James Purnell welfare shake-up: same old story
Posted on Tuesday 22 July, 2008
Filed Under New Labour
Well shake it shake it up baby now. Twist and shout. But how much bigger can this week’s ‘biggest shake-up of the welfare state since the 1940s’ possibly be than ‘the biggest shake-up of the welfare state for 60 years’ unveiled by David Blunkett in 2005? And will the impending ‘Labour Blitz on Dole Scroungers’ hailed by the Sun yesterday be more or less of a blitz than the ‘Brown Blitz on the Black Economy’ similarly praised in the Murdoch press eight years ago? Luftwaffe, eat your heart out.
Come to that, how is it that those people singled out in pensions secretary James Purnell’s work for dole proposals are exactly the same people name-checked in Peter Lilley’s ‘I have a little list of benefit offenders who I’ll soon be rooting out and who never would be missed’ speech to the Conservative Party conference in 1991?
Those who make up bogus claims in half a dozen names. Young ladies who get pregnant just to jump the housing list. You know the sort.
No wonder David Cameron has offered the Purnell plan unqualified backing; politicians of all major parties are singing not so much off the same hymnsheet as out of the same Gilbert and Sullivan operetta score. If you get the feeling you’ve heard it all before, that’s because you have.
The unemployed – sorry, I meant to say feckless workshy job cheats, of course – have been a popular target for cheap rhetorical shots since the Poor Law Amendment Act of 1832 and probably even before that.
I am not naïve enough to argue that nobody out there is claiming benefits to which they are not entitled. Nobody can have any trouble with the notion of rooting out systematic deliberate fraud, for instance. However, cutting already pitiful levels of benefit is hardly going to achieve that.
Frankly, one of the main reasons that numbers on incapacity benefit remains so intractable is that generations of the long-term unemployed have been deliberated coaxed onto IB, thanks to a tacit government policy designed to massage the headline unemployment figure ever downwards.
But one question is going unanswered in the current debate. If this problem is truly anywhere near as prevalent as Labour, the Tories and Daily Mail would have us believe, how come none of the huge range of initiatives over the last three decades has made a damn bit of difference?
Interestingly, the Purnell purge comes in the same week as Alistair Darling is set – in the words of the Financial Times – to ‘bow to pressure from business by scrapping contentious reforms to the taxation of foreign profits’. A whole raft of anti-avoidance measures will simply be dropped as a result.
It sometimes seems that New Labour does not push through its crackdowns on those failing to pay their way in society with equal determination in all cases.
<<Go back
Comments
15 Responses to “James Purnell welfare shake-up: same old story”
-
- Yemen: an unfinished revolution
- Comment Is Free: An honours system for those who fight to make Britain a better place
- Democracy crushed; elected President arrested; World wrings its hands
- Fabians change policy on unpaid internships
- Kamal al-Fayoumi arrested as Egyptian regime retaliates to strikes
-
-
Meta
-
I’m just waiting for the human rights cases to start rolling in to be honest.
Will this mean that the government will in actual fact be paying below the minimum hourly wage for work undertaken by the unemployed during these hours? Or are they going to top up their benefits?
According to a TUC study The Missing Billions. The super rich and large compananies are avoiding tax to a staggering £25 BILLION a year, through ever elaborate tax avoidance schemes. Its a pity this Labour Government is’t clamping down on that than trying to take money off some of the poorest people in society.
Look at me I’ve serious problem sad to say I have a catheter in all the time and I smell of urine, I cannot help it this is my life these days. I have a spinal shunt in my back to drain excessive fluids and have a morphine pump planted under the skin. My bowel leaks all the time a fluid and it smells, this is all caused because from the waist down everything is dead after my accident at work.
This is now eighteen years from this, and I want to return to work, not very educated but I was good at my job very good I could build you a house no problems.
But I’ve been looking for work for five years using job brokers and agencies like job center.
In five years all I do is part time jobs for four or five weeks over Christmas but even then they make sure I’m not near anyone.
What does this government want me to do I’ve tried. But of course in October 2008 I’ve just been told my benefits will be cut by £45 a week, which will place me and my wife into serious poverty again, I really do give up
I am in favour of the poor carrying out persistent and deliberate fraud – i cannot see what the problem is. Whatever those at the bottom of the pile can get out of the bourgeois state I am in favour of. The £2 billion lost in ‘fraud’ is peanuts compared to the fraud being perpetrated by New Labour privatisers – now privatisation – that is serious fraud that needs to be tackled.
Dave
Was Purnell in that photo when you found it,, or did you photoshop him into it afterwards?
Good to see righteous anger developing over these reforms, but the whole welfare system and much of the New Deal has been about harassment, coercion, imtmiidation and cuts, the left and much of the unions(except PCS) has been largely silent on these issues, time to fight?
atis mia – well said!
Dave, what do you know about the DOHA WTO round of talks which according to Newsnight will usher in a massive shift in globalation opening labour marklerts even further and liberalising services which will have major implications for public sector workers and surely driving down wages even further, maybe times are going to get even tougher..
So much for “joined up government” …
Under the new plans, single mothers will be pushed back to work when the child is 7 years old.
Into what kind of work, you would have to ask.
If school finishes at 4pm every day, and the working day lasts until 6pm or 7pm, there will have to be after-school activities every day. Until 7pm. Not likely in any school, as I am aware. Maybe Ed Balls can confirm this.
So it probably wouldn’t be full-time work. And with the endlessly flexible employment culture of the UK, the only available positions would be in shops, maybe cafes.
To prevent the single mother and child sinking totally under the poverty line, they would need tax credits, lots of them. So the state would be subsiding this low-wage, low-paid employment.
