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Archive for the ‘Working age poverty’ Category

Money Management advice

Wednesday, December 14th, 2011

One of the new projects we have begun this year is Money Management advice training and workshops – in this guest blog post project workers Cwti Green and Doreen Lewis set out the background to their work

 

Coins stacked like a graph Orange border rounded edge boxChristmas is a time when a lot of us worry about making ends meet and getting our budgets to balance, especially at a time when fuel costs are increasing and everything seems to be getting more expensive. For some people we work with in east London, these worries are with them all year round.

People living on benefits, people on a low income, people with mental health problems, people in debt, homeless people, are often struggling with managing their money. Children and young people can live in a culture where there is little incentive to save or to think about budgeting.

We have been running money management sessions since May, and the idea behind them is to encourage people to think about how they spend their money and how they can save money. These sessions form part of the Community Links Early Action approach – working with people, enabling and building resilience, rather than coping with the consequences further down the track

We run money management sessions for many different people from many different backgrounds and cultures. We have worked with 10 year olds in primary schools and youth clubs, young people in secondary schools, those at risk of exclusion from school, and NEETS (young people not in education, employment, or training). We have also worked with lone parents, social-work students, a survivors’ group, people with mental health problems, and homeless people. As well as discussing ways to save, how to stay out of debt, and how to budget, we offer those in debt an opportunity for one-to-one debt counselling.

We give certificates to children and young people, which can be appreciated by those who have very few.

We also give money management information packs to young people aged 16 and over, and to adults. These address the needs and concerns specific to each age group. So far, from May to December, we have worked with 654 people and referred 15 people for debt advice. Rather than say any more, we will leave it to some of the participants to give their response to the sessions.

Quotes from Adult Participants:

  • It has made me look at my money on a regular basis to give me a good idea on what my income and outgoings are. (Tenants’ Group)
  • This workshop has given me loads of information regarding saving, for myself and also for my clients.
    (Social Work Students’ Group)
  • Try and put money in a savings account. (New Deal)
  • Buy things I need, not what I want, and use tips given. (INUF)
  • Using less water, compare prices on Internet. (Survivors’ Group)
  • I will make a shopping list before I go shopping and cut down on my takeaways. (Children’s Centre)
  • Putting money aside each month. (Anchor House)

Quotes from Young Participants:

  • I will try to save money by reducing the amount of times I eat chicken and chips. And reduce going to fast food restaurants. (Rokeby School, Year 10)
  • If you save some money a day a week it will be more bigger and in a year the amount will be big and big. (Rokeby School, Year 7)
  • Spend less. Don’t buy stuff I don’t need. (St Bonaventure’s School, Year 10)
  • Think before you buy. (St Bonaventure’s School, Year 10)
  • I’ll save the money which I usually spend on drinks and chicken and chips. (Youth group, Froud Centre)
  • Saving pocket money. (St Helen’s Primary School, Year 6)
  • I will cut down on fizzy pop. (Godwin Primary School, Year 6)

It’s tempting to spend more than you can really afford at Christmas – our money management advice and training supports people to keep to realistic budgets and avoid the difficulties of starting the new year in debt.

Youth Contract: Nick Clegg on unemployment and ‘keeping it real’

Friday, November 25th, 2011

Deputy PM Nick Clegg delivers the 2011 Scarman Lecture. (Picture People Can, Brixton)This week the latest unemployment figures were released – not surprisingly, they show an increase in the number of those aged 16 to 24 who are not in education, employment or training (NEET) now a total of 1,163,000 people.

In response the deputy prime minister Nick Clegg is today announcing the Youth Contract – new measures to tackle youth unemployment  – more work placements for 18 and 19 year olds and money that could act as a subsidised wage to help employers increase apprenticeships – two policies to which we contributed our thinking when we were invited to meet with the youth employment team at the DWP last week.

