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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 »

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 »

European Year launch event lacked purpose

Wednesday, March 17th, 2010

Yesterday was the launch event for the European Year Against Poverty in the UK, which we’re marking all this week on the blog, with some fascinating posts up so far.

The event, organised by DWP, brought together over 100 people, a significant proportion of whom were ‘people experiencing poverty’ (still a phrase that makes me squirm, even if I do resort to using it every now and then.) As a charity that has always said the people who experience a problem understand it best, we’d certainly applaud DWP for this, and also for their intentions, which were in the right direction. However, its lack of focus left me wondering why we’d bothered.

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Posted in Working age poverty | No 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 »

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 »

Community Allowance Pilot Partners Wanted

Tuesday, September 8th, 2009


We (the CREATE Consortium) are looking for three community organisations to pilot the Community Allowance with us. Could you be involved?

Background – the Community Allowance proposal
A Community Allowance would allow benefit claimants to supplement their income without incurring a penalty – this month’s New Start magazine has a useful overview of the idea, which is starting to be picked up by government. We hope to be involved in piloting the idea, and would welcome your involvement.

Under the government’s Right to Bid scheme, any organisation can propose to the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) a new way of delivering any of its services. We thought this was a good opportunity to work with the DWP to pilot the Community Allowance. We developed a Right to Bid proposal for a £2.2 million pilot programme in 15 areas across the UK, and submitted it in January 2009. In April, they asked us a number of questions about our proposal, and you can read our answers here.

In July 2009 they called us to a meeting where they informed us that the Right to Bid process was looking for much smaller scale pilots. They also said that the outgoing Secretary of State, James Purnell MP, had made it clear that the Community Allowance could not be piloted for people on Income Support or Job Seekers Allowance.

They rejected our bid but asked us to submit another proposal for a smaller scale pilot operating in three areas anywhere in the UK. They also said our bid would stand a greater chance of success if we restricted the people who could participate to those who are on Incapacity Benefit and Employment and Support Allowance.

We asked all the organisations that had already expressed an interest in piloting the Community Allowance if they would be prepared to go ahead on that basis, and over 30 organisations said they would.

Aims of pilots:

  • To test the feasibility and impact of the Community Allowance on participants and their communities in a range of settings across the UK.
  • To capture learning and evidence that could inform further development of the Community Allowance to people on other benefits (e.g. Income Support and Job Seekers Allowance).

Want to be involved in the pilot programme?

We are looking for community organisations from across the UK that are interested in becoming a partner with CREATE in order to run the Community Allowance. We would like to work with organisations that are:

  • Local community based charities, social enterprises or community interest companies
  • Trusted locally, with a track record of working with ‘hard to reach’ people
  • Equipped with the capacity and skills to support the Community Allowance participants
  • Able to generate local paid work (e.g. community research or youth work) or identify and place people in paid work that strengthens their neighbourhood (e.g. School Crossing Patrol)

We’d like these pilots to be in a range of rural and urban areas. In each area we anticipate identifying and working with one or more partners, each of whom would recruit, employ, and support people. We have estimated that in each area the Community Allowance could create around 80 part time jobs.

If you wish to develop a proposal for how your organisation would deliver a Community Allowance pilot programme in your area, please download a proposal form and guidance notes. Completed forms need to be back to the CREATE Consortium by 5pm on 1st October 2009, either to CREATE Consortium, 33 Corsham Street, London N1 6DR or to n.alexander@dta.org.uk

Type of Jobs: Eligible jobs on the Community Allowance would be restricted to those that contribute to strengthening the neighbourhood. This would be defined and refined by the CREATE Consortium over the duration of the pilots through dialogue with the CREATE partners.

Real Time Evaluation: The CREATE Consortium will contract with an independent evaluator to carry out a real time evaluation of the pilot programme.

 Do get in touch on aaron.barbour@community-links.org with any suggestions or questions.

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Posted in Benefits, Community Engagement, Innovation, Regeneration, Welfare, employment | No Comments »

Theresa May MP: What is Conservative thinking on Welfare Reform…?

Tuesday, September 1st, 2009

Last week I went to listen to Theresa May MP (Shadow Secretary of State for Work and Pensions) speaking about welfare reform at an event organised by Policy Exchange. In our previous blog we referred to the latest research by Policy Exchange revealing that unemployment was closer to six million than the current official figure of 2.44 million. May argued that the majority of these people have been ‘lurking in the shadows for the past twelve years’ and that many of whom can work and do want to work but they have been ‘let down by Labour’.

Similar to our blog post she highlighted that recent mass unemployment brought on by the recession has ‘brought a new focus on our welfare system and in many ways has exposed its inadequacies’ May later went on to assure the room that a Conservative government would do more than just promise a radical reform in the run up to the general election, but they would deliver on reform because they are ‘not afraid to be honest about the state of worklessness in Britain today’.

