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Posts Tagged ‘Benefits’

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First thoughts on Frank Field’s review on poverty and life chances

Monday, June 7th, 2010

http://comlinks.beepweb.co.uk/linksuk/wp-content/images/FrankFieldMP.jpgWe were  pleased to hear the PM announce plans for a new review on poverty and life chances, led by Frank Field, and considering, amongst other aims how to develop services that “nurture children”.

He will:

  • examine the case for reforms to poverty measures, in particular for the inclusion of non-financial elements
  • generate a broader debate about the nature and extent of poverty in the UK
  • explore the effect of a child’s home environment
  • recommend potential action by government and other institutions to reduce poverty and enhance life chances for the least advantaged.

We will be blogging on other aspects of the review in the weeks ahead but note now Fields specific commitments to consider how grass roots groups can transform children’s lives, to learn from others and to producing an action programme.  He told the BBC: “I hope we will have a programme of action, …which the government can actually act on. ……I don’t think we need lots of brilliant new ideas, lots of people have done work, we now need to bring that together and shape it in a way which leads to action.”

With the right community interventions at an early stage we could be doing much more to enable all children to fulfil their potential.   We know some of what works. We do it everyday at Community Links across a network of more than 60 projects in East London and it isn’t rocket science.  Its warm and friendly places where young people can be safe and free to play and learn and grow. Its committed and empathetic staff  that children can trust and respect and it’s the deep value relationships that grow from reliable and constant understanding between service user and provider.

When we were reviewing the Council on Social Action’s unfinished business  before the election we suggested to party leaders  that  a national community support strategy for children and young people, rooted in such approaches,  should be a priority for the new government.  We advised that an effective independent  contribution to developing such a strategy would learn from the successful working process of the Council  and would combine advice and recommendations to government with  concurrent, cross sector action on the ground.  Above all it would seek to understand and, where appropriate, support and develop existing good practice.

The brief for the Field review is not quite the same and as yet we don’t know exactly how it will work but there are clearly many connections. We particularly welcome  the positive commitment to learning from what works and to generating a practical action programme.

We look forward to contributing to the learning and, especially, to the action.

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Posted in Child Poverty, Council on Social Action, Welfare, Working age poverty, debt | 2 Comments »

DWP’s mixed messages on benefits

Friday, April 9th, 2010

Following on from our earlier post on benefit fraud, it’s worth noting an interesting debate on the subject in the Lords last week. In 2009 James Purnell’s Welfare Reform Bill was passed and in it was the controversial ‘one strike and you’re out’ amendment; section 24 of the new Act. After the first caution or administrative penalty, let alone conviction, a claimant will have their benefits stopped for a four week period. If this happens twice (two strikes) in a five year period their benefits will be stopped for thirteen weeks.

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

Charlotte’s story – unemployment and the Jobcentre

Wednesday, March 31st, 2010

Charlotte is 19, lives in East London, and is currently unemployed.

“I left school at 16, with 10 GCSEs. I’ve worked since I was 14, doing cash in hand jobs – waitressing mostly – and I also have an NVQ Level 2 in hair dressing. When I was 17 I had to go on income support because I broke my leg and smashed a vertebra in my back. The Jobcentre was good about that, and they gave me advice, but that was because I wasn’t allowed to work. When I was about 18 I started working formally as a market researcher, but I lost my job in September last year.

I tried as long as possible not to go on benefits, and lived off some savings for as long as I could. But I couldn’t find a job after so long that I had to sign on.

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Posted in Benefits, Informal Economy, Welfare, Working age poverty | 2 Comments »

How to tackle poverty – ideas so far…

Friday, March 19th, 2010

Tackling poverty and unemployment are going to be dominant themes of the upcoming election. This week we’ve asked a group of experts – not just academics and policy staff but also people experiencing these issues for themselves – what change would make the most difference in reducing poverty amongst adults.

The 12 million people living in poverty in the UK are split roughly half and half between those in working households, and those in households where no one works.

