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Archive for November, 2009

Just the beginning for welfare reform

Wednesday, November 25th, 2009

Despite the Welfare Reform Bill passing into a law a couple of weeks ago, there seems fairly universal acceptance that there’s still a lot of welfare reforming to be done (including, some would argue, undoing the damage done by the most recent set of reforms).

The questions left are around the direction of future reform, its scale, and its timing.

Is it going to be, as Faisel Rahman persuasively argues it should in today’s Guardian, positive reform – harnessing people’s desire for work, treating people on benefits as contributors, removing the barriers in the current system? Or is it going to be negative, increasingly punitive and stigmatising towards those on benefits?

Will it happen piecemeal – raising the earnings disregard one year, changing the rules for lone parents on Jobseekers Allowance the next? Or will there be wholesale reform, like that proposed by the Centre for Social Justice?

And will it happen in a few months, a few years, or a few slow decades? We’d certainly like to see some immediate smaller changes that this government could still bring in and which would make a big difference – we’ll be saying more about that next week. But in the long run we’re hoping, and arguing, for the need for wholesale, positive reform of the system.

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Posted in Benefits, Informal Economy, Welfare | No Comments »

Londoners unite to tackle poverty

Monday, November 23rd, 2009

Next Tuesday 1st December a coalition of anti poverty charities and organisations from around London, including Community Links, will meet to share successes and look ahead to next year. Stephen Timms MP for East Ham will open the event, but after that we’ll be hearing almost exclusively from activists and charities working locally around London, including from Community Links co-founder and local councillor Kevin Jenkins.

The event, being held in Stratford, is being organised by the European Anti Poverty Network London branch. The EU have declared 2010 the European Year for Combating Poverty and Social Exclusion (nothing like a snappy title), and this meeting is to allow London charities to start deciding what they can do throughout next year.

As well as Community Links, organisations participating will include the Migrants Resource Centre, End Child Poverty London, ATD Fourth World,  Leonard Cheshire Disability, City Parochial Foundation, and more. There will also be an exhibition of the charities’ work open to the public all day.

For more information, or to reserve a place, download the programme and booking form here

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Posted in Informal Economy, News, Voices from the Ground Up | 2 Comments »

How we reduced Jobcentre delays from 8 weeks to 3 days

Monday, November 16th, 2009

A few years ago we started looking into how Newham’s local Jobcentre could run a better service for its users, many of whom were coming to us for advice when the service let them down.

We began with the principle that those who experience a problem understand it best, and asked service users and frontline staff about their experiences. It quickly became apparent that filling in forms correctly was a big challenge for users, many of whom spoke English as a second language. Seventy per cent of forms submitted were rejected first time around, meaning extra work for staff, and long delays (of six to eight weeks) before claimants received the benefits owed to them.

We identified a straightforward solution: recruit local volunteers who spoke appropriate languages to assist people in filling in their forms. We piloted the project, installing volunteers in the Jobcentre and matching them with people who were struggling with their forms. The results were spectacular – the rejection rate for forms fell from 70 per cent to one per cent. The waiting time for processing a claim fell from six-eight weeks to three-five days. We calculated that the pilot saved over a year of staff time. The centre’s performance shot up to become one of the best in the country. And, as an unintended but welcome consequence, 30 per cent of the volunteers who had been unemployed went on to get a job.

This is just one example of the success of our Everyday Innovators approach – working with frontline staff and service users to improve public services. It is based on thorough research with those who know best, people experiencing the problem. Community Links trains other organisations in the approach – if you’d like to find out how to achieve real change in your public services, download the brochure here, or contact Aaron Barbour on 020 7473 9666 (dd) and aaron.barbour@community-links.org

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Posted in Everyday Innovators, Innovation, Research | 1 Comment »

Fraud and error in the benefits system – where DWP are going wrong.

Monday, November 16th, 2009

Last week the Department for Work and Pensions released their annual figures (PDF) on fraud and error in the benefits system. It seems a good time to make exactly the same points we made last time this happened.

Firstly lumping together fraud and error is misleading and means everyone (including Teresa May, in the Telegraph article linked above) concentrates on the fraud and forget about the error.

