Six months in… welfare

It’s six months since we launched this version of Guerilla Policy. Here’s a selection of some of our favourite posts we’ve published in welfare (we’re covering changes to welfare for disabled people in the next post, given the extent of the reforms being made at the moment). Thanks to all those contributors we’ve published so far.

It’s obviously been a time of great change, and great concern, in welfare. Back in November, writing from the perspective of his role as a community organiser, Mark Parker at Southwark Organising described what he was seeing on the ground:

“…we are confronted by numerous households who are barely holding things together. People are angry and hurt, resentful and hungry and the prospect of still greater cuts to benefits, services, transport, jobs and housing is crushing. This government presents them with still greater reasons to stay small, to be undemanding and to take what is handed out. Our oppressed communities are being shattered. People – able-bodied and disabled – are seeing their livelihoods utterly destroyed with little hope of a return to sanity. Young people – especially if you are male and black – face huge discrimination in the jobs and housing markets and have an easy ticket to prison or mental ill health or both. Women across the board are facing the greatest pressure, seeking to support their families and being given fewer chances than before to thrive and prosper.”

In December, Alex Richardson-Price on the 99percent campaign blog reacted to the Chancellor’s Autumn Statement by arguing that the young and unemployed were being left in the cold as a result of policies such as the Work Programme, the abolition of the Education Maintenance Allowance and the tripling of tuition fees for university students:

“But in fact, the effect of the autumn statement on young people is best measured by what it left out rather than any new headline proposals. In large part, the attacks have already begun; the significance of the autumn statement is in its belligerent refusal to recognise their deleterious effects and its insistence they must continue for many years. In fact, the Tories have made it clear many times that even after the deficit is ‘under control’, there will be no restoration of funding to public services. Unless challenged, the cuts will be permanent.”

The Work Programme was the focus of many subsequent blogs; in February Richard Johnson at Buying Quality Performance analysed the way that contractors were focusing on people who are already close to work (so-called ‘creaming and parking’):

“This represents a short-term saving. It delivers, however, very poor value for money. With every day of unemployment, your chances of getting stuck there increase, and other associated problems start to appear, such as poor mental and physical health. The 70% who are parked will go on to cost far more, in basic benefits as well as across a whole range of other public services.”

In a later post, ‘The Value of Nothing’, Jane Mansour explained how any ‘savings’ made by the Work Programme actually represented a cut in the support offered to the long-term unemployed.

In January, the In My Shoes blog criticised the Government’s rhetoric about welfare and how this was informing its policies:

“The Government are perpetuating myths and misunderstandings about what they delightfully coin the benefit culture. This is a deliberate ploy on their part to play one sector of society off against another, in this case the working poor, against those who aren’t working. The deserving poor against the undeserving and presumably feckless. …The Institute of Fiscal Studies are a major economic research institute in the UK often used by the Government. The IFS  have said that JSA accounts for 2.4% of the total welfare budget, they continue that benefits for those on low incomes, ie those who are working account for 21% of the welfare budget, whereas payments for elderly people, including the state pension make up over 42%. So why oh why does the Government feel so free to glibly castigate and vilify this section of society?”

Jane Mansour also criticised the ‘shirkers and strivers’ rhetoric as an inaccurate account of the reality of how the welfare is used:

“The shirkers/strivers debate is founded in misconception – assuming there are two static groups in opposition to each other misunderstands and misrepresents the dynamism of the labour market. Even at times of high unemployment there is considerable flux as people cycle between work and worklessness, low pay and no pay. …Engaging with the strivers vs shirkers rhetoric ignores a substantial group of people who have been and are repeatedly failed by the current system. They are sometimes on benefits and sometimes in work. When they are in work, they may continue to claim benefits because they are likely to be in low paid work.”