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

We must raise benefit levels for working age people

Wednesday, March 17th, 2010

Ruth Lister is Professor of Social Policy at Loughborough University

I’m always rather reluctant to name a ‘single’ policy change that is the key to reducing poverty.  But, I will champion the somewhat politically unfashionable cause of improving benefit rates for working age people, which are currently well below the official poverty line.  Under New Labour there have been real improvements in a number of benefit rates, particularly those for children.  But the adult rate of the safety-net benefit provided by income support and income-based jobseeker’s allowance has been neglected.  The current weekly rates are £64.30 for a single person aged 25 or over (18 or over if a lone parent) and £50.95 for younger adults.  The couple rates range between £100.95 and £50.95 depending on age.

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Posted in Benefits, Working age poverty | 1 Comment »

Rich, famous, jobless, and not as bad as I expected

Wednesday, March 10th, 2010

Rich, famous, and jobless sounded awful – the worst kind of them-vs-us portrayal of poverty. When we were approached last year by the production company, asking if we’d help find unemployed people to feature, we turned them down. But the programme, shown over the last two days, has actually been quite impressive in illustrating some of the issues we come across every day.

In the first show the four ‘celebs’ (let’s be honest, we’d only ever heard of Larry Lamb), were given 4 days of Jobseekers Allowance (about £35), and told to find a job. In an incredibly artificial situation – followed by a camera and with only 4 days to work – they still learnt some important lessons. Not least the cruelty of the way wages are deducted from benefits, leaving people working for what seems like nothing. Neither of the two who found work were very keen to give back their ‘benefits’. They also realised quickly the difficulty of living on £65 a week, and the seemingly-small but almost insurmountable barriers that such low income presents – not being able to afford the bus fare to the interview, for example.

In last night’s show, they were packed off to various areas of the country to spend a few days living with people who were unemployed for a variety of reasons. It threw up some incongruous moments – Larry Lamb as marriage counsellor particularly stuck in my mind – but also some instructive lessons. The biggest of which is that each unemployed person, in their different ways, seemed to benefit hugely from a bit of personal attention from someone who cared. It wasn’t something they were getting at the Jobcentre.

The middle class elbows of one ‘celeb’ managed to get her host some work experience in a zoo (although where that’s leading is another matter). The dangerously severe approach of an Irish landscape gardener towards his hosts – a couple with 5 children living on benefits – betrayed his cringing lack of understanding of the barriers many people face, but even they seemed genuinely moved by his austere concern. And when Noel Gallagher’s ex-wife accompanied ex-offender Nick to the Jobcentre, she admitted their hostile approach towards him had almost turned her violent. No wonder Nick was struggling to find work, when that’s the kind of support he was getting.

At Community Links we have talked many times before about the importance of building meaningful relationships with individuals to really achieve change. These programmes illustrated well the two main problems with the benefits system. Its perverse financial disincentives to work in many situations, and the lack of personal support it provides to individuals for whom that could make all the difference. If these programmes have gone some way towards making that more obvious to the public, that can only be a good thing.

One point of concern – the way they seemed to leave the unemployed people they featured. The farewells were presented as emotional and final. I sincerely hope the television company wasn’t heartless enough to severely disrupt people’s lives for four days and then leave them high and dry.

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

Applying for JSA online – would it work?

Wednesday, March 3rd, 2010

Matthew Taylor at the RSA has proposed an incentive (£30 online shopping voucher) to encourage people to claim for Jobseekers Allowance online. In many ways it seems sensible for many of those on JSA who are happy on the internet. However, our practical experience working with unemployed people suggests there will be a substantial number for whom it just isn’t appropriate, and should not be used as a substitute for the good-quality individual support that can really make a difference to people’s lives.

A couple of years ago we discovered that 70% of forms submitted to our local Jobcentre were being filled in wrongly and rejected. It took up a lot of staff time and meant delays of 6-8 weeks before people started receiving their benefits. People were struggling to fill in the forms correctly because they spoke English as a second language, or struggled with literacy. A simple solution – installing volunteers in the Jobcentre to help people fill in the forms – reduced the rejection rate from 70% to 1%, and waiting times from 8 weeks to 3 days. We calculated it saved over a year of staff time, and the Jobcentre became one of the best performing in the country.