Secondly underpayment of benefits (this year running at £1.2bn), is arguably an even bigger problem, because it leaves vulnerable people in a desperate situation, evicted or unable to buy food. They often end up seeking advice at Community Links, because the system has let them down so badly. And don’t forget this is just people claiming a particular benefit but getting less than they’re entitled to. It doesn’t include people who aren’t aware they’re entitled to a benefit at all.

Thirdly, ‘customer error’ is not the fault of the claimant. The report separates out intentional fraud (£1.1bn), unintentional ‘customer error’ (£1.1bn), and ‘official error’ (£0.8bn). Our experience at Community Links shows that claimants make errors because they are left to navigate a hugely complicated system with very little guidance, bombarded with unintelligible forms, and offered very little support. It’s a stressful experience, made worse when DWP tries to claw back money they’ve overpaid. The high level of customer error is an indictment of the DWP (if a business was losing £1bn a year because customers couldn’t work out how to use the payment system, they’d sort it out pretty quickly).

Finally, and perhaps most importantly, we’ve shown before how much of the fraud in the benefit system is perpetrated out of need, not greed. Obviously there are those who are greedily playing the system, and they make for great newspaper headlines, but in our experience many people on benefits do a bit of work on the side because they need to. Reforming the benefits system so that people were able to do small amounts of work as a first step back towards the job market would lead to higher employment and fewer people working in the informal economy. Ultimately, less fraud and a smaller welfare budget.

Finally, whatever they do in response to these figures, anything would be better than this, but rather depressingly I saw some very similar adverts outside our office in Canning Town, just a couple of days ago (above, and to the right).

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Posted in Benefits, Informal Economy, Welfare | 3 Comments »

Prime Minister’s Council on Social Action launches new research at Chain Reaction

Thursday, November 12th, 2009

Today at our Chain Reaction event the Council on Social Action will be launching three new papers.* You can follow Chain Reaction live on this page, and even watch the launch of these papers, with vice-chair David Robinson at 11.30am.

The first two look at just how important human relationships are in society. A mentoring scheme for ex-offenders, a friendly advisor at the Jobcentre, or a caring and concerned nurse at the hospital, can all make a difficult experience much easier. Ultimately, they can transform society.

That seems like a bold claim, and one that makes a lot of sense when you think about. But the first of our reports Time Well Spent goes further and provides some evidence that it’s worth investing in. The research looks at legal aid, and the relationship between advisor and client. It shows that not only is a good relationship very important to both, but it actually leads to a better outcome. It’s evidence for something we’ve said before – that public services should be ‘humanised’, they should have individual relationships at their heart.

Meanwhile the second report People of Influence describes the whole range of CoSA’s work on the importance of one-to-one relationships. It looks at the 44 recommendations CoSA made over a year ago, and shows that 20 have made significant progress or been fulfilled. Some fascinating progress has been made, it’s well worth a read.

And finally, Means and Ends looks back over the last two years of CoSA’s work, highlighting the many successes. You’ll be hearing more about this in the next month or two, but for now do take a look, and follow all that’s happening at Chain Reaction today.

* Community Links operates a bewildering array of brands, so it might be a good time to say that we organise Chain Reaction, and we coordinate the

Prime Minister’s Council on Social Action, with our co-founder David Robinson as vice-chair.

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Posted in Council on Social Action, News | 1 Comment »

David Cameron on poverty – does Big Society just mean Better State?

Tuesday, November 10th, 2009

David Cameron and Iain Duncan Smith have very successfully wrestled the poverty agenda off Labour in the last few months, and today David Cameron goes a bit further in fleshing out their vision. Apparently he’ll echo Labour’s commitment to ending child poverty (a commitment which should soon be enshrined in law anyway), will focus on incentives for people to get back into work (or maybe not), and will appoint Tomorrow’s People chair Debbie Scott as a backbencher in the Lords should he win.

Listening to Teresa May and Yvette Cooper discuss it on Today this morning, it struck me that there are two big questions and they’re being confused. The first is around what to implement – the changes to the welfare and tax credit systems, primarily. The Conservatives actually have some good ideas on this, focussing on the barriers to moving off benefits into work, the complexity of the system, and the need for wholesale reform. The devil is in the detail though, and we’d certainly want to see a bit more of that before getting too enthusiastic.