The issue of youth unemployment troubled the previous Labour administration and it’s likely to do the same to current coalition government. It’s a thorny issue for many reasons: most of all it’s a electorally important so a major priority for any political party. We know there is a risk of creating a lost generation of young people who are just starting out in life, and the future of our society. Just as important as the danger of a lost generation is the risk of a discontented and disconnected youth population.

We saw first hand the consequences with last summer’s riots; in fact Nick Clegg was reminded of this as he delivered the Scarman Lecture in Brixton hosted by the People Can charity. He watched TV footage from 1981 covering the Brixton riots and was held to account by a bunch of fantastic, well-informed and articulate young people, all lined up in purple school blazers but by no means uniform in their appearance – unlike the rest of the audience which was full of ‘professional experts’ in the field.

Clegg gave a good performance. Referring to the 1981 riots he said last summer’s riots, thirty years on, were not the same – they may have looked similar but they had different underlying causes. According to Clegg, the riots this year were about economic inequality and government has an obligation to ‘shine a light across our economy’ to identify where the injustices are occurring. He said that we need a more nuanced and precise understanding of where young people from minority ethnic communities were falling through the net and  asked why ‘their success doesn’t match their ambitions’ He asked lots of good questions and raised some valid points, but it still did seem a bit staged, still a bit like a performance.

Then came the ‘keeping it real’ young people and their refreshingly direct and genuine  questions. They confidently and respectfully asked about tuition fees, they asked about the ‘Eton Bubble’ from which the leaders of our country are disproportionally drawn. They questioned how young people from less-privileged backgrounds could relate to these leaders and vice-versa. After reeling off numerous statistics Clegg suddenly came alive and in the nature of ‘keeping it real’ gave a simple, honest response… ‘I’m in a coalition government and I am a deputy prime minister… I would love to be prime minster and do what I think we really should be doing all of the time!’ A youthful, genuine question got a genuine and energetic response. The change in dynamics said it all, a policy was formed there and then – the connection was made between young people, terribly concerned about their future prospects, and the institution that is responsible for their future, their opportunities in education, employment and training.

We strongly welcome the announcements made today – new money to support young people in the labour market – fantastic. But tackling youth unemployment is about so much more – it’s about rebuilding the trust in our political institutions, it’s about encouraging responsibility amongst young people – but also, it’s about putting an end to the hypocrisy that currently exists. Look at the context of the summer riots; the previous summer we had the MPs expenses scandal, the bail-out of the banks, followed by deep cuts to services for young people – youth clubs closing down across the country, Connexions services disappearing and the Future Jobs fund closed for business.

Government haven’t been sending out the best messages to young people, it has been an irresponsible parent, providing a bad example and it seems to follow the principle ‘young people are to be seen and not heard’. This principle doesn’t work – for anyone.

Combined with funding more high quality provision to enable youth employment, government must endorse and embed a policy of ‘keeping it real’, honesty and engagement with the people it’s there to govern, including our future generation.

Is the Benefits System “fit for work”?

Tuesday, November 22nd, 2011

ManometerA few news stories in recent days have been gauging the the health of the benefits system.

Last weekend Professor Carol Black was in the news reporting the findings of her enquiry, commissioned by the Department of Work and Pensions, into people on ‘long term sick’. It suggested reducing benefit payments for those on ‘long term sick’ and handing over the responsibility for assessing people as fit for work to an independent panel. The report found some GPs signing people off for reasons other than their health and that too many people were being left on benefits and out of the labour market as a result. It also suggested that employers who are hiring people with long term sicknesses should be given a tax break to nudge them into hiring them.

Also this week in the news there are stories about the masses of appeals against the controversial Work Capability Assessments (WCA) – People found fit for work are moved onto a lower benefit and expected to start searching for a job. Tribunals have been swamped (many of which have had the advantage of of receiving legal-aid funded independent appeals advice- due to disappear if the legal aid bill goes through.) A large proportion of the initial WCA decisions are being overturned. Others are taking a very long time to go to the tribunals after six months many people are simply putting in a new claim for the sickness benefit, Employment Support Allowance.

