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Archive for May, 2010

Prevention is the best way to tackle the budget deficit

Friday, May 28th, 2010

Politicians local and national will be making tough decisions in the months ahead. It would be easy to prioritise acute services and reduce investment in prevention. Easy but wrong.

For more than 30 years at Community Links we have been persuading policy makers, commissioners and independent funders to think about fences at the top of the cliff rather than ambulances at the bottom. It may seem a difficult argument in these straightened times but spending more now on, for instance, detached youth work with young people who aren’t a danger to themselves and others would be better by far than waiting for the really expensive problems to develop. There is scarcely any area of health care, education or social policy where prevention or early intervention doesn’t make best sense – socially and financially.

It is for this reason that Treasury Chief Secretary David Laws’ largely unreported answer to MP Graham Allen’s question on Wednesday was particularly significant.  “Will the minister,” Allen asked, “seek to address some of the problems of the structural deficit by ensuring that we invest in babies, children and young people, so that they do not later require billions of pounds of remedial treatment for drug addiction, teenage pregnancy and a lack of aspiration in education and work, and so that we can build the type of society that most of us in the Chamber want to see?”

Laws replied, “The honourable gentleman is absolutely right. As we take tough decisions and come towards the spending review at the end of the year, we will have to try to maintain the services that we particularly value and that protect individuals in society who are on very low incomes. We need to protect investments that have the potential to pay off in the future, and I promise him that I will examine carefully the matters that he mentions”.

We do what we do because we believe that we all have an equal right to fulfil our potential. Some need help; advice, training  or practical support. We haven’t hitherto framed it as a contribution to the structural deficit. Perhaps we should.

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Posted in General | No Comments »

Welfare reform proposals get a mixed reaction from the most successful New Deal project in London

Thursday, May 27th, 2010

New Secretary of State for Work and Pensions Iain Duncan Smith’s welfare reform announcements today (and his simultaneous Guardian charm offensive) get a mixed reaction from colleagues around Community Links who, amongst other things, run the most successful New Deal project – supporting long-term unemployed back into work – in London and the South East.

On the one hand, we’ve been calling for wholesale reform of the benefits system for many years, so it’s good to see him demanding it too. His recognition of the problem of work incentives in the benefit system – whereby people can end up worse off and less secure on taking a low-paid job – is welcome.

The benefits system needs to be designed so people can take stepping stones into well paid and secure work, rather than leaving them high and dry as soon as a temporary and low-paid job appears. Equally, it must be ready to pick them up again quickly if the job ends, both to prevent the cycle of debt that often begins in that few weeks between the last pay cheque and the first benefit cheque, and to give people the reassurance that taking the job in the first place won’t jeopardise their situation further down the line. Whether he can get these large and expensive reforms through the Treasury remains to be seen.

However, his continuing adherence to the idea of sanctions for ‘those who won’t work’ is worrying. We know that even the long-term unemployed want to work, but some face many and complex barriers – lack of training or education, lack of support at the Jobcentre, health or family problems. For some, it takes several cycles through our six month programme before they’re in a position to accept a job. Cutting their benefits after the first cycle will plunge them further into poverty and further from the job market, costing more, and stigmatising where government should be supporting.

Finally, the Work Programme model – whereby charities like ours (and private contractors) take on more of a role in supporting people into work – has good aspects, not least the ‘black box approach’ that would let us design bespoke programmes for individual jobseekers. Yet the signs are that, by making the contracts so big that only large multinational companies can apply, they will lose the unique contribution a charity like ours can make to supporting the long-term unemployed. The system will need to be carefully designed, and properly funded, to make sure this doesn’t happen.

Overall, much of the rhetoric – punishments and stigmatisation aside – sounds promising, but the detail is still not there. At the launch this morning Duncan Smith said he wanted to work with charities like ours to hammer out the detail over the next few months. If this is a genuine offer then we are very willing to help him shape the system so that it best serves the needs of the two thousand jobseekers we see every year, the tens of thousands in Newham, and the millions nationwide.

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Posted in Benefits, Informal Economy, Welfare, Working age poverty | 3 Comments »

Tackling Working Age Poverty

Friday, May 21st, 2010


by Gary Blake
Today is the end of my first week in post as Co-ordinator for the  Tackling Working Age Poverty project. Community Links, in partnership with Church Action on Poverty, are working on a national campaign to research and address working age poverty.