You’d have to be careful that an online system didn’t end up costing more, in the extra staff time needed to chase up incorrectly submitted forms. Certainly have it for those who are comfortable with it, but don’t forget about all those for whom it’s just not appropriate.

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Posted in Benefits, Welfare | 2 Comments »

Welfare Commission: humanising decision making and appeals in the benefits system

Tuesday, February 9th, 2010

Today the Department for Work and Pensions Select Committee publishes its report on decision making and appeals in the benefits system, the headline press coverage reports that overpayments due to error had soared from £400 million in 2000, while overpayments due to fraud and mistakes by claimants dropped. As part of the solution the select Committee is calling for a Welfare Commission to be set up to simplify the benefits system. We welcome this news and believe that any redesign should place a one-to-one service to claimants at its heart; ensuring efficient and humanised service delivery. We have a few specific recommendations for the Commission to consider

  • Reduce the complexity of claim forms,
  • Make crisis loans more accessible and immediate,
  • Addresses the inconsistency of the earnings disregard across all benefits to ensure accidental fraud is not committed resulting in benefits being automatically stopped.

Last year the Community Links advice services were used by a total of 12,400 local people. At our drop-in advice sessions 37.8% were benefits related cases, of which 73% were a result of DWP error. Our advice services continue to be in high demand, services cost several hundred thousand pounds per year – funded by local authorities and the Legal Services Commission. This cost to the tax payer could be dramatically reduced by the simplification of the benefits system and increased competency with the administration process.

Research by AdviceUK in Nottingham reveals that 42% of the demand at advice agencies in the city is ‘failure demand’ – demand caused by failures in the system of public administration. Reducing this would save significant amounts of money and free up advisors to carry out valuable work with clients, supporting them to resolve their long-term problems.

Many of our clients have used our advice services in the past; some have had their benefits mistakenly stopped on more than one occasion. The knock-on effects are increased borrowing and debt, eviction problems and in many cases people falling into the informal economy, working cash-in-hand to cover costs as a last resort. Debt related advice has doubled, and our advisers believe this is in part due to the recession-related rise in claimant figures, and benefits being stopped or delayed as people struggle to find formal work.

Our campaign, Need NOT Greed has been calling for a simplified benefits system. A system which is easier to navigate could help prevent the rise of informal economic activity caused by people struggling to survive poverty. At the launch of the Need NOT Greed campaign in February 2009 Terry Rooney, chair of the DWP select committee said

“There is a treadmill of being in the informal economy out of Need NOT Greed. The striking thing is that the national benefits system is geared up to serve millions, but everybody is an individual – it’s how you can recognise everyone’s needs and requirements. You need a totalitarian system and there are enormous challenges – but ones that need to be faced and met.”

A local campaigner and user of our advice services said

“the system wears you down, I am constantly just surviving. Every time you pick yourself up and try to move forward the system lets you down again. It’s the same old problems for everyone and none of us round here trust it anymore. How can something you don’t trust be able to help you?”

Rising unemployment is increasing demand for welfare benefits at a time when public funding is under severe pressure. Spending time building productive relationships with people using services is time well spent; not an extravagance. These relationships are instrumental to efficient delivery of public services. We hope that a Welfare Commission is established as it is evident that change is necessary – but change must put the needs of the service user at the heart of the system.

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Posted in Benefits, Communication, Informal Economy, News, Regeneration, Research, Welfare, debt, employment | 2 Comments »

£16bn of benefits go unclaimed every year

Wednesday, February 3rd, 2010

Community links is one of the 27 charities challenging government today over the £16bn in benefits that go unclaimed every year. The campaign, coordinated by Citizens Advice, wants government to set targets to improve the take-up of means-tested benefits, ensuring that money earmarked for some of the most vulnerable people actually reaches them.

It’s an issue we’ve been aware of for some time. About 12,000 people visit Community Links’ advice service every year for support with benefits, housing and debt. Last year we helped them claim over £1.3m in benefits they were entitled to but not receiving.

