Cicero Policy Briefer

Issue 20, January 2008

Welfare reform: balancing talk with action

By James Allen

The last month of 2007 was one filled by a seemingly endless stream of discussion papers and consultation documents on welfare reform. It appears that the Government might have come down with a bad case of consultation-itis in the run up to Christmas.

On a more serious note, it is a very positive development to see the Government beginning to see welfare reform as a truly cross-departmental issue. In the gaps between the silos of healthcare, Incapacity Benefit reform, skills, poverty, social exclusion and housing, many people remain. The Government has accepted that there has been a large number of consultations to digest and respond to recently, but has pointed out that this far preferable to a government dictating from Whitehall how best to reorder return-to-work services. To an extent, governments are in a no-win situation here: no consultations indicate a government that refuses to listen and learn from those who know best and work on the ground, while too many consultations lead to complaints of overloading and obscuring of issues. In addition, the Government could have been in danger of lacking decisive direction in this vitally important area in the post-Freud vacuum, but there is no sign of the Government slowing down in its policy ambitions.

Labour has an impressive story to tell on tackling unemployment-particularly youth unemployment, with record numbers of people in work and almost three million more people working now than in 1997. However, the rate of those on Incapacity Benefit stands at the worrying high level of 2.7 million. The story is not all doom and gloom-the employment rate of disabled people is 10 per cent higher than it was a decade ago. Through improvements to the Disability Discrimination Act and wider legislation, disabled people are better protected in the workforce than ever before. Additional obligations on the public sector, and a whole raft of programmes such as Pathways to Work have all played their part.

The only way to tackle the high numbers of people not in work is to join up the response to the whole problem. It is lack of opportunity and poor skills which lead to worklessness and poverty. Those affected are more likely to be socially and financially excluded, to suffer from the worst outcomes and to have to raise their own children in poverty. Those still not in work, including some people who have never worked and have no experience of the benefits that work brings, are by definition among the hardest to help. New proposals around earlier interventions by JobCentre Plus, including skills assessments much earlier in Incapacity Benefit claims are welcome. If there are clear skills needs which are barriers to an individual finding and keeping a good job and then progressing in work, then there seems little justification to wait until the person has been on benefit for a number of months to act and offer the necessary training and support.

The next 12 months look exciting for those of us engaged in the welfare reform policy process. We can expect the national roll-out of Pathways to Work and further moves toward unifying the successful New Deals, which are now in need of renewed impetus and the joining up of a whole range of policy issues—most notably the skills agenda and the Government’s return to work policy.

Once we’ve all got a handle on the huge pile of reading that probably didn’t get finished before Christmas, I hope that 2008 sees some real progress on getting some of society’s most vulnerable and excluded people closer to getting and keeping good jobs.