Our benefits advisors are increasingly supporting local people with these appeals, however a few minutes down the road we are also delivering the Work Programme (referred to in the second article) where people go if they are found fit for work. The more people we successfully support in appealing the WCA, the less people on ESA we will see coming through the doors of our Work Programme. This presents a huge problem to us. Because of the payment model of the Work Programme contract we get paid more to support a person claiming ESA that is found fit for work than we do for someone who is claiming Job Seekers Allowance. Like many organisations delivering the Work Programme, we are hugely reliant on finding work for ESA claimants to make the programme economically viable. However we are not getting to support these people into employment as they are appealing the decision. Yet we are seeing many people claiming JSA on our Work Programme; people with many complex issues in need of intensive  support – that is  of course costly- but we get funded very little to provide this support.

One of the biggest problems behind all of this is that too much is dependant on a benefit label. WCA determines a person’s capability to work. Then there’s lots of support to help them become employable. Assessments should be more sophisticated if government wants to reduce the numbers of appeals, and control the escalating cost of tribunals. It is important that the right people are referred to the Work Programme based on the correct assessment of both capability and employability.

Significant consequences follow from the type of benefit claimed, including the amount of money to which each claimant is entitled; the amount of money each person is “worth” to an employment support organisation; the rules for seeking work with which a claimant must comply… and the consequences if they don’t. All of this creates further barriers to work and increases fear amongst people not working. Universal Credit will hopefully address this issue but that won’t be completed until 2017, in the meantime maybe we should identify a person’s needs for support – work related or not – rather than allocate resources based on the name of benefit they are claiming. With over 2.5 million people affected in one way or another there is a huge amount at stake for government and little time to waste.

‘Speech marks’: the impact of language stigmatising benefits

Monday, October 17th, 2011

Today the annual TUC poverty conference is taking a close look at the myths and stereotypes swirling around the benefits system. Launching at the conference are two reports. One, from the TUC, looks at the factual inaccuracies and misleading statements that often comprise political rhetoric on the benefits system. Challenging Myths and Stereotypes takes some common thoughts – ‘People on disability benefits are swinging the lead’, or ‘Lots of unemployed people are scroungers’ for example – and looks at the evidence.

The other, by Community Links, is a brief discussion paper examining evidence of the impact of stigmatising language on people claiming benefits. For example, what is the effect of the  Secretary of State for Work and Pensions describing people unemployed for a long time as:  ’a block of people in Britain who do not add anything to the greatness of this country?” And how does it square with his thought that, “Too often in some of these areas people have been out of work for a long time, they’ve lost confidence, they’ve lost courage, they’ve lost any sense of self-worth. What the Work Programme I hope will do will be to tackle that and start to bring them back to the workforce.”

We suggest that stigmatising language – which is certainly not confined to this government or to one political party, as the report shows – actually undermines government’s attempts to support people into work. Directly it worsens health and reduces confidence and self esteem which – as the Minister admits – are crucial to getting a job, and indirectly it affects the attitudes of employers and support agencies towards people receiving benefits.

There is some evidence to support this view, but our conclusion is that the impact of this language on people’s voting intentions is much better understood than its  impact on those it describes. We urge policy-makers within government to pay greater attention to the effect their words could have on the individuals they claim to be supporting.

The discussion paper grew out of our work on the European Year Against Poverty in 2010, and includes quotes from workshop participants from last summer. We don’t have plans to take this strand of work forward ourselves, but are hoping that other organisations might be able to seize the idea and develop it further. If you are interested in doing so, please get in touch or leave a comment below.

Is Government undermining the reforms to tackle poverty it has invested so much in?