I hope over the coming months to listen to people’s views and hear your ideas on how we can make a difference for people experiencing working age poverty.

Yesterday DWP published the latest set of statistics revealing the extent of poverty in the UK.  Several commentators have analysed the figures including New Policy Institute co-founder Peter Kenway whose article in today’s Guardian reports that six in every 10 children in poverty now belong to a working household and in-work poverty has been a rising trend since the late 1970’s.

He says “Work that does not provide a sufficient income is now as much to blame for poverty than worklessness.”

We are taking a close look at working-age poverty over the coming year.  As part of this campaign we are organising listening events around the country. Now is an opportunity to see how serious the new government is about poverty reduction. If you want to get involved in our campaign, leave your comments below or send me an e-mail.

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Posted in Child Poverty, Working age poverty, employment | 1 Comment »

The Big Society and good old-fashioned community development.

Wednesday, May 19th, 2010

DSCN4326Geraldine Blake: Community Links CEO.

Today saw the first policy statement of the new coalition government: the focus on community activism is a subject we care deeply about.

David Robinson, Senior Advisor at Community Links and former Vice-Chair of the Council on Social Action was one of a small and diverse cast of individuals invited to a discussion of The Big Society with the new Prime Minister and Deputy PM at No 10.  Though the ideas announced this morning were largely familiar from the manifesto and election campaign it is interesting to note that in addition to  the PM and his  Deputy, Cabinet Office ministers Francis Maude and Nick Hurd were also around the table. This was the first Cameron / Clegg joint appearance since announcing the terms of the coalition.  Any of the many obituaries for the Big Society written during and after the campaign were clearly premature. Whilst we don’t disagree with the rhetoric, we feel the Big Society approach will stand or fail on the investment put into it.

At Community Links for 33 years we’ve been supporting young people, families and local residents to engage in their communities, to volunteer, to help shape local services and to deliver those services. We know that this work transforms people lives and makes our communities better places to live (crime dropped by half on one estate after we had worked there for less than a year). We can do this because we have spaces to do it in (community centres) and experienced staff to deliver (with a ratio of 1:2 staff to volunteers across the organisation). This costs money; money that each year we find hard to secure. At the moment our work is underpinned with a mix of public and independent funding. We know (and we’re working very hard to prove) that investing in this kind of community activity saves the state money further down the line.

So we’ve got two nagging doubts about the Big Society programme, published today.

Firstly, that this is all happening in the context of radical cuts to public-sector budgets. Whilst we agree that governments cannot change deep-seated social problems alone, neither can communities. For willing citizens to be effective, they need to be the partner of the state and not the alternative. It is essential, particularly in very poor communities, that public services are protected, not rolled back. They cannot be replaced by volunteers, no matter how enthusiastic.

And secondly, the paper we see today talks about supporting the creation of neighbourhood groups and the expansion of charities, social enterprises, mutuals and co-ops.  All good stuff – but let’s see your money!  Are we expecting this to come from increased charitable giving and philanthropy?

We’re pleased about some of the structural ideas in the paper, but at the end of the day, what will make the Big Society work, is good old-fashioned community development work.  We know that this is absolutely the hardest thing to raise money for.  So training up 5000 community organisers - good, requiring them to raise their own salaries - highly unrealistic.

Before he was elected David Cameron issued an invitation to “ …join the government of Great Britain”. We are not waiting to see what happens next, the practical experience of organisations like Community Links needs to shape this programme.

One final thought – please, please don’t waste a lot of time by setting up brand new stuff.  Britain isn’t broken, there’s lots of amazing work already going on in and by communities, families and local networks. Invest in what is already working, and help it to work bigger and better.

There are many ways to continue the conversation; the Community Links Chain Reaction network is encouraging community groups to hold self-organised meetings.  Our first ideas group in east London in early June. This gathering will be expressly cross-sector, and will focus on responding to the new Government’s proposals. Let us know if you want to be involved.

