By Will Horwitz
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.
Check out some photo’s from the event on the Community Allowance Facebook Page here:
http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=170096&id=74776203237&ref=mf
Why not join this facebook group to help us campaign to get the Community Allowance included within the benefits system?