With the UK supporting a total of 1.4 million people who have been on unemployment benefit for nine out of the last ten years, Work and Pensions secretary of state Iain Duncan Smith has decided enough is enough.
A new scheme is about to be unveiled in a white paper where claimants could find themselves litter-picking or gardening if the government proposals go ahead. The Work Activity scheme was designed to tackle the workshy and flush out those doing undeclared jobs on the side while still claiming benefits.[1]
Duncan Smith explains: "One thing we can do is pull people in to do one or two weeks' manual work - turn up at 9am and leave at 5pm, to give people a sense of work, but also when we think they're doing other work."
Under the scheme, job advisers will be able to send tens of thousands of claimants on placements totalling at least 30 hours a week for four weeks. Those who refuse to take part or who persistently turn up late for their placements will lose their unemployment benefit for at least three months.
A Department for Work and Pensions spokesman said: "We will shortly be bringing forward further proposals on how to break the cycle of dependency blighting many of our communities and make sure work always pays."
Isabelle Oakshott, writing in The Sunday Times on 7 November reports that the internships are ‘most likely to be arranged through town halls or charities and could involve activities such as painting schools, clearing up litter or gardening.’ She goes on to make the point that with local authorities staring at significant cuts as a result of the Comprehensive Spending Review, the availability of such free labour is likely to be ‘seized on’ and that the compulsory work placements could also be in offices if private firms could be persuaded to join the scheme as part of corporate social responsibility.
However, it is not yet clear how much support such a scheme would have among charities, because of its coercive nature. A post on a BBC forum inviting debate about the scheme attracted the following response, a view that could well be shared among a number of voluntary sector organisations:
“If there is a job there to be done, pay someone to do it. Don't treat valuable work as a form of punishment. If the job needs doing, pay someone to do it so they can earn a living and hold their head high. When manual work is treated as some kind of a punishment for the sin of being unemployed, it demeans all manual work, shows that government has a poor opinion of workers, and belittles those ‘forced’ to work who have in all likelihood been forced into the depressing state of long-term unemployment.”[2]
Richard Exell, the TUC’s senior policy officer on social security told The Times: “The reason we have got such high unemployment isn’t because of a problem with the work ethic, it is because there aren’t enough jobs for people to do”, and the shadow work and pension secretary, Douglas Alexander observed the scheme was “focusing on the workshy but offering nothing to the workless.”
[1] At the time of writing, the White Paper was not yet published. However it should be available at this part of the of the DWP website: www.dwp.gov.uk/publications/policy-publications/#welfare
[2] www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/haveyoursay/2010/11/should_long-term_benefit_claim.html