Tuesday, October 11th, 2011

End Child Poverty - Keep The PromiseAt the Conservative Party conference last week, The Secretary of State for Work and Pensions Iain Duncan Smith said that he wants to “make the link between restoring our society and restoring our economy”. So it was interesting to hear what the Institute of Fiscal Studies had to say about the impact of the Coalition Government’s reforms on child and working-age poverty from 2010 to 2020.

One of the most serious concerns coming out of this report is the expectation that by 2013 the median income will fall by 7%. However in the longer term Universal Credit is expected to have a positive impact on reducing both relative and absolute poverty by 2020, lifting 600,000 working –age adults and 450,000 children out of poverty.

Yet there’s a number of uncertainties that could offset this; how the planned Universal Credit will affect unemployed peoples’ behaviour; and the impact of the government’s recent move to link most benefits to the Consumer Price Index.

Universal Credit aims to simplify a system so that complexity isn’t a barrier in itself to people moving into work and also to  taper benefits as people increase their earnings. It is about encouraging people to take up “mini-jobs”, using a more generous disregard in Universal Credit, pocketing small amount of earnings they begin to make. Added to this government is also giving more support to people through the new Work Programme and toughening the  conditions for those in receipt of  Universal Credit.

Much of this relies on employers making “mini jobs” available and paying at least the national minimum wage, if not more. (Perversely, increasing wages will actually increase the median figure against which child poverty is measured – a flaw in the design of the child poverty measurements).

It’s difficult to forecast the impact of government’s reforms as Universal Credit is intended to change people’s behaviour – something which is impossible to capture in any modelling. The system is being designed to be dynamic and full of incentives,  encouraging people to take-up even small bits of employment. By introducing conditions to those already in work for example, Government is hoping people will remain in employment, earn more money and keep their job for longer.

All of this will have a huge impact on reducing poverty.  But reforms like these are being undermined by linking benefits to CPI, meaning that whilst the cost of living will rise, the amount of credit people receive from the state is likely to see less of a rise.  When government introduced this policy they said they hoped to see £6 billion in savings as a result. Therefore less money will be in the pockets of the poor, restricting their spending power even further whilst government retains the savings.

With the Work Programme, a “payment-by-results” model means the amount of money delivery agencies are paid is fixed for a five-year period. Again government will be saving money as this award is not linked to inflation, whilst the costs of services are. Delivery costs are likely to rise between 25-30% over the five year period, yet providers will get paid a fixed award based on the benefit savings over that time – not accounting for their natural rise when linked to CPI. Again Government will pocket these savings, whilst the Work Programme service providers (many small charities) will struggle to survive and will have less money to spend on delivering genuine support.

Iain Duncan Smith wants to make the link between restoring society and restoring our economy, which is a noble thing to do. However saving money by giving less to people reliant on benefits and less to those delivering the Work Programme – including charities who are already running on a shoestring – will not restore the economy, nor will it restore our society.

In the short term it may put some extra cash in governments pocket but they will be undermining their own initiatives intended to have a greater impact on tackling the poverty and reviving the economy in the long-term.

Easy Pickings – Vulnerable Workers and Exploitation in the Construction Industry

Monday, October 3rd, 2011

UCATT Report Cover imageToday’s Daily Mirror includes coverage of one of our recent reports.

As part of our informal economy work programme, we launched a jointly produced report entitled ‘The Hidden Workforce Building Britain: exposing exploitation and protecting vulnerable workers in construction’.

This report was the culmination of a two year programme with UCATT (the UK’s largest construction industry trade union) and Manchester Business School, funded by the BIS Union Modernisation Fund.

