Rethinking welfare and employment support as means for people to secure their basic needs.
The government has backed a report calling for ending the ‘compliance culture’ at Jobcentre Plus and moving towards a more encouraging environment for jobseekers. At the Institute for Employment Studies’ launch of Working for the Future, employment minister Alison McGovern called out the blame game where no leeway is granted to claimants unable to access work due to constraints around childcare, travel or health conditions. Instead, she pledged a significant change in emphasis alongside the merging of the National Careers Service with Jobcentre Plus.
Campaigners have long argued the emphasis on compliance and the threat and use of sanctions and benefit caps, including the two-child limit, set unemployed people at odds with the DWP. Instead of supporting people into work, the system can saddle them with financial worries that restrict their ability to think further ahead than their next meal.
Conversely, employment plays a crucial role in poverty reduction. A household is 50% more likely to move out of very deep poverty if someone in the household moves into work but evidence suggests the current welfare system often undermines jobseekers’ efforts to find work.
Tackling poverty effectively requires a functional net, not just holding people while they get into work, but lifting them up to truly meet their needs. Here we examine how recent reforms have impacted people’s ability to return to work and considers how welfare and employment programmes can be improved to engage the long-term unemployed, addressing the right issues and responding to their needs.
Holes in the net
People’s perceptions of welfare often focus on both its cost to taxpayers and the goal of moving individuals into work, but they tend to overlook whether the current social security net is adequate to meet essential needs. Alex Beer from the Nuffield Foundation argues that the benefits system should address “problems that society has yet to find a better way of responding to, including low pay, ill health, and housing costs.”
Evidence from the APPG on Poverty Report highlights that the “mental toll” of living on low income can hinder efforts to escape poverty and undermine the “right mindset” needed for an effective job search. Further research by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation shows that inadequate support can lead to prolonged job searches and increased stress, which diminishes job-seeking motivation and effectiveness.
The UK’s social security entitlements are among the lowest in OECD countries and its welfare policies have historically pushed people further into poverty. Michael Clarke from the charity Turn2Us emphasises that “Policies like benefit sanctions, the two-child limit, and stricter conditionality are destroying trust, damaging health, and deterring people when they need help the most.”
All stick, no carrot
The welfare system currently operates on the assumption that reducing benefit reliance and imposing stricter conditions will encourage more people to find work. However, research indicates that punitive measures such as benefit caps and sanctions have minimal impact on reducing economic inactivity.
For instance, the two-child benefit cap, designed to incentivize employment, has not led to increased employment rates among parents according to research from LSE. In fact, removing the cap could potentially lift 360,000 children out of poverty.
Similarly, sanctions, which have doubled since the pandemic, fail to improve work entry rates and often create financial stress that hampers job search efforts. Joseph Rowntree Foundation (JRF) has reported that the threat of sanctions, which looms over each interaction, undermines trust between claimants and work coaches, making it even harder for individuals to find work.
Emily, a participant in Quids in! money guidance and employment programs, described her experience with DWP: “It was very demoralising, and you’re made to feel by DWP like you’re a worthless scrounger. I wasn’t doing enough hours because of my pain. And then they kept threatening me with sanctions, sanctions, sanctions…”
Job-search conditionality can increase employment rates however it often results in individuals being pushed into insecure, low-quality jobs. More than half of Universal Credit claimants are in severely insecure work, which exacerbates unemployment’s scarring effects and reduces future career prospects.
“To clear the way to employment, welfare, and how it is administrated, must enable people to focus on job hunting without worrying about their next meal,” Jeff Mitchell, Director of Clean Slate Training & Employment, explains. “I worry the government has underestimated the task in hand, turning the DWP oil tanker 180 degrees. It’s not just hearts and minds there that it needs to win over, they might find the antipathy towards jobseekers is systemic and baked in.”
Future engagement
Welfare reforms like raising social security entitlements, extending the household support fund, reducing sanctions, and scrapping benefit caps can create a more supportive environment for individuals to focus on finding work.
The government’s apparent joined-up thinking around the health service as a contributor to the economy could mean good news for jobseekers too. “By attempting to cut wait times and improve public health, the government will look to support people with their health and speed up their return to work,” Health Secretary Wes Streeting told the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change. This starts to address questions of how millions of economically inactive Employment and Support Allowance claimants should prepare to migrate to Universal Credit, which places an emphasis on returning to work at its heart.
A recent report from the The Commission on the Future of Employment Support calls for enhanced personalised support at jobcentres, and improved awareness of available support to better engage and assist jobseekers. Tom Pollard from the New Economics Foundation welcomed the report’s “emphasis on shifting the focus of employment support from compliance and engagement.”
Evidence shows one of the biggest barriers to engagement is a lack of awareness about available support. Of the 2.5 million people in the LCWRA group, one third are interested in receiving help but have minimal engagement. With a focus on traditional employment support rather than balancing roles as UC advisors, Jobcentres could better connect people to the resources and training they need.
As the government readies its new strategy for economic inactivity in the upcoming White Paper this autumn, DWP Secretary Liz Kendall has already set a clear tone, stating, “We are not going to write you off and blame you. We’re going to bust a gut to give you the support you need to build a better life.”
Helen Barnard from the Trussell Trust welcomed this approach, adding: “Prioritising dignified and accessible support for all and ensuring people can take up decent, secure work are key building blocks to a future where no one needs a food bank.”
As these reforms roll out, it will be critical to monitor whether they effectively address the needs of low-income individuals and move beyond the rhetoric of claimants choosing a ‘life of benefits’ over employment.
Image: 1000 Words / Shutterstock
Having worked as an employment adviser, and watched the job centre plus job coach sector grow, while the unemployment rates remained the same, I’d say there is no incentive for job centre coaches to find jobs for clients. If everyone found work there would be no need for the existence of job centre coaches. It’s a bit like the NHS, if we were healthy there’d be little need for doctors and nurses.
While employment advisers with independent organisations were rushed off their feet, serving 49 plus jobseekers, job centre work coaches sat around in job centres talking among themselves and implementing compliance. Once a jobseeker is put on a programme like Testart, JETs of Wirk and Health, they lose access to job centre services. The managers on employment advice programmes withhold resources from job seekers who start work. My participant would start work and then my line manager would withhold reasonable expenses like travel card and workwear refunds, thus ensuring the job start’s job is unsustainable and they’d leave work and return to the programme.
Most of the managers didn’t even put resources like training, job fairs and job brokers in place and programmes were set up to fail. Job centre plus and employment programmes are very tech heavy, with staff spending more time on updating poor IT systems and ticking compliance boxes, than actually speaking to job seekers, and providing the support they need.
Having worked at Clean Slate and on three employment programmes, with one requiring me to job seekers in job centre plus offices, I can honestly say I achieved better outcomes at Clean Slate than in any employment programme. The programmes are meant to remove barriers to work but most of the funding from the DWP is spent on senior staff, not job seekers. My ethics caused me to leave the sector.