Work for Your Benefits Pilots
Oh dear! So providers are now expected to move from helping the unemployed to punishing them. I didn’t realise long-term unemployment was a crime against the state. Reading through the specification, there is no mention of skills development, training or anything that may be of use to the individual concerned. It’s purely what it says it is – work for your benefit or lose it.
Bizarrely, this provision goes against the findings of the DWP’s own report “A comparative review of workfare programmes in the United States, Canada and Australia” which found that workfare is ineffective in increasing people’s ability to find work and that, in fact, it reduces employment chances by preventing people from gaining the skills necessary to secure employment. The report also finds that workfare is particularly ineffective in two specific aspects: Helping those with multiple barriers to employment and helping people find work when there are high levels of unemployment.
This scheme targets the long-term unemployed and it is the long-term unemployed who have the greatest barriers. Surely, someone with literacy problems should receive help to address their literacy rather than being sent out to scrub graffiti off walls or clear up dog mess in the park (and I think it’s fairly obvious that the work provided is likely to be off this calibre – the DWP report found that the most common forms of work experience in the American model were” sweeping streets and cleaning public buildings and parks”). Other individuals are likely to have barriers preventing them from fulfilling their workfare obligations (e.g. an individual with alcohol issues) which means that many of society’s most vulnerable members may end up not only without employment but without benefits.
So, while the rest of the world (yes, even Wisconsin) is moving away from a punitive model that is demonstrably flawed, the UK is implementing a scheme that has no benefit to individuals, employers, the economy or society as a whole.
It is easy to criticise providers and the employability system and people often do. However, the majority of staff employed in the sector has a very genuine desire to help the individuals they work with and the majority of those out of work want nothing more than to get back into employment. It’s sad to see a system being introduced that reduces the relationship between provider and client to one of punisher and punished.
The report quoted can be found at:
http://research.dwp.gov.uk/asd/asd5/rports2007-2008/rrep533.pdf
Hi Woody, the report you reference was covered on this site after its initial publication. I believe Gregg and the SSAC both cautioned similarly with regard to Work for Your Benefit, and the government responded by confirming that the proposed scheme would be tailored to ensure that it helped people toward work.
Looking briefly at the specification, the provision of an 'enhanced Stage 3' as a competitor to WfYB is interesting, as the report you cite may lead one to believe that such a scheme could actually result in higher job outcomes than WfYB gets, thus leading to WfYB being abandoned after the pilot. However, it's worth noting that providers will be paid 50% of their fee on sustained job entry, not including the work experience element of WfYB itself. Also, the provision calls for 30 hours of work experience and up to 10 hours of job search support each week.
This doesn't necessarily mean that the provision will work, but it does move it away from being a pure 'punishment' provision. As always, and as made clear in the cited report, the risk is that the funding model and sanctions regime could most punish and least help those who are most at risk. This could be the case even if the provision works in producing job entries.
I'd be interested in any contributions that can point out how this differs from previous mandatory work experience provisions, including New Deal work experience delivery.