Rather than the responsibility of welfare recipients, on the Red Brick blog in February the Government was criticised for a lack of responsibility for the impact of its reforms:

“As welfare ‘reform’ and housing cuts bite ever harder, when do we reach the point where the government concedes that the hardship caused is an inevitable consequence of rebalancing the public finances and reducing the deficit? So far, they seem to be in deep denial. This contrasts with the Thatcher era, because when she increased unemployment as a tool of economic policy, she at least admitted that the growth in joblessness was a price which was (on her reasoning) worth paying. The Cameron government seems either to deny that there is any hardship or to blame anyone other than the ministers who have instituted the cuts.”

Ministers have also been continually challenged by Joe Halewood‘s marshaling of the facts on the Bedroom Tax, from how many people would be affected by it, how many ‘spare’ bedrooms there are in social housing, how much it will cost (rather than save), and how tenants can defeat it. In a powerful post in March, Zarathustra told the story of a woman in a difficult relationship to illustrate the ‘casual cruelty of the bedroom tax’. As the woman reflected:

“This government don’t see people as individuals, all with different circumstances and needs, we are just fodder to them. To some extent you do have to put yourself first. But not totally, it’s about give and take, there should be a way for us both to be ok, not one person ok, the other left in dire straits. But this government is all take. Look after number one and screw you.”

(Mind you, the Labour Party leadership has also come in for its fair share of criticism for its weak response to the Government’s reforms, as argued by Paul Bernal and Sue Marsh, among others).

No-one claims the welfare system is perfect - especially those who regularly come into contact with it. As Systems thinking for girls wondered in April, ‘Nevermind the £53 p/w. How would IDS cope with the system?’ And as Thomas Neumark argued in November, writing about ‘Stigma and stigmatizers’ in response to a report from the University of Kent:

“The benefits system is Britain is fundamentally flawed. The way it is designed means it guaranteed that people who claim benefits will be stigmatized. What’s more, we have a political class and media who are doing little if anything to address this problem. Worse, they are, in many cases, actually making it worse.”

Thomas put the blame on the high reliance on means-testing in the UK welfare system. For Thomas, changing the way that benefits are delivered could include a commitment to:

“…’progressive universalism’ where most households get some benefits but certain groups get more than others. It could also involve more sophisticated forms of personalization, where households are given help depending on their individual situation. Perhaps more controversially it could mean introducing a more “contributory” aspect to benefits, for example, giving people a percentage of their previous income for a period of time after they are made unemployed. Perhaps just as importantly it means changing the culture within the benefits system. This goes deeper than a conversation over whether it is the private or public sector that should be doing the actual benefits assessment. It means changing the system so that claimants do not feel that they are the hapless recipients of generous ‘gifts’ from the state and so that the assessors do not see their primary role being around preventing fraud.”

But perhaps as Matthew Gardiner proposed in December, all government policies should be accompanied by a ‘Social Impact Assessment’, alongside the more traditional Impact Assessment:

“…for me the biggest failing of the Impact Assessment is its absence of humanity. As this policy plays out, we must ensure that the real impact is truthfully portrayed. Yes, there will be heartwarming cases where the benefit changes provide a motivation for self-improvement of the kind MPs expect to see. We should not be afraid to report those – they matter for the individuals and society as a whole. But we also need to report factually how for a family losing £300 from their weekly benefit their choices are now between food and heating, we need to show how respiratory illnesses have increased and how child nutrition has suffered. These human stories will play out across the country in the years to come as the callousness of this policy – encouraging people into work that for many just doesn’t exist – becomes apparent.”

Finally, just as many of the welfare reforms were being implemented, Pseudo Deviant reflected on how she felt, and wondered whether resistance is futile:

“All in all it can feel pretty bleak. Stuff like this can easily lead to people feeling depressed, like they don’t have a voice, like no one is listening, apathetic, like fighting is pointless, angry, frustrated and bitter. All those feelings are totally valid reactions to what is happening. A point I would like to make is that these kind of policies are in part designed to make people feel that way. Like there is no point struggling against them any more, that (to borrow a Star Trek quote) resistance is futile. I say sod that.”

Let us know which other welfare bloggers we should be posting. Get in touch with us at: [email protected]