Last year’s Benefit Take-up Task Force, which we sat on, looked at the issue and some progress was made as a result. Targets for housing benefit take up have now been included in the Audit Commission’s Key Lines of Enquiry (KLOE) for local authorities, and there is support from the Treasury to push this.

However the difficulty lies in the fact that, as always government departments do not work together very well. As different departments issue different benefits – HMRC for Working Tax Credits, DWP for out of work benefits, local authorities for housing benefit – it makes it very difficult to create and impose targets for benefit take up as a whole. There is a concern that targets will deter agencies, acting as a barrier to encouraging them to do more. This complexity is also one reason why people don’t access them in the first place.

Nevertheless it is clear something must be done. Citizens Advice highlight that four out of five low paid workers without children (1.2bn households) miss out on tax credits worth at least £38 per week, a total of £1.9 billion, and as many as half of working households entitled to housing benefit do not claim it. There’s a similar story with council tax benefit, pension credit, and child tax credit.

Access to these extra benefits could take households above the point of desperate struggle, into a situation where they’re able to look forward and plan for the future. There are many reasons why people don’t claim everything they’re entitled to – we frequently meet people who just don’t know about them, people who think they could get them but are left baffled by the complexity of the system, and those who want to but don’t know how.

Targets will ensure that local authorities, job centres, and other offices make active efforts to ensure people access all their benefits – better advertising, more support, more accessible information. Therefore we fully support Citizens Advice on this benefits take-up campaign.

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Posted in Benefits, Child Poverty | 1 Comment »

How does the media influence public attitudes to people in poverty?

Tuesday, January 12th, 2010

Attitudes to poverty week A few months ago a BBC producer asked if we could put her in touch with people willing to talk to Melanie Phillips about their experience of being unemployed and on benefits. We declined – we didn’t feel we knew anyone in the right position. The second of two episodes aired on Radio 4 yesterday (my review of the first episode here, second episode here).

It did made us think a lot about the role we, as a grassroots charity working in one of the poorer London boroughs, could play in influencing public attitudes to those on benefits, and how we should interact with the media on this issue.

Then we thought we’d draw on the collective wisdom of our readers, and open it up for debate. So for a week starting on 25th January, this blog will be devoted to discussing the importance of the media in influencing public attitudes to poverty. We’ll be commissioning posts from a wide range of contributors – if you’d like to write something, please do get in touch

To get people thinking, and as a brief introduction, here are some assertions. Feel free to disagree.

The media is important because it can influence public opinion. If the media present poor people as scrounging, benefit-cheating, crime-ridden layabouts, people who are not poor might believe that’s the case. If the media present poor people as just like everyone else but trapped by a system and really quite keen to be less poor, then people might believe that instead.

Public opinion is important for the way individuals and government treat those in poverty. If the not-poor 4/5 of the population have a stereotyped and negative view of the poor fifth, they will tend to treat them accordingly – in job interviews, in shops, in the doctor’s surgery, on the street. This helps keep people poor. And if the government believes that a crackdown on benefit cheats would be more popular than a raise in benefit levels, you can guess which they’ll announce. This will also keep people poor.

In the last few years the media has largely misrepresented and stereotyped poor people, in two ways.

1) In documentaries that claim to highlight poverty, but are perceived – very strongly by those featured in them – as a deliberate misrepresentation. This came across clearly at a fascinating event last year (part of JRF’s excellent work on public attitudes), where people with connections to programmes like Rich Kid Poor Kid, or The Tower, highlighted the ways in which they felt the programmes had wronged them and their communities.

2) In news and comment that selectively covers poor people who are also criminals (anti-social behaviour, knife crime, benefit cheats etc). Many people’s only experience of poverty is through the media, and without any coverage of the law-abiding majority of poor people, they are left with the impression that poor equals criminal. The award-winning blogger NightJack controversially called this the problem of the Evil Poor, Neil Robertson made the point that what they really are is the ‘visible poor‘.

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Posted in Attitudes, Communication, Innovation, Regeneration | 1 Comment »

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