The second question is about how to implement these changes, a debate which the Conservatives try to portray as ‘big state’ vs ‘big society.’ Here I think there’s much less clarity. A lot of people would admit that Labour’s approach hasn’t been as successful as it might (although it’s important to remember it hasn’t been disastrous either), but I’ve never seen a convincing argument for why that’s a result of a big state, rather than just a not-very-effective big state. Cameron’s alternative – the ‘big society’ – doesn’t really seem to mean anything so far, beyond some vague mutterings about the importance of social entrepeneurs. Social entrepeneurs are a lovely bunch, but expecting them to sort out the entire welfare system seems a bit mean.

It seems like Cameron is arguing for a better state, which doesn’t seem too controversial, and dressing it up as the end of the big state to satisfiy his party. Until he tells us, in policy detail rather than in platitudes, what a big society actually entails, it’s hard to come up with a decent assessment.

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Posted in Benefits, Informal Economy, Welfare, employment | 1 Comment »

Guest post – UK homeworkers left increasingly unsupported

Monday, November 9th, 2009

Joe Turner is Director of the Freedom Clothing Project

Government believes there may be 70,000 homeworkers in the UK earning below the minimum wage.  That is 70,000 people, primarily women, who are so exploited by bad employers that they continue working on poverty rates, hidden behind their own front doors.

Ministers have said to me that the women can complain about their pay, but this totally misunderstands the situation they find themselves in.  The women need the money, to complain would to blacklist themselves from the only source of income that they have.  The reality is that the government would prefer to allow these people to fend alone rather than support services that actually fight on their behalf.

Last year the National Group on Homeworking, the only UK group focussing on the issue of UK homeworkers, closed.  The government said it had no interest in continuing to fund their work and instead set up a phone helpline.

What remained was an inadequate and scattered network of services.  One of the few remaining dedicated council workers now finds her role under threat.  When I went to visit Tanzeem Mahmood in Rochdale, she took me to meet the group of homeworkers she supports.  Acting as a part translator, part social worker, part friend, Tanzeem helps the women to read and fill in official forms, listens and collects information about bad employers and tries to do as much as her 3 days-a-week job will allow.

In December, Rochdale Council is planning to end the post in a cost-cutting exercise leaving some of the most exploited workers in the area entirely alone.  Clearly the weakest matter little to the accountants in Rochdale, even though the service must cost a tiny fraction of their total budget.

What you can do:

  • Educate yourself on the issue of UK homeworking.  Write to your local politicians to ask why there are so few services and little knowledge about this neglected group of women.  It is an issue that rarely hits the headlines, but last year the BBC completed a brief report here.
  • If you live in the greater Manchester area, write to your local media asking them to urgently take up the issue of Rochdale’s homeworker service
  • Write to the managers at Rochdale Council expressing your disgust at the loss of this service supporting some of their most vulnerable residents.  Write to:

Paul Young
Head of Service
Customers and Communication Service
Homeworking Service
PO Box 39
Municipal Offices
Smith Street
Rochdale
OL16 1LQ

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Posted in employment | 1 Comment »

Why aren’t the child poverty and welfare reform bills better aligned?

Friday, November 6th, 2009

A couple of days ago shadow work and pensions minister Andrew Selous mentioned both our work on the informal economy and the community allowance campaign during the committee stage of the Child Poverty bill. It’s always nice to see a bit of lobbying reflected in what politicians say, but it also reveals something of the debate around poverty and welfare reform.

At this stage of the bill’s passage, a small group of MPs is considering every sentence in incredible detail. Yesterday they’d reached the section of the child poverty bill that will make it compulsory for every local authority to assess the needs of children living in poverty in their region. And Andrew Selous’ contribution was about the extent of that assessment.

He was arguing for it to be compulsory to assess not only the family income of the poorest children, and their takeup of benefits and tax credits, but also the extent to which jobs were available and being created in their area, and their ‘family resilience.’

He believes that to beat child poverty we need, above all, ‘more and better jobs’ – ie that getting people off benefits and into work is the best (only?) way to tackle poverty.  A focus on the transition off benefits and into works sounds like the kind of thing that should be in the Welfare Reform Bill – slightly more advanced through parliament, with a focus on coercing people into work that seems far removed from the child poverty bill, with its focus on income level.

