Welfare Green paper.

Earlier today, or yesterday (my internet connection got arsey), Conservative MP James Purnell published the governments long awaited plan to change the UK welfare system. It has been claimed that this is the biggest shake up of the system since its creation and is based on two major ideas.

The work for benefits scheme. Under this scheme people who claim unemployment benefits or "Jobseekers Allowance" will be forced to carry out community based work programs doing things such as picking up litter, painting over graffiti and cutting grass. When these same task are preformed by convicted criminals they are known as "community punishment orders". Although both the Labour party, the Conservative party and the UK Independence Party have claimed this idea as their own it has in fact been stolen lock, stock and barrel from the United States where it has been tried, tested and found to be pretty much useless.

While the scheme is quite successful in getting people off welfare very few of those people have actually gone on into paid work. The majority find themselves being declared ineligible for welfare by reason of lateness, insubordination or poor work etc and slip out of the bottom of the system presumably into the black economy. Apart from supervisors effectively making up supposed offences in order to meet throughput targets this scheme also suffers heavily from the problem that people who are doing full time voluntary work don't have the time to undergo training or look for paid employment.

Most importantly, despite the decreased number of welfare claimants the cost to the taxpayer of this type of welfare scheme remains pretty much the same because of the increased costs of administering and supervising this type of state ordered busy work.

It will also be interesting to see if the private companies that put these Jobseekers to work will be the same private companies that are already being paid by the local authorities to carry this type of work out. If that is the case then the taxpayers will in effect be paying these companies twice, once to do the work and then again by allowing them to avoid paying National Insurance and the minimum wage to their labour force.


Employment Support Allowance. This is to be brought in to replace payments made to people who are unable to work through reason of illness or disability. Where it is crucially different from the previous system is that it no longer assumes that the disabled people are in fact disabled. Choosing instead to assume that they are just being difficult by trying to avoid jobs running up and down stair because they haven't got any legs. Ignoring the fact that a large proportion of people claiming sickness benefits will never work due to incurable illnesses and birth defects such as mental sub normality this new benefit is to be considered "temporary".

In order to claim people will have to agree to a series of regular and often useless medical assessments and training orders provided by for profit companies such as Working Links, Learning Links, A4l and Learn Direct. In my experience these organisation do not have clue what skills are required for the modern work environment let alone have the ability to train people in them. They tend to be staffed by people who are so inept they cannot find work beyond the taxpayers teat. One, worryingly named Instant Muscle was so hopeless that despite only having one customer, the government, it couldn't even manage it's own fiances and was forced into liquidation.


While the announcement of these reforms will no doubt tick all the right boxes with the hard pressed working poor who've yet to figure out that rather then being the sick and the unemployed it is the government themselves that is ruining the economy I am in no doubt that it will do anything to either help people get back into work or cut the governments expenditure of the unemployed and unemployable. What it will do is ensure that rather then being spent on the people who really need it taxpayers money will be siphoned off into the pockets of quasi-private companies who can't cut it in businesses without government subsidy.


As all my attempts to get off welfare and into work have been cruelly cut down so the government can use me as a guinea pig this idiotic idea I could go into great detail of exactly what's wrong with it and offer more then a few suggestions of how to improve it but I guess that is Sadie's job now. Besides it's all going to be sneaked into practice without proper parliamentary debate so there seems little point in me wasting my breath.