All well and good, but how are they planning on doing this and what do they mean by worklessness in Britain today? Well firstly May told us about how they would no longer hide people away on Incapacity Benefit, instead if they are capable of returning to work then ‘they will be provided with the support they need to get them there’. Secondly we were told how the Tories ‘would not be bullied by those, often from the left who opposed change’ Thirdly, as they understand that Government cannot solve this problem alone, they are ‘committed to working with individuals, communities, the public, private and the voluntary sector to break the culture of dependency’

All still a little ambiguous to me, so I eagerly awaited the Q&A for a little prompting on a more detailed explanation of Tory policy proposals. The questions came: ‘how exactly are you going to simplify the benefits system?’, ‘what are the differences between the two party’s policies on welfare?’ ‘Will the Tories recognise the six million figure if they get into power next year?’ (Watch the video  for the responses)

 Unfortunately I left the speech, still not much clearer on what the Conservative thinking on welfare reform is. To achieve a cultural shift around worklessness, which is what May said was paramount to their reforms, understanding the root causes of inter-generational benefit dependency within families and communities is essential. Yet there is not much evidence of this happening. Whichever political party is our next government, if reforms are to work they need to address the complexity of ‘interlocking problems that no government has successfully addressed, and no pontificating can possibly help to solve’.

 They need to reach out into these communities and work with the long-term unemployed, understanding their current situations, how they have coped over decades on benefits and what economic activity is really going on in these communities. We know from Need NOT Greed that people do have a strong desire to work but are really struggling to make the transition to independence. People have taken their own small steps back into work through bits and pieces of informal work. If the system enabled them to do this formally they would. To really break this cycle of worklessness and benefit dependency we need innovative political thinking to inspire individuals and communities to help themselves: use the skills from informal work to bring people close to the labour market, understand the local economy and support its development and make the benefits system an enabling transitional process, not a preventative one. These are proposals that should be on party manifestos, vocialised at welfare reform speeches and not ‘lurking in the shadows’ for another twelve years.

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Posted in Benefits, Child Poverty, Informal Economy, News, Welfare, employment | 2 Comments »

Welfare: fit for purpose? Benefits and employment

Friday, August 21st, 2009

Image Credit: The Guardian

Benefit Busters was shown last night on Channel 4, questioning how to get lone parents off benefits when they are financially better off not working. It was the job of Hayley Taylor to find the answer, and she did this through her A4E Elevate course aiming to build single mothers’ confidence to get them back into the labour market. Or, was she bullying a group of slightly vulnerable mums, some of which had serious issues of debt and possible drink addictions, and neither of which Hayley had any professional qualifications in what so ever? I haven’t quite figured out what A4E stands for yet but it could be something to do with Accident and Emergency.

On the whole there were a number of job successes, and possibly one career success - that belonging to Hayley herself. I am still trying to figure out who benefited from this programme. It was apparent that the mothers were eager but profoundly lacking in confidence, it was apparent that the system was completely flawed but no Goverment Minister was interviewed as to why the current welfare reform bill hasn’t addressed the existing disincentives. It was also apparent that what the most vulnerable really need is intensive support, professional advice and guidance but instead they got ‘tough love.’

With the latest unemployment figures at a shocking 2.44 million, an increase of 220,000 in the past three months to June 2009 and talk of the real figure being 6 million getting the reform of the welfare system right is more important now than ever. The Jobcentre Plus is possibly the most popular venue in town right now; with a noticeable increase in the range of customers, and therefore an increase in the range of skills and capacity required by the staff, placing a heavy burden on Jobcentre Plus staff.

Current reforms mean government are employing large private organisations like A4E to deal with the long-term unemployed whilst they get to grips with the latest recession wave of white collar workers. The BBC Radio 4 programme “Face the Facts, the JCP isn’t working“, aired last Sunday interviewed people recently made redundant, people with impressive CVs and keen to find employment yet they were completely let down by the JCP service.  The same frustrations voiced in this programme were echoed by the long term unemployed in our report Working Alongside.

Welfare must be a first class service for all: capable of responding to the needs of a varying population before it can justify imposing threats like benefit sanctions or sending people to boot camps.

We spoke to Guardian journalist Jenni Russell and yesterday in her article in the Guardian she eloquently and accurately pointed out that errors in the current, outdated and rigid system and poor quality, low paid, erratic employment is the problem, ‘the solution is nothing less that a rethinking of the welfare system fit for the 21st Century’, because, as Hayley concluded ‘the systems not right; it just seems backwards really’

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Posted in Benefits, Child Poverty, General, Informal Economy, News, employment | 3 Comments »

“Working Alongside”: Community Links and ATD Fourth World’s ‘Need NOT Greed’ discussion groups on the Benefit System

Tuesday, July 14th, 2009

Working together for a better future for everyone

“People who experience a problem understand it best.” 

