I was asked to write a piece for the Compass Website about Need Not Greed, our campaign to encourage people to move out of cash-in-hand work and into the formal economy.
The article is generating some lively debate! Contribute your own comments over here.
Speaking at the Labour Party Conference yesterday in his Leaders Speech Prime Minster Gordon Brown said: “The economic times are tough of course that makes things harder- but we are in this for the long haul – the complete elimination of child poverty by 2020. And so today I announce my intention to introduce ground-breaking legislation to enshrine in law Labour’s pledge to end child poverty.” (Source: Labour party website).
Community Links are going to take part in the Keep the Promise Rally- UK’s biggest ever event to campaign for the end of child poverty on October 4th, between 1-3pm, in London’s Trafalgar Square. As a signatory of the campaign, we support the aims and intentions.
The idea behind the campaign is to prove to the government that there is huge public support for targets to end Child Poverty by 2020. If lots of people turn up on the day, that will send a strong message and encourage the government to work harder to make the target a reality.
Join us at the rally, contact maeve.mcgoldrick@community-links.org to find out how to get involved. With your support, we can ensure that the Government ‘Keep their Promise’ to a generation to End Child Poverty.
Visit www.endchildpoverty.org.uk/promise to demand a better future for all our children.
“The Community Allowance would allow community organisations to pay local people to do work that strengthens their neighbourhoods without losing their benefit status”
Jess Steele delivered a compelling presentation about the the Community Allowance at last weeks Development Trusts Association’s conference. Jess is chair of the CREATE consortium (of which Community Links is a member) and was encouraging the DTA membership to adopt the Community Allowance into their manifesto. The benefits system stops people carrying out much needed part time paid work in their own community and (in many cases) taking a step towards more permanent employment – the consortium believe government should introduce a community allowance to provide the flexibility for this to happen.
Download her speech and presentation slides here which lay out the convincing case for Department of Work and Pensions to allow us to test the Community Allowance in a series of pilots.
View our previous blog posts about the Community Allowance here and here.
Back the campaign at www.communityallowance.org .
There is genuine excitement and expectancy amongst many local people in east London about the coming Games; in part driven by sporting success of of team GB in the Beijing Olympics and Paralympics.
Now that the Olympic Flag has been handed over by the Chinese to the new host city London the focus tuns sharply towards 2012.
In 2007/08 we were ran a series of local events commissioned by the London Borough of Newham’s Community Participation Unit, so we could understand from local residents how the London Olympics 2012 might inspire them to become more active in their local community.
We have compiled all the views and feedback we collected at the eight events into one downloadable report “Inspired By the Olympics”. This report shares the views and opinions that local residents hold about the Olympics, so that the responsible bodies and agencies across the five London Olympic boroughs and other parts of the UK, can hear the voices of local people and take action to deliver a better Olympics, and more importantly to leave behind a valuable legacy for local residents and businesses in the area.
We found that local residents were excited and felt proud and inspired by the coming Games. ‘I am looking forward to the Olympics: I feel it is a positive and uplifting move for the borough.’ They wanted to be involved in the Games themselves, by attending the sport events, as well as volunteering. ‘I wish that everyone will get involved, especially the youngsters.’ Many local residents wanted to take advantage of future employment, training and business opportunities. People felt that better jobs, and better paid jobs, along with good childcare were key priorities. They wanted to volunteer in their local communities to enable other people to get involved. They also wished for improvements in council services, including safer local parks, cleaner streets and neighbourhoods, more policing, less crime amongst young people.
We asked children of all ages to contribute to the consultation. Here are a few…
I wish…
‘I could run or swim in the Olympics 2012.’
‘My wish is to attend at least one event’.
‘The Olympics bring fun and improvements to our community.‘
‘I wish to do the relay and become the winner, and get the medals and the money for the poor people.’
‘I am four now and I will be nine when the Olympics starts, how can I be involved?’
Download the report: Inspired by the Olympics.
The LinksUK team have today been busy with the launch of the Programme for our new initiatve Chain Reaction.