It’s good that Selous is trying to force the issue of that transition into the child poverty bill, but seems a missed opportunity that the bills aren’t just better aligned in the first place. He recognises, as we’ve been saying, that “the challenge of getting into work from being out of work is huge. The move from not working and being on benefits into full-time work is an enormous step – sometimes almost a step too far that many people are not able to make in one leap.” Why hasn’t this recognition, particularly during a recession and with rising unemployment, been included in the welfare reform bill?

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Posted in Benefits, Child Poverty, Communication, Informal Economy, Regeneration, Research, Welfare, employment | 1 Comment »

The impact of the recession on child poverty

Tuesday, November 3rd, 2009

The End Child Poverty campaign released a report today which highlights the obvious, but is still depressing reading. In a recession where unemployment rose rapidly and is still rising, there are 170,000 more children in families without jobs, and two million in families reliant on benefits.

You can argue about the statistics, as thinktank Policy Exchange tried last week, but it’s hard to argue with the consequences and surely more important to focus on the solutions. This film, made by some of Community Links  young reporters in Newham, clearly shows what needs to change…

One of the proposals in End Child Poverty’s ‘Recession Recovery Package‘ is to allow parents to take on part-time or ‘mini-jobs’, which make up a third of all Jobcentre Plus vacancies. They recommend an increase in the earnings disregard – the amount someone on benefits can earn before their benefits begin to be withdrawn, to allow people to take on these jobs without affecting their benefits. Our Need Not Greed campaign has long maintained that increasing the earnings disregard would be a valuable way of helping everyone, not just parents, into work and out of poverty, and we’re going to be talking more about that in the next few weeks.

In the meantime, why not sign the petition on the 38 Degrees website, calling for government to introduce measures to combat child poverty in their Pre-Budget report, due later this month.

Posted in General | 2 Comments »

Four good reasons to pay people on benefits for working in their community

Tuesday, November 3rd, 2009

Yesterday saw the parliamentary launch of two new reports into the Community Allowance. It’s a fairly simple proposal – allow local people on benefits to earn money doing part-time community-building work, with no impact on their benefits – yet there are so many good reasons why it should happen.

Most of them are outlined in the new booklet, with contributions from Lord Adebowale, Will Hutton, Philip Blonde, Julia Unwin, Barbara Stocking, and more. But it never does any harm to spell out the benefits yet again.

Addition: Here’s Naomi, from the campaign, spelling out them out even more clearly than I did in writing.

It can be the first vital step back into work.
Benefits can act as a trap. People trying to move into the available jobs, which are often part-time, temporary, and badly paid, usually end up worse off than had they stayed on benefits. There is little opportunity to develop skills or build a career, and little recognition of the barriers people face. A part-time job which doesn’t affect benefits, gives a bit of extra money, skills for a CV and experience of work can be a vital first step back into work. That’s the Community Allowance.

It supports community organisations and strengthens communities
Badly underfunded community organisations often rely on dedicated members and volunteers to do crucial work. Giving them a route to employing local people in part-time work would benefit the community and the organisations working in it.

It saves money
Social Return on Investment is a tool that assigns a monetary value to the social good achieved by investing in social projects. A study by the New Economics Foundation also launched yesterday, suggested that every £1 invested in the Community Allowance would generate £10 worth of social value. The problem, of course, is committing government to spending upfront on projects it doesn’t know will work.

It challenges the stereotypical view of poverty
As Julian Dobson clearly explains in the booklet, the general public have a distorted and damaging view of those on benefits, which government often regrettably panders to. Evidence of people on benefits doing valuable local work in their community could go some way to addressing this. (In actual fact a huge amount of valuable community work is already done by people on benefits, but we just don’t hear about it.)

Community Links is heavily involved in the campaign, and many of us were there at the launch yesterday. There have been some significant steps forward in the last few years, culminating yesterday in the announcement of three organisations who will pilot the Community Allowance in their communities next year. But until the proposal has been adopted for all those on benefits, we’ll be hearing a lot more about the campaign.

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Posted in Benefits, Informal Economy, News, employment | 1 Comment »