Extract from Community Links’ founding statement

 

Community Links and ATD Fourth World, are two charities both working with people who live in poverty. We jointly conducted a series of workshops with people who have long-term experience of poverty to explore their experiences, draw out common themes and develop ideas for changes to the system that participants felt would help them move out of poverty, off benefits and into sustainable secure employment.  

These are the stories of the people we work with everyday. They are the ones who have to queue for 40 minutes in the Jobcentre, the ones who never see the same member of staff twice, and the ones who have to negotiate the bureaucracy of the benefits system just to be able to feed their families whilst they look for work in this ongoing recession.

“Working Alongside“ is the latest in our Evidence Paper series. It is an account of those three workshops and some recommendations. We hope policymakers and other practioners will learn from this work  to inform their strategy and policy and go on to improve services offered by the Department for Work and Pensions, Jobcentre Plus and their partners.

Download a copy of “Working Alongside“.

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Posted in Benefits, Child Poverty, Research, Welfare, debt, employment | 2 Comments »

Community Allowance: Latest News

Tuesday, July 7th, 2009

We at Community Links have been a part of the CREATE Consortium since its inception. The campaign calls for changes to benefit rules which would enable community organisations to pay people to do work that strengthens their neighbourhood without it affecting any of their benefits.

In a guest blog here CREATE Consortium co-ordinator Naomi Alexander updates the campaign progress. 

Well, we finally have some news from the governments Department for Work and Pensions about the Community Allowance.

We (Steve Wyler, Executive Director of the DTA, Aaron Barbour, Head of linksUK at Community Links and me) went to a hastily arranged meeting with 6 officials from the DWP this morning to discuss our Right to Bid proposal that we submitted back in January.

We’ve got through two rounds of intensive scrutiny and evaluation from across the Department and they wanted to give us their feedback.

Because the last Secretary of State, James Purnell, said that people on Job Seekers Allowance (JSA) would not be eligible for the Community Allowance, our bid, which includes a lot of detail about people on JSA is not eligible for funding and they are rejecting our proposal as it stands.

While we are obviously, really disappointed that this is the decision after all the work that has gone into getting this far, there is still hope.

They have asked us to write another bid (!) as they are keen on the Community Allowance concept and can see the value in piloting it to test the approach. They have given us some guidance as to how we should re-shape the bid to stand the best chance of being approved.

This includes:

  • Re-shaping what we would deliver through the Community Allowance only for people who are on Employment and Support Allowance and Incapacity Benefit
  • Scaling back the pilot programme from 15 pilots across the UK to just 3 pilots as the Right to Bid process is targeted at funding small scale activity that can act as the DWP’s research and development arm to test out new ideas and add value to their existing work
  • Choosing which three pilot areas it would be piloted in and having identified lead community organisations in each area before the bid is submitted
  • Ensuring that each of these pilot areas fits within Job Centre Plus and Pathways to Work provider boundaries, which are different to local authority boundaries
  • Beginning to develop a dialogue between the community organisation(s) running the pilot and local Job Centre Plus and Pathways/FND providers in each area
  • Including more of a focus on how many people will move into jobs as a result of the activity, specifying which of these are part time, full time and sustained over a 26 week period  

We have had lots of discussions about this since Friday and we think it is worth being pragmatic at this stage and moving ahead with another bid as outlined above. At the same time we will continue our lobbying and campaigning work to convince politicians that the Community Allowance should be available to anyone on any benefit and try to get the scope of the pilots extended to include those on JSA at a later date.

What do you think?

We would like to hear if community organisations are still interested in being pilot partners under this scaled back version of a Community Allowance pilot.

If you are interested, or you’d like to discuss the practicalities of becoming a pilot partner please email me (and copy in Jess Steele the Chair of the CREATE Consortium j.steele@dta.org.uk).

Depending on the level of interest, we will set up a short selection process that enables us to choose three pilot locations and partners. The aim is to get the new bid to DWP for their end of August selection panel, so that we have a decision in September and a contract signed and monies flowing to pilot partners as soon as possible after that.

It’s a challenging timescale, especially as it’s over the summer whilst people will be taking leave, but if you’re up for it – we’re up for it!

We’ve come this far and now have an opportunity to get something up and running next year that will begin to demonstrate how the Community Allowance could work. It may not be what we know is needed in our most deprived communities but it’s a start and we have no intention of giving up. With your involvement we will keep up the pressure on politicians to realise the full potential of the Community Allowance over the long term.

We look forward to hearing what you think.

Thanks so much for your support.

Naomi Alexander

Email: n.alexander@dta.org.uk Web: www.communityallowance.org

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Posted in Benefits, Community Engagement, News, Regeneration, Welfare | 4 Comments »

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