By Will Horwitz
The Conservatives are talking about their plans to Get Britain Working at conference this week, and they’re focusing on welfare reform. I’m glad they’re concentrating on the issue, but they’ve failed to look at the real reasons why people struggle to get off benefits into work. If only they’d listened to the experts, people trying to do just that.
David Cameron’s high-profile proposals to retest everyone on incapacity benefit, weed out the 600,000 who ’should be working’, and further involve the private sector in getting people back to work, are really nothing new. The Government are doing very similar things already, and there’s no evidence it has been particularly successful.
However, it’s significant that he’s still pandering to the view that people idly scrounge off benefits (more about that next week), and it’s a shame that he hasn’t recognised – in the way that Iain Duncan Smith did a few weeks ago – the huge barriers that people face when trying to get off benefits and into a good job.
In fact, the Get Britain Working report doesn’t really contain any analysis of why people aren’t already moving into work. There’s little evidence that the Conservatives really understand the lives of those they’re claiming they will help.
People who come through the doors of Community Links want to work (would anyone really want to live in poverty?) But plenty of things stand in their way. Some – like a lack of skills and confidence – might be addressed by Conservative plans for support. But the much larger ones – the sudden loss of housing benefit, the insecurity of the job, the fact that after 16 hours work you’ll be no better off, the discrimination against and lack of facilities for disabled workers – aren’t mentioned at all. And it’s these that really matter.
Luckily, we’re in Manchester this week to tell the Conservatives what will work – how they could enable people to progress off benefits into employment. We’ll outline some of our proposals later in the week, but for now have a look at the Need NOT Greed website and try following @neednotgreed on twitter to join us there.
[...] How to really Get Britain Working | [...]
How true! I mean it has to be more than 12 years of misgovernment which allows for 50% of the UK population to own a massive 1% of private wealth… (our very own National Statistics, data by the way).
This is bullying pure and simple and it will all end in tears.