And if/when the Tories get back in they are going to slash or freeze tax credits. So that will drive the single mother into real poverty.
And of course it perpetuates the culture of idolizing the rich, for the best hope for this single mother would be to somehow get a rich man to take her and her son in. Partnerships driven by financial need rather than affection – very appropriate for a leech like Purnell and his Mandy gang-bang buddies.
One consolation is that Purnell may be on housing benefit hill himself if the 24% is borne out in the General Election next time.
The issue around lone parents being compelled to work under these measures omits free childcare.
People will need good quality childcare and there’s sod all mentioning of this in any of the welfare reforms in the past 18mths, from Hutton to Hain to Purnell.
We have indeed heard it all before – David Cameron put forward these exact proposals in January 2008. Check my blog if you don’t believe me. The link to David Cameron’s proposals is still on the BBC website.
Another pat on the back for the Conservatives from the faltering government.
This didn’t come out of the blue: we have been preparing our response-first since last December (below is fruits of some labour). The following resolutioncould form some of the basis for a campaign against the New Poor Laws. Though it will have to amended to make more explict how the measures criminalise the unemployed.
Welcome to the world of Houndstown USA where to get Dole you have to work in public chain-gangs picking up litter (and sweeping the streets clear for passing toffs).
I’m practising my basic vocabulary for this:
“Yess Baas! Yeah Massar!”
MOTION ON WELFARE REFORM taken from Ipswich and District Trades Union Council to Suffolk County Association of Trades Union Councils, were it was passed unanimously for inclusion on the Agenda of the Trades Union Councils Annual Conference.
lConference notes that the Prime Minister has made Welfare Reform a centrepiece of his financial strategy. His advisers aim to remove 1.9 million people from Incapacity/Invalidity allowances, and make the right to Social Housing and Benefit dependant on job-seeking and skills tests, with greater elements of compulsion, up to the age of 60, to take part in the New Deal scheme.
We are concerned that the principles underpinning New Deal are flawed; we note that
- The DWP does not directly run any New Deal scheme to prepare claimants for work.
- Contracts for training and placements in firms and voluntary bodies are employer led, with terms and conditions of work often outside regulations and hidden from public scrutiny.
- The widespread use of work-placements undermines the conditions of existing workers and has already meant a large-scale replacement of the Jobless, by those convicted by the Courts, undertaking Community Service.
- There is no provision for claimants to join trade unions, with many New Deal companies not recognising Trades Unions.
- The criteria to get Benefits now include obligatory participation in training or work placements
- Reforms are introduced with no consultation by those most affected, ie the claimants
- The defects of the system affects employees of the DWP and those working for providers in both the private and public sectors. Harassed claimants do not make easy customers
Those on New Deal, from Gateway, Job Search and Training Centres to Placements are increasingly vulnerable to exploitation;
- they have no employment rights
- there are no tribunals to judge cases of alleged abuse
- there are a number of claims that some employers use the system to obtain free(subsidised) labour.
- Training Schemes rarely match the level of recognised qualifications, with some being placed on week-long ‘Job Searches’, with no training whatsoever.
- Placements are sketchily supervised and the payment (Benefit plus £15 a week) is derisory for what is approaching full-time employment.
- The potential for harassment and bullying is evident, with no-one responsible for independent arbitration.
For these reasons Conference demands
1. An independent review of the entire Welfare-to-Work programme.
2. A genuine training system, with real qualifications which are job-transferable and taught to fit the standards of Vocational College courses.
3. Ensure that all instructors have been police-checked and providers can show that their instructors are fully qualified. (amendment from Bedfordshire TUC – accepted)
4. Ensure that adequate insurance cover is provided for people undertaking these programmes. (amendment from Bedfordshire TUC – accepted)
5. Properly paid placements in work that acknowledge genuine experience and fulfil criteria such as social need and skills development.
6. A system of independent supervision and arbitration
7. An end to compulsion.
Conference recognises that full employment is an important goal. Provision for those unable to work should be based on the principle of ‘work or maintenance’.
Workfare is profoundly unjust, which will reduce claimants to dependency. In it’s place we should aim for real jobs, a decent level of benefits, training at college and apprenticeship standards.
Motion from Suffolk TUC to Annual Conference of Trades Union Councils, held in Sheffield 14th and 15th June 2008.
Moved by Roger MacKay, Ipswich TUC
The motion was passed unanimously by Conference.
The notion that there is a large number of ‘workshy benefit scroungers’ is easily disproved by looking at (eastern) Germany. Workfare was introduced for the ‘long term’ unemployed – that’s, I think, everyone who’s been without paid employment for over 12 months – under the SPD-Green government, through ‘reforms’ thought up by the corrupt ex-Volkswagen boss Peter Hartz. Such “workfare” is paid at around 1 Euro per hour on top of benefit, and ‘coincidentally’, even if it’s illegal, many of these ’1-Euro-Jobs*’ have come about within the public sector, replacing those sacked by local councils to ‘save money’. The sad point is, that there aren’t enough workfare jobs to go round. People ‘want’ to do them, and there are many cases where people take their ‘Jobcenter’ (run jointly by the local council and the state employment service) to court to try and force them into giving them something to do (bizarrely, voluntary work, etc. is banned, as then you’re not ‘available for work’).
Of course, people most would prefer a proper job, on proper pay, but in much of eastern Germany and Berlin that isn’t an option for much of the population in actually existing capitalism, and probably won’t be for decades to come.
The other thing is that if NL and James Purnell were genuinely concerned about employment and disability then they would tighten up DDA, better flexible working hours, decent wages and so on and so on.
But they aren’t as it is all about profit and further exploitation.