We co-hosted an intimate launch event at TUC’s Headquarters with union reps, vulnerable workers and government officials to share the findings and discuss how to take them forward. The later being the tricky bit because we are still awaiting the outcome of the Davey Review into the government’s workplace rights compliance and enforcement arrangements. The government is parceling this into its ‘Red Tape Challenge’, and the general feeling is that they will probably relax enforcement rules, whilst reducing the capacity of enforcement agencies. This will be a challenge in itself as enforcement agencies are already miniscule. For example, there are only 12 construction health and safety inspectors to oversee the thousands of construction sites in London. Cutting this sort of supposed ‘red tape’, as government tried to do with the Equality Laws, will not improve profitability nor make construction businesses grow more, but it will make matters worse for many construction workers by increasing their vulnerability.

The report aims to capture the position of vulnerable workers in the construction sector and how we should protect them and also enforce their rights in the workplace. Our part of the research aimed to capture the voices and direct experiences of vulnerable workers; whilst Manchester Business School focused on the role of regulation and enforcement agencies in relation to vulnerable workers.

We went out into the community to talk to people for the research. One of the team, for example, went early in the morning to the car park of a large DIY and building supplies store in east London and spoke to some construction workers being picked-up for the day. We met a young Romanian man there, no older than 20. He’d come to look for work because a two-week stint with a Turkish gangmaster had come to an end. “The guy I was working for employs around ten people who are all foreigners, including Romanians, Bulgarians and Iranians. He took us to sites where we were usually painting and renovating houses,” he said. “I was paid £50 for a nine or ten hour day with half an hour for lunch.”

The young man says he can’t work legally because he does not have a national insurance number. “I went to the Jobcentre and asked for an NI number,” he says, “but they said I had to be in a job before I could get one.”

Then at about 8.30am, our researcher watched as the workers were chased by the police, a daily charade as we later discovered,  as they simply return later once the police had left. So at a community level many know this sort of exploitation is going on, but there isn’t yet the resolve to address it.

The report contains three overarching recommendations to address these issues:

  1. Structural change: there should be a renewed, independent labour inspectorate for the UK. It should be a single organisation which would have a coordinated strategy, joined-up resources (budgets, staff, common training, materials and one database etc). It should have a clearly recognisable brand and have a single point of access for members of the public.
  2. Building Alliances and Working with Society: there should be increased partnership work must be developed with unions, the voluntary sector, advice groups, local authorities and business groups – forming alliances to reach and support more vulnerable workers and prosecute exploitative employers.
  3. Pro-active Investigations: The new labour inspectorate should be carrying out more proactive investigations. We acknowledge that this will of course require additional resources which will be difficult to find in the current economic climate. However the cost of not increasing the number of pro-active investigations will continue to be extensive in terms of lost tax revenue for the state; stunting growth of businesses and therefore the economy; breaking employment law; and increasing the vulnerability of workers and preventing some from being able to leave the benefit system.

We found that many people working on construction sites do not know where to go for support, let alone have heard of the enforcement agencies. So we’ve also launched a credit-card sized leaflet ‘Agency Workers – we’ve got you covered’, informing people of their employment rights and where to get information, advice and guidance. It’s designed to be discretely carried in pockets or shoes because on some construction sites workers are searched before entry.

It’s this fear factor that contributes as much to the vulnerability of workers, as it is the poor work and pay conditions. Many construction workers are ‘just surviving’, particularly in these precarious economic times. If they speak up, as one young man told us, they will receive a ‘tap on the shoulder’ and are told not to return tomorrow. Their shoes easily filled with unemployment levels being so high. They know they are being exploited but would rather that than have no job at all.

We hope this report contributes to the minister’s thinking for his Review about how to address the conditions that many vulnerable workers face on construction sites each day.

Sanctions don’t work – they remove responsibility

Friday, August 19th, 2011

Since the beginning of this year we have lobbied Government for better support for unemployed people, rather than relying on sanctions to get people into work. Today the National Institute of Economic and Social Research (NIESR) released the evaluation findings of a pilot on the use of skills conditionality. They have concluded that sanctions are not really necessary nor are they effective.

