Category: Social Policy

This occasional blog discusses issues in Social Policy.

Edinburgh goes back to the 1930s

Edinburgh Council has decided to distinguish between deserving and undeserving cases for the allocation of Discretionary Housing Payments.  The DHPs are there to mitigate the effects of the government’s underoccupancy penalty – the ‘bedroom tax’ – in the event of hardship.  The hardship, of course, is general, because the effect of the penalty is to reduce basic living allowances well below the minimal rates of benefit.  Faced with the extra demand,   the council has decided to ask people if they drink, smoke or have mobile phone contracts or satellite dishes.  The priority for the DHP is to be given to people who live more virtuous, ascetic lives.

In the days of the Poor Law, people had to be completely destitute before they could receive benefits.  The means-test was introduced between the wars to avoid the harshness of that regime, but it became a by-word for pettyfogging rules and intrusion in its own right.  True, people didn’t have satellite dishes, but they might have had a piano in the parlour or some silverware, and the inspectors identified those items as luxuries and demanded they should be sold before benefit could be paid.

Several rules about luxuries and disposal of assets were carried through to Supplementary Benefit and Income Support, but in principle means-tested benefits since 1948 have not been intended to penalised people for having better life styles.     Social security was supposed to be a form of social protection.  Anyone could be sick, disabled or unemployed – it could be you.   Despite what you read in the press, that’s still true.  Most people are unemployed for relatively short periods – less than one person in 250 is unemployed for five years.  Most people who become long-term sick have worked for a time before it happens.  Most single parents become that way because their relationships break down.  In better times, people take on liabilities – including mortgages, tenancies, satellite television, mobile phone contracts – and those liabilities carry on while they’re on benefit.  Suspending support when incomes falter means that people are no longer protected – and the people who have fallen furthest will be those who suffer the most.

What else, an Edinburgh councillor complained, could they have done?  The answer is, lots.  They could have sought to mitigate the effects of the bedroom tax by reclassifying property.  They could be offering advice on income maximisation and debt minimisation.  If they have to ration  DHPs, they could try to determine priorities and introduce clear and legitimate criteria.  Instead, they’ve decided to spearhead an attack on the undeserving poor.

Charities and charismatic leadership

The announcement, that some chief executives of major charities have high salaries, didn’t come as a great surprise.  Charles Moore, writing in the Daily Telegraph, attacked charity chiefs in general, but he also opined:  “Large charities need professional competence and charismatic leadership.”

The cult of the charismatic CEO does have its place.  Half of the activity undertaken by CEOs, possibly more, is outward facing – negotiations with the government, approaches to funders, speaking to the media and representation of the charity’s case.  ‘Charisma’ can help; for example, there are CEOs who can talk money down from the trees.  That’s a great skill to have, but it’s got nothing to do with ‘leadership’.  Whether leadership is about vision, direction, inspiration or motivation, that’s not what the CEO of a very large organisation generally does.

There are some outstandingly charismatic, competent individuals who work in the third sector, but they are not necessarily senior officers.  There are youth workers who can relate to, motivate and inspire young people who are disheartened, excluded and disengaged.  Community  work relies heavily on people who can inspire and motivate others to work together – in France, the task is sometimes called ‘animation’.   Neither of those professions commands the sort of salary that these rare  talents apparently justify.   I wonder why that is?

'Go home or face arrest'

I’m a British citizen, and have lived here all my life, but I’m also the first male member of my family not to be forced to leave his home in several generations.  My father and grandfather left France in 1940; my great grandfather left Berlin; my great-great grandfather left Posen/Poznan, now in Poland.   Like many second generation immigrants, I was raised in the expectation that the time could come when I’d have to leave, too.  It’s a tribute to British tolerance that the occasion hasn’t arisen.

That makes it all the more distressing to see the British government engage directly in actions designed to shake the security of any immigrant.  One aspect has been the vans going round London, threatening illegal immigrants with deportation. (Yougov reports that 61% of  the population think that this is not racist.)  Another has been the process of ‘spot checks‘ by stopping people who look ‘foreign’ and demanding papers.

Further link to the Mirror's article; click on the picture o go to article

There are, of course, more efficient ways of checking status than spot checks and advertisements.  The government could get people to wear a visible external symbol, in a nice bright colour,  so that checks could be done at sight.  It might even encourage some of them to leave the country.  And I’d probably want to go too.

How to get a council house: down memory lane

The Channel 4 documentary, How to get a council house,  takes me back a way. My first real job, in Hartlepool, was allocating council houses; I was the sole lettings officer for a stock of about 12,500 houses. Tower Hamlets has just over 13,000 council houses and what seemed to be an army of people doing the job. There were striking differences from the way things used to be done. First, people are invited to ‘bid’ for express a preference – despite the (fairly obvious) problem that the vast majority have no hope of being considered, and in some cases there would be well over a thousand people having their hopes raised. Second, people were being told how long they might have to wait, even though it was clear to them that it wasn’t a queue and the length of time was not what mattered to get priority. Third, the computer provides the answer, and the council takes multiple viewings at a time to get the allocation done as quickly as possible.