On the 17th and 18th November we’ll be bringing together social leaders, community activists, policy makers, business leaders and young people from around the globe for an event at London’s Southbank to share learning and to generate new ideas for social change, locally, nationally and globally.
Chain Reaction is based on the simple idea that none of us on our own can change the world, not governments, not businesses, not charities. We succeed when we work together. This event will result in 25 new ideas for social action that participants have committed to take forward together.
We’ve got lots of exciting people taking part. Alongside four Cabinet Ministers, our contributors include boundary crossers like Dr Victoria Hale, founder of the world’s first non-profit pharmaceutical company and Rachel Lomax, one time permanent secretary of two government departments, deputy governor at the Bank of England and former Vice President at the World Bank. America’s Nipun Mehta, the creator of Charity Focus and Comic Relief founder Jane Tewson, now doing ground breaking work in Australia, will challenge and inspire us and angry alchemists like John Bird (Big Issue) and Tim Smit (Eden Project) will be sharing their special brew, reminding us that some things are hard but nothing is impossible. In addition to this stellar line up, venture capital guru Sir Ronald Cohen will be applying his experience to the financing of social change and Mark Thompson Director General of the BBC will tackle the contribution of the media. Sir Richard Branson will be joining us via a video link, and City father Sir David Walker will be with us in the flesh.
Over 20 organisations including Global Entrepreneurship Week, the IDEA World Congress and the VSO Global Exchange Programme will host sessions and grass roots practitioners from nine countries (and rising!) will join us to share their learning on transforming communities. A compelling programme will focus on themes such as the potential of new technologies, the power of sports and arts as tools for transforming communities, and the experiences and contributions of young people (100 places are reserved for under 21s – the leaders of tomorrow – some of whom will come from Community Links projects). Practical workshops will explore issues such as financing, communicating and the ‘scaling up’ of ideas.
A unique feature of Chain Reaction will be the opportunity for participants to self organise, with bookable meeting spaces, and places to connect with others and collaborate in building new projects, new partnerships and new ways of working.
We’re excited about the prospect of bringing together an inspiring group of people to work together on issues that concern us all…
… will you be part of the Chain Reaction?
photo credit: Carl Blake
Getting a job is difficult enough but when a system, supposedly designed to support you, actively works against you producing a disincentive to finding work - then you’re in trouble.
More than three years ago we looked at one mechanism within the benefits system designed, we thought, to encourage people off benefits and into work. The ‘earnings disregard’, allows people to earn small amounts of money without losing benefits, as an incentive to try out bits of work before moving into sustainable employment. The amount has remained virtually unchanged for the last 20 years (since 1988) and is pitifully low. This impacts greatly on individuals as it prohibits a move off benefits into work. It hinders organisations trying to employ staff for part-time, sessional, or temporary employment as people do not want to give up their benefits for short term work, knowing what it’s like to get back into the system. This is the benefits trap.
The consequence is that people remain trapped in poverty, reliant on welfare benefits and unable to contribute to the development of their community and society.
It is interesting to note that three years on many of the issues and problems remain the same. The government must address the perverse situation which exists with work incentives, particularly earnings disregards. Current rules actively disincentivise people from returning to work. Shortly after this paper was written in October 2005 the national minimum wage rose to over £5.00 an hour. This means that single people on Jobseekers Allowance were not able to work even one hour a week without impact on their benefits!
Today we publish LinksUK Evidence Paper no.12 (PDF download), as we know the government Department for Work and Pensions is interested in examining ‘work incentives’ at the moment. It was a working paper written in 2005, on behalf of an informal network of 45+ interested organisations seeking to reform the earnings disregards rules and thresholds.
Have you found similar ‘traps’ within the benefit system? Share your experiences with us by leaving a comment.
The Jobcentre Plus has been hailed by the DWP Select Committee as a success story thanks to good management and most importantly the high levels of experience at the top and the involvement of local ground staff in shaping the changes.