Posted in Council on Social Action, Innovation, Inspiration, Leadership, News, Volunteering | 4 Comments »

Developing an EU platform to address undeclared work

Monday, May 17th, 2010

Amsterdam, a city known for its permissive approach to life, was the venue for a fascinating two day meeting on undeclared work recently. We were invited as the only social partner following our research and campaigns on the informal economy. It was hosted by Regioplan, a research organisation based in the Netherlands, and attended by various bigwigs (mainly from governments) from western European countries, to assess the feasibility of developing an EU platform to address undeclared work.

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Posted in Informal Economy, Welfare, Working age poverty, employment | No Comments »

Guest post – welfare reform isn’t rocket science

Wednesday, May 12th, 2010

Jeff Mitchell is director of Clean Slate Training and Employment, supporting people back to work. Before the election he asked candidates from five parties about their plans for welfare reform, and wasn’t impressed with their answers. The challenges he outlines are ones the new government must start grappling with. This was first published on Jeff’s blog

I only had two asks: invest in workless people and deconstruct the benefits trap. I must have been speaking Japanese. There was no response to my points from any of the 5 candidates who took part in the event.

Is this rocket science?

Last year, Clean Slate opened a centre to help job seekers from one of Bristol’s most disadvantaged wards. I figured – and this betrays even my prejudices, and I’ve worked with unemployed people for the past 18 years – that we’d have to drag people in kicking and screaming. But even while we were still measuring up, with just the shop front in place advertising that we would be “Working With You Towards Employment”, people starting coming in looking for help finding work.

Once up and running, Sue, a woman who’d spent the previous 20 years raising a family told me she’d been on a Job Centre Plus programme for 13 weeks and still didn’t have a CV. She hadn’t even known what she wanted to do but once she’d sat down with a Clean Slate worker, she said, and talked about the skills she’d used in bringing up her children, she realised she’d make an excellent carer. Sue felt she’d done her time with kids but set about, there and then, looking for work caring for older people. Once she knew what she wanted to do, the CV followed quickly and it took only two sessions with our staff to leave with one fully completed.

By contrast, I’ve heard that the Department of Work and Pensions desribe unemployed people as “stock”. It’s easier to dehumanise people and treat them as a single entity when it comes to policy. But in Clean Slate’s experience, it’s the opposite that works on the ground.

Numerous job seekers have come to us complaining they’re sick of being assumed to be benefits cheats. They don’t blame the press, they don’t expect any better. But they do resent the fact that that’s how they’re made to feel by Job Centre staff. They feel demeaned, depressed and unworthy of any opportunities to get themselves off the breadline.

Clean Slate is not interested in being yet another sausage machine, churning people through a one size fits all system. Nor are we interested in skimming the cream, helping those needing least help, so we can grab the juiciest financial kick backs from Job Centre Plus. We believe the best hope for overcoming unemployment and worklessness starts and ends with each individual, so we start there. It’s far more rewarding when people like Sue, who have been deactivated by the unemployment system, get switched back on.

So, is it rocket science? Absolutely not. How we make this vital work pay is a harder question. Especially when those who are clamouring for our votes cannot comprehend how a personalised service can be delivered to a mass of 3 million people.

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Posted in Benefits, Welfare, Working age poverty | No Comments »

Pre-election karaoke

Wednesday, May 5th, 2010

Amid the din of election coverage, it’s nice to be reminded that most of the world is carrying on as normal – working, volunteering, even dancing. Today, for example, is Community Links’ annual pensioners’ tea dance and karaoke party, organised by a group of volunteers from one of our corporate supporters. The hubbub emanating from the hall, right in the middle of our office, is a nice if distracting reminder that the good society is being supported every day, and no doubt will continue whoever makes it in to government.

Something that might not make it through the election period, however, is our proposal for a Community Allowance, which has been sitting with DWP for months, and is in danger of disappearing completely. After the election, expect to hear much more about it, as we try and persuade whoever’s in government of its obvious merits.

Until then, however, it’s sobering to remember that for many of the pensioners downstairs, the people coming through our doors for advice, or the young people we support into work, the next few years are going to be pretty tough, irrespective of tomorrow’s result. The recession hits the people we work with hardest and longest, and it’ll take more than some karaoke to sort that out. Proposals like the Community Allowance, which rewards work that strengthens communities and supports people back into work, could be crucial.

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Posted in Benefits, Informal Economy, Volunteering, Welfare, Working age poverty | No Comments »