That last bit is something of an improvement. When I started in the job, I asked the person who’d done the job before me how the decision was made to allocate which property to which person. Part of the answer was based on an assumption: people from the old town wouldn’t want to go to West Hartlepool, or vice-versa (though no-one actually asked them). Then came the main issue: how clean and respectable they were. Prospective tenants were graded as excellent, good, fairly good, good, fair, moderate, poor or shocking, and the quality of the property they were offered matched their assessment. (That was fully in accordance with Macey and Baker, the leading textbook on housing management at the time: “The personal suitability of the applicant and his wife are a guide to the type of dwelling to be offered.” ) I did change the way things worked – introducing a points scheme, allowing preferences, giving priority to need and doing what I could to stop the grading. I wasn’t popular for doing it.

Jargon alert

This is the 300th entry on my blog, and being laid up and feeling sorry for myself I thought I might allow myself a little wallow.  I have been working this summer on the third edition of Social Policy, which in this edition is also going to bring in material from Policy Analysis for Practice.  Social Policy lays out the architecture of social policy as a field of study, and it represents twenty years’ work.  It’s been published in several countries, including Japan and India – this next edition will be translated into Serbo-Croat – and I’ve tried to make it as helpful as possible to an international readership. However, as a text-book, and a third edition to boot, it won’t feature prominently in the British universities’ great quadrennial egg and spoon race. It won’t even line up with the starters.

If anyone would like to comment on a draft, it would be helpful: the only way to be sure that a book is clear, comprehensible and accessible is to check that it all makes sense to other people. I have to confess however that the current draft does contain some words which are disapproved of in the Government Digital Service’s newly published style guide. The naughty words include:

  • dialogue. Civil servants shouldn’t use this, the guide suggests, because it only means ‘we speak to people’. It would be more polite, and possibly more instructive, if sometimes they listened to the other side of the conversation as well.
  • key. The guide explains: “A subject/thing isn’t ‘key’ – it’s probably ‘important’.” The idea of key intervention depends on the belief that you can pick out one or two elements of a complex problem and change in the other elements will follow. For example, guaranteed interviews for people with disabilities probably aren’t ‘important’, because they don’t affect many people directly, but there’s an argument they might just be key to changing recruitment policies.
  • robust. I explain in the book: “‘Robust’ policies are policies which allow for future changes in direction. Some policies don’t.”

They’re also not keen on words like empowerment, collaboration, promotion or facilitation – words we have taken to using because the task of government is less and less to do things itself, more to help other people to do them. Is the problem a matter of language, or of approach?

The problem behind the benefit cap

Much of the argument about the benefits cap is based on an exaggerated emphasis on a very small number of people, intended to give people the impression that the system is far more generous than it really is; but there are some people affected (I met someone who was being capped last month). Iain Duncan Smith defended the cap on the Today programme this morning. Part of his defence was the claim that people on benefit were receiving support to pay for housing that people in work could not possibly afford. That has to be wrong. Housing Benefit is payable to people in work, at a slightly superior rate to people not in work – it is more generous partly because of earnings disregards, and partly because people in work don’t suffer the same penalties, like the bedroom tax. The taper – the rate at which the benefit is withdrawn – is 65%. This is the same figure as the taper being introduced for Universal Credit.

There is a more fundamental problem in the design of Housing Benefit; it is that the benefit depends on the level of the rent, and rents can be very high. If we accept that government is going to meet a large part of the cost that independent and private providers charge, then over time, those charges will come to reflect the benefits available to pay them. This is the trouble with Housing Benefit, and the same problem can be seen with some other benefits, including child care costs from tax credits, legal aid and residential care fees. In the short term, the way to deal with the issues is to cap the costs, rather than the benefits. In the longer term, however, the issues will not be resolved without direct provision of essential services.

So what is 'disability'?

This is a little snippet from the ONS Opinions and Lifestyle survey, pulled out for  ad hoc analysis by the DWP.  From Tables 10 and 11 in the analysis, 62% of people identified as disabled said that they did not think of themselves as being disabled. Among the people with disabilities who said they were not disabled, more than half (55%) said it was because they could carry out their normal day-to-day activities, and 27% described themselves as fit and able to live a full life.  Others put down their limitations to ill health or old age. Among those identified as ‘disabled’, 26% said they did think of themselves as being disabled, and 11% said ‘sometimes’.

One of the central problems with our benefit system is that it relies on claimants being able to recognise where the boundaries fall.  People don’t necessarily identify their needs in the same way, and they can’t place themselves in the neat little boxes we ask them to plump for.  Needs change, from month to month and sometimes from day to day.  It’s not just a problem with disability or health.  Ask people living on the edge about their work status, their income and the state of their relationships and they often can’t answer directly.  Unfortunately, that is all too likely to be taken as an indication of evasion, obstruction or fraud.

All the trend at present is to ‘personalisation’ – making the system more individual and more responsive.  That is absolutely the wrong way to go.  It is intrusive and  arrogant – no administration can respond consistently and fairly on this basis.   We need to allow more latitude for  changes in circumstance , covering longer time periods and broader categories. The benefits system has to look at needs in ways that are less detailed, less personal, and less presumptuous.