Edward Leigh MP was “keen to highlight the critical part played by the senior management team who, he said, had over 100 years of front line experience in the agency’s business
Stephen Timms MP, Minister for employment echoed these praises and went further to state: “Their work will be held up as a model of exemplary good practice for all public sector organisations”
The idea of government developing strategies based on first hand experience is something LinksUK have been pushing, check out our previous blog article on developing a sounding board for Benefit reform.
Yesterday the Marketing giant Leo Burnett won the DWP contract for the Anti Benefit Fraud Campaign. They will be responsible for a three to five-year communications strategy, tackling benefit fraud by encouraging more people to get into and stay in work. There will be a focus on changing people’s attitudes to employment and highlighting the personal value of work.
This implies that many people do not see the value of working; it implies contentment for a life on benefits. Yet as I speak to local people I find the worst thing about their life is being trapped on benefit
One lady recently told me “I am not just a statistic, I am a person with ambitions but a system that removes choice and control from my life and creates fear keeps me where I am, trapped. And of course I will do a bit of cash in hand work now and then, in times of unexpected and un-budgeted expense, such as school trips or birthdays.”
Hopefully Stephen Timms really means what he says and uses the experiences of people committing benefit fraud to understand the motives behind their actions. A blog entry I came across today eloquently illustrates such motives and stresses how people act out of need not greed, to deal with debt and poverty issues. I reiterate the words at the end of the blog:
Hopefully the new DWP campaign think beyond greed and will consider motives driven by need.
To share views/experiences or for more information do get in touch (maeve.mcgoldrick@community-links.org) and hear more about our Need Not Greed campaign!
The Greater London Assembly’s economics unit report no.22: ‘Patterns of low pay in London’ highlights (yet again) the numbers of people and the conditions that keep many in poverty.
Between 15-19% of London’s workforce is low paid (earning less than £7.05 an hour), that’s between 481,000 and 609,267 working poor. Low pay more frequently affects employees who are less well-qualified, young, and and from black and minority ethnic communities.
As our Informal Economy work has shown, work should not keep people in poverty, but help to raise them out of it. More of a focus by employers and the government (even in this difficult economic time) should be aimed at ‘making work pay’. A popular slogan bandied about that the DWP in its green paper ‘No one written off’ should consider further.
The other consideration to reduce these levels of low pay is that of enforcement, particularly of the National Minimum Wage, however current levels of enforcement are comparable to the Dickensian era.
Of particular note in the GLA report is the figure that 199,400 (7.2%) of London’s workforce are earning less than £5.05, with most of them young people. Why is there a difference in the rate of the NMW for people over a certain age? Our report ‘Cash-in-hand and working rights for young people’ (see previous blog entry) made the recommendation that the NMW should be the same regardless of age. This would help to reduce wage inequality and help to progress more people in the labour market currently in low pay.
I was reminded recently of the London Health Observatory statistic that for every tube stop on the Jubilee line going east, from Westminster to Canning Town, life expectancy decreases by one year.
A more shocking report from the World Health Organisation last week claimed that life expectancy in two different neighbourhoods of Glasgow (a 10 minute drive from each other) vary by as much as 28 years.
The main factor for this huge disparity is poverty. Staggeringly the gap between the rich and the poor has continued to grow over the last 10 years under a Labour government.
Poverty has a life time impact on the children and young people who grow up experienceing it. Child poverty in the UK is unacceptable. We are the fourth largest economy in the world, a powerhouse for the world’s financial markets, a rich and prosperous country, and yet:
We recently published some research into poverty in our area commissioned by the local authority and in October linksUK’s ‘Social Change Series’ will focus on child poverty- so watch this blog… or subscribe to get regular updates by email.
I came across a poignant letter in the Guardian (read it here) in response to the announcement of the recent DWP Green Paper“No One Written Off”. We support people like this unfortunate letter writer every day at Community Links.
We are hosting a small roundtable meeting at the end of September with a number of Newham’s employment / welfare to work organisations to develop a local response to the Green Paper. We’ll post it on our blog in early October.
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