy of the whole ship?

One cannot help but feel that the voice of the church – a serious and valued voice in our national debate – would have a lot more credibility on the topic of if, when they spoke, they gave the slightest indication that they had been paying equal attention to the plight of welfare recipients before David Cameron entered 10 Downing Street.

Slave Labour, Or Earning Your Keep?

Samuel Hooper6 Comments

Welfare To Work - Job Centre Plus

 

Much hand-wringing in The Guardian today, as they continue their ideological crusade against the government’s Welfare-to-Work programme. This time, the cause for outrage is the discovery that several large charities also signed up to participate in the scheme.

In high dudgeon, the article demands:

“The question is, what were large voluntary sector organisations doing embracing such arrangements when people think of them as supporting the disadvantaged? Who is speaking up for disempowered and marginalised people, including the young, disabled and unemployed?”

Obviously, offering work experience opportunities to predominantly young, less affluent people with little prior experience of the workplace doesn’t count as “supporting the disadvantaged”. No, they are clearly much better supported when they are kept on welfare forever, with little to no hope of finding work. Note to Peter Beresford – helping people doesn’t always just come in the form of writing them a benefit cheque – sometimes equally important are the non-financial benefits that can be offered – such as work experience.

He goes on to comment:

“But this isn’t the first time that we have seen big charities behaving more like corporates.”

And:

“…many charities have lost sight of their traditional value-base, and become indistinguishable from the state and private sectors. They have become permeated by their personnel, ways of working and ethics.”

Remember, everyone. Capitalism = bad. Corporations = bad. Emulating a corporation or profit-making organisation, in any way (including striving to be more efficient, lower overheads or improve productivity) = bad. In fact we would all do well to remember the true intended beneficiaries of some of these third sector organisations – the people who work for them, not the people they claim to help and represent.

Continuing the theme, Iain Duncan-Smith (the Work & Pensions Secretary) embarked on a war of words with Simon Cowell when he lamented that perhaps too many young people see the only path to wealth and prosperity as being through entering TV talent shows and trying to “make it big”.

This is one of those rather eye-rollingly typically conservative comments moaning about the youth of today, and it received a predictable backlash from Mr. Cowell, the end result of which appears to be that Simon Cowell may take on an apprentice or two, and Iain Duncan-Smith has won front-row seats to the taping of the next episode of X Factor.

But joking aside – and ignoring for one moment the terrible thought of Simon Cowell moulding a group of impressionable young people in his own image – what exactly is wrong with the idea of workfare, and why do so many on the British left get upset about it?

The left wants to preserve an umbrella of universal, unearned benefits, for everyone. They were furious when the Conservative/Liberal Democrat coalition government moved to put a cap on child benefit payments for households earning over £40,000 per year, because they (probably quite correctly) realised that if the wealthier segments of the population whose taxes fund this benefit then don’t also receive a portion of it back themselves, they will be much less inclined to support it, possibly leading to a slipperly slope where eventually it is abolished.

And in much the same way, we hear cries of “slave labour!” when the government tries to introduce what is actually a very sensible scheme to offer unpaid work experience to the long-term unemployed. Of course, the work is “unpaid” only in the sense that the companies taking on and training these individuals do not give them a paycheque – they still continue to receive their Jobseekers Allowance benefits courtesy of the taxpayer.

There is nothing kind or compassionate about leaving people to fester on benefits without helping them back to work. This government programme is voluntary, and has loopholes large enough to drive a truck through to ensure that those who can’t be bothered to attend their placements, or those who commit all but the most egregious of offences while on their placement will remarkably still keep their benefits nonetheless.

But despite being emasculated by these concessions to Labour scare-mongering, the Welfare-to-Work scheme will still provide valuable work experience for young people who, in many cases, have not had the opportunity to experience the workplace, thus helping to prepare them for a lifetime of productive self-sufficiency. This programme is designed to help people help themselves, and therefore it deserves the support of the so-called “compassionate” Left.