Category: Social security

This blog includes discussion of issues in British social security policy, along with new material to complement my book, How Social Security Works.

The Natcen report on disability benefits is disappointing

The DWP declined to publish the Natcen report on The uses of health and disability benefits.  It’s now been released to the Work and Pensions Committee, and is available here.  The report is presented as a qualitative study; wisely, the authors have avoided numbers.  However, the form of the report is disappointing, and I cannot suppose that it is an adequate reflection of the work that was done.

Qualitative social research works, or needs to work, on two guiding principles.  The first is that what people tell you is evidence.  That is often derided by people in love with quants, but it is fundamental to the nature of evidence.  Courts of law judge evidence by looking for corroboration – probabilities and statistics aren’t enough.  As a broad proposition, evidence is corroborated when two or three witnesses  say the same things, confirming what the others have said.  This report doesn’t do that. It consists very largely of the researchers’ summaries of what people told them.  In a 79-page report, there are 15 ‘case illustrations’, and only 27 direct quotations from respondents.  That means, simply put, that while there are plenty of judgments, there is hardly any evidence given for those judgments.

The second principle is voice: what people tell you, and the way they tell it, matter.  Direct quotations, right or wrong, have a purpose and a moral authority.  Researchers have an ethical duty to report what people are telling them.  The way the respondents express themselves is fundamental to any adequate qualitative social research.

It may well be that this format was demanded by the DWP.  (I’ve been asked by other commissioners, in the past, to dump direct quotations and to just say what I think instead – and I’ve refused to do so.)  It’s very likely that the researchers intend to provide the evidence for this report, and to reflect the voice of the respondents,  in a separate publication.  However, they will need the DWP’s permission for this.  Their report, as it stands, does not do what it needed to do.

The TUC proposes a ‘replacement’ for Universal Credit

It’s been obvious for many years that Universal Credit is failing. On this blog, I’ve considered a long series of critical reports.  When I first made criticisms of the benefit – that was done on the same day that Iain Duncan Smith announced the measure – my concerns were about the concept and its practicability.  Then the criticisms moved on to its implementation, and the impact of further complexity to make up for the deficiencies.  Nowadays, the areas of concern are more likely to be focused on the abundant empirical evidence of failure – for a benefit that has still not fully been rolled out.

The TUC has realised that Universal Credit is a ‘disaster‘, and a new report makes proposals for its ‘replacement’.  The detailed report covers six main areas:

  • making work pay
  • increasing the level of benefit
  • changing rules about conditionality and the initial waiting period
  • changing the process
  • altering the assessment periods, and
  • changing rules for payment.

These are all ways to improve the benefit.  I don’t think this goes anything like far enough.  The fundamental problems will remain:  a tapered benefit, a central focus on getting people to work  when most of its claimants are either already in work or aren’t going to be in the labour market, and a reliance on information that can’t be supplied or managed. The TUC’s proposals are well meant, but they leave all of those elements in place.

 

 

 

Computer says ‘no’

It’s admittedly difficult to get resources to people given the state of the benefits system.  The Chancellor has pleaded that it’s difficult to get higher benefits paid to people, because so many benefits don’t run on the shiny new systems introduced for Universal Credit.  Many people are still on legacy benefits, which rely on older computer systems.

A focus on Universal Credit may seem the best option available, but there are two large deficiencies in that.  The first is the deliberate exclusion of so many people from Universal Credit itself.  The coverage of UC is limited by design: the limitations are produced by

  • work requirements
  • people excluded from recourse to public funds
  • sanctions (the largest number being for people who have missed a meeting)
  • limited entitlements because of notional (or imaginary) income
  • capital rules
  • the arbitrary changes in entitlement coming from fluctuating incomes, and
  • Inaction/suspension because information required

At slightly higher income levels, people may also drop out of the UC system because of the benefit cap or the two child limit.

The second problem, of course, is that people may not have claimed UC although they were entitled to it. The government seemes to be working on the wholly implausible assumption that takeup is about 83% – which would mean that the takeup of UC was markedly better than the previous takeup of Pension Credit, Job Seekers Allowance or any disability benefit, and that that would be true despite UC’s special blend of all the factors identified as deterring takeup in previous research (PDF file).

There are other ways of getting money to people on the lowest incomes.  Cold weather payments  (ignore the weather bit) provide one obvious mechanism: they make it possible for the government to transfer money automatically to  recipients of Pension Credit, UC, Income Support, income-based JSA or ESA.   Or, if that’s too finicky, Winter Fuel Payments (which aren’t actually assessed in winter anyway) go to every pensioner, and Child Benefit goes to every child – that covers, in a simple and practical way, a substantial majority of people on lower incomes.   Putting money into pensions and Child Benefit as well as UC would be hugely more helpful than UC alone.  The targeting is not perfect, but it’s practical and a more effective than tax reductions could ever be.

The DWP is a people business. Treat it like one.

The DWP has announced the closure of several of its offices in Scotland, apparently intended to reduce the size of its ‘estate’ – that is, the buildings and offices it uses.  It’s true enough that many people working in the system found it impersonal – to that extent, location isn’t what matters most.  The estate is about more than buildings, however: it’s also important for people – where they work, how they get there, and what it’s like when they are there.

One of the last research projects I undertook, before the Great Shutdown, was a project listening to the views and experiences of social security officers in Scotland, some of whom were in places that are about to be closed down.  We had 228 qualitative responses, 142 from staff in group meetings and 86 written submissions.

My only interaction with other DWP departments is whatever contact our computers have. There’s very little with actual people. Staff move about between roles but once you’re in you’re chained to your desk and don’t get to know any other parts of the business.

There are serious delays, but staff have been clocked from dealing with them by a system that is fragmented and inflexible.

There is no staff to process claims, and there is a backlog of claims. We’re now at a stage where you’re going through your own cases and there’s ones going back … –and they’re vulnerable customers – and there’s no staff being allocated to deal with it. There are skilled staff who could address that, and process claims, but they’re put on the phones. People are put on the wrong jobs.

At its core, the DWP is a people business: it relies on people (its staff) talking to other people (the service users).  And service users have lots to say to a human being, if only they can find one.

The fact that you have a time frame at all shows they don’t have a clue – some might take two minutes, but others take 25 minutes, it takes as long as it takes and sometimes you just need to listen to them.

 You find yourself cutting them off, trying to wrap it up so you’re under time and they just don’t get the service they should.

 (On the phones) I was told (by a manager) to get to the point quicker. The woman was bereaved and crying and I wasn’t prepared