Naming welfare claimants

It’s the silly season, and newspapers are desperate to fill their pages with anything at all.  So it must have been a delight for the Mail on Sunday when Mark Littlewood, Director of the Institute for Economic Affairs, came up with a proposal to name publicly every recipient of welfare benefits.  Littlewood’s list  would probably include twenty five million people – a similar number to the leak of data in 2007,  which included far more than the numbers of recipients of Child Benefit.

The proposal is drawn, like many other punitive ideas on welfare, from the United States.  The Jenner Amendment, passed in 1951, makes it possible to publish details from social security rolls.  The basic principle, which has recurred from time to time in US policy, is that the recipients of public support are not entitled to privacy – the same idea, for example, has also been used to defend arbitrary house searches of claimants, which would have been unconstitutional for anyone else.  Obviously, the purpose of publishing details of welfare receipt – despite Littlewood’s protest to the contrary – would be to name and shame.

I would not accept any principle that declared people receiving benefits to have fewer rights  than other citizens, but Littlewood’s proposal is so general that it would not have that effect; it would make public the names, addresses and finances of most people in the country.   There is admittedly a case for public support to be public – as there is a case for all tax allowances and declarations to be public, on the Scandinavian model.  If anything, the case for open taxation records is rather stronger, because unlike benefits it wouldn’t require publication pointing to personal medical details.  The question we need to ask is whether we want to live in a society where everything is public.

What Littlewood (and the Mail) don’t seem to understand is that people on benefits aren’t different from the rest of us.   In a flexible labour market, which Conservative governments in particular have been eager to encourage, most people of working age pass through periods when they draw on benefits.   Many of our working age benefits – Tax Credits, Child Benefit, Housing Benefit – go to people in work as well as those out of work.  Beyond that, everyone in the UK benefits from the welfare state – every child in school, every older person, everyone registered with a medical practice whether they use the health care or not.  And that is still the basic difference between the UK and the US.  We have institutional welfare, and they don’t.

The DWP threatens local authorities with penalties

Some landlords – most recently, Welwyn Hatfield DC – have been redesignating rooms in order to reduce tenants’ liability to the bedroom tax.  This has attracted an aggressive response from the DWP , directed at local authorities rather than social landlords.  Lord Freud has rewritten to Chief Executives to warn them that

“Blanket redesignations without a clear and justifiable reason and without reductions in rent, are inappropriate and do not fall within the spirit of the policy. … Where it is found that a local authority has redesignated properties without reasonable grounds and without reducing rents, my department would consider either restricting or not paying their housing benefit subsidy.”

The first problem for the DWP is, of course, that there is a clear and justifiable reason for redesignation.  There is a statutory definition of room size, and box rooms, alcoves and walk-in cupboards don’t meet it.

The second part of this, referring to reductions in rent, is rather more complex.  Traditionally, rents in the social housing sector have reflected historic costs rather more than the amenities they offered.   Rent setting in England has been since 2002 subject to a process of ‘convergence’, intended to rationalise the morass of  different levels of rents charged for otherwise similar properties.  (In Scotland and Wales the issues have been considered, and there has been some ad hoc adaptation, but there has not been the same uniform process.)  Target rents in England have been set on the following principles:

•   30% of a property’s rent should be based on relative property values compared to the national average
•   70% of a property’s rent should be based on relative local earnings compared to the national average
•   a bedroom factor should be applied so that, other things being equal, smaller properties have lower rents

Initially the English policy was supposed to bring rents into conformity with a common standard by 2012.  The rent rises demanded were unmanageably high, the deadline has slipped back, and it is now scheduled to be done by 2015/16 unless the Bedroom Tax upsets it further.

Do make allowances if I get this next bit wrong; I don’t work in England, but  I trust that my English readers will set me right.  From what I can decipher, while the government would have liked bedroom size to be a determinant of rents, it hasn’t quite happened, and it is not always obvious what proportion of rent is attributable to the number of bedrooms.  In places, it seems that the main effect of the DWP demanding a deduction of the proportion of rent attributable to bedrooms will be to limit the scale of increase in rents that the DCLG has been requiring social landlords to make.  It looks, then, like a case of government pulling in two directions at once; it’s also a mark of a wider failure to understand that Housing Benefit is not just a benefit, but an instrument of housing policy.

"An historic culture of chasing targets"

I’m in the process of updating my textbook on Social Policy. Today I was putting together material on targets and performance indicators, when along came a prime specimen.

The report on Kent Police by Her Majesty’s Inspectorate of Constabulary provides a remarkable insight into the impact of targets on administrative practice. Some crimes are easier to resolve than others, so Kent Police had developed a practice of making sure that the easy crimes got the attention. They put the effort into clearing up cases of shoplifting and cannabis use, and recorded ‘no crime’ for some more difficult problems, including crimes of violence, burglary and rape. The Inspectors attribute this to ‘an historic culture of chasing targets’.

Later this week I’ll be looking at corruption and abuse of power, but of course I can’t expect anything new to happen there.