The report finds that claimants don’t need to be mandated onto a skills course as they welcome the opportunity to develop their skills set and they also have a sense of obligation to their adviser to do this activity. For all Government’s talk about ‘responsibility’ it is worth acknowledging this finding; that people do already have a sense of duty to their adviser. Maybe this is not being utilised cleverly enough.

A second really interesting finding is that people were disappointed with the type of skills training they were told to go on as they believed it was not what they needed. They had a career in mind and wanted something specific to enable them to stand a chance of getting a job in this area. However more often than not they were told to go on a general skills course.

This reminds me of a time a local resident came to us as he had found a gardening job he thought he stood a chance of getting. He had been unemployed for well over 20 years and had never used a CV to apply for gardening jobs. He asked the Jobcentre adviser for help with this as the deadline was in a week. She identified his lack of CV skills as the priority need so put him on a 13 week CV writing course! He missed the deadline and a year later is still unemployed not having used any of the CV skills he has learnt. Of course people need to adapt to the modern world of recruitment but Jobcentre advisers have an intermediate role to play in this, especially for people who have been our of the employment world for a decade or two.

Thirdly people are unsatisfied with the training available to them; seeing it as basic and very limited. Where people have been responsible and taken action by themselves to improve their chances of getting a job, such as volunteering, it is not being recognised. People should be able to have a say in what actions they take to find employment. We have noted the importance of co-design in our Deep Value report mentioned here before. This increases personal responsibility and removes the need for mandating people to do something.

We have asked the DWP for the research that has lead to the current policies on conditionality but it seems to be non existent. Hopefully this new report will allow for some evidence based policy making and recognise that sanctioning for the wrong reasons does not encourage compliance, nor in our view will it encourage responsibility.

Is language the key to welfare reform

Friday, July 29th, 2011

Transforming welfare seems to be a never ending crusade for political parties and in this decade, more than ever before it is seen as a tool to reconnect to disconnected voters. For this reason the rhetoric is becoming all the more important. Take the recent piece in the Guardian from Liam Byrne MP about welfare and responsibility, or more to the point irresponsibility,  in attempts to rectify the ‘worst statistic for me was that nearly 60% of voters said Labour was not just a bit, but seriously, out of touch with the lives of ordinary working people’.

As I write David Cameron just sent through a bulletin saying that they are ’doing the right thing by decent, hard-working people. Nothing so undermined the value of responsibility in this country than the woeful welfare system allowed to spiral out of control by the last government.’

James Purnell appeared on BBC’s Newsnight on Wednesday saying that welfare reform is vital if Labour is to reconnect with voters; that the electorates have ‘fallen out of love with the welfare state’. It seems Labour is taking a view that welfare in the UK should have a strong contributionary principle behind it and there should be an end to ‘free allowance from the State’. One suggestion is that it should offer much better protection as well as demanding more from the individual.

Anne Begg MP, chair of the DWP select committee wrote a letter to the Minster for Employment this week  expressing serious concerns over the misrepresentation of benefit claimants who are going through a work capability assessment. Begg calls for Government to play a role in the media taking responsibility and counteract the negative stereotyping of claimants. Words like ‘scroungers’ being a much used description.

We have raised the point about language as part of our Working Age Poverty project last year; arguing that Government has a role to play here and to make sure policy is not shaped on the media language currently being used. When we talk to the DWP about supporting people back to work, we talk about helping them set their goals based on their aspirations as this forms a relationship that effectively supports them back into work, as evidenced in our Deep Value report. The term ‘learned helplessness’ has come up and often proves contentious amongst many organisations around the table. Labours welfare reform ideas are based around this term and to a degree there is some truth in that – it is very hard to be responsible for your own employment when the system to get you back into work is so prescriptive. But many of us work with people who have a huge amount of responsibility in other areas of their lives; caring for children on their own, keeping the family afloat with an incredibly small budget, keeping off the streets or supporting oneself through an illness or living independently with a disability.

These people are voters too. We never hear anything positive about the unemployed – whether looking for work or not capable of work. A radically different type of language may be more transformational than yet more thinking on the principles behind welfare, or at least it should be a major part of it.

Formalising cash-in-hand work

Monday, July 4th, 2011

Just a quick plug for the Global Microcredit Summit as they have invited me to Valladolid, Spain, on 14th-17th November  2011. They’ve asked me to speak at a workshop titled:  “The importance of business development services for microfinance clients in industrialized countries.” I’ll be sharing with delegates our contention that it is possible to ‘formalise’ or ‘legitimise’ cash-in-hand work through grassroots business development services, from recent research that we’ve gathered from organsiations across the UK, with support from Joseph Rowntree Foundation.

We’ll be in a position to share more practical details of our formalisation model by then.

The Summit will bring together more than 2,000 participants from over 100 countries, including H.M. Queen Sofía of Spain, Nobel Laureate Muhammad Yunus and Sir Fazle Abed of BRAC. Delegates will have the opportunity to participate in 6 plenary sessions, more than 50 workshops, over 30 associated sessions, a variety of day-long courses, as well as field visits to leading institutions around the world in the days before the Summit. Delegates from over 60 countries are already confirmed! Reduced Registration rates extended until July 15, 2011!

For more information go to: www.globalmicrocreditsummit2011.org

Journeys to formalisation – our initial thoughts

Friday, May 27th, 2011

So I promised recently to share with you our initial findings from our ‘Journeys to Formalisation’ project, supported by Joseph Rowntree Foundation.

Just to remind you we’re trying to develop a model to formalise or legitimise cash-in-hand work. We’re constructing this by interviewing and so learning from organisations across the UK who are already doing this.

The UK’s informal economy is significant, representing 12.3% of GDP (Schneider, 2002; 2011). Despite its importance, there is no dedicated service to support people to formalise their economic activity, and yet from our own surveys we found that 46% (2009) and 56% (2006) of cash-in-hand workers want to formalise.

Given the ‘illegality’ of informal paid work, people involved in this activity are distrustful of government institutions or people they don’t know. Statutory agencies, however welcoming, cannot be the vehicle through which informal workers can be supported to formalise their activity. Their unsuitability stems from their duty to report abuses regarding the benefits, tax and regulatory systems.

Trust is the key for cash-in-hand workers to move out of informality (Community Links, 2010). Trust in not being reported to the authorities; trust in talking openly about their developed/acquired skills while working informally; trust that the advisor and/or local organisation has the user’s best interests; trust that users will be better off (financially, emotionally and socially) by working formally; and trust in agreeing a plan and receiving support to formalise and legitimise their activity. Trust is the result of continued interaction between residents and local, experienced intermediary organisations that over a period of time have been based within a community.

Individuals will come forward to formalise / legitimise their activity when they have tested their business and their own skills needed to run the business; and are ready to grow it.

The local organisations supporting formalisation are not set up to do so, but have evolved and became a by-product of the organisation’s work. For example, they may already be providing business support or advice, are trusted by and have considerable knowledge of the local community.

What we need from the Government (be that national, regional or local authorities and agencies) is to recognise the extent of informal paid work; to be willing to try a combination of ‘carrot’ and ‘stick’ approaches – they rely far to heavily on the ‘stick’ and yet HMRC’s own cost-benefit analysis shows they get a far greater return on their investment when they support and encourage people back into the tax system. In recognising the catch-22 that government is in i.e. being seen to condone something illegal, we suggest that they apply the “only look forward” principle. If people come forward and want to formalise then give them one chance. If they are supported to formalise (in steps) their activity e.g. get a driver’s licence, the necessary insurance, fill their tax return form etc… and don’t return to informal working then don’t throw the book at them.

We’ll be sharing more as the project progresses but in the meantime if you’d like to find out more and to get involved in the research please contact me or download the emerging findings paper.

Photo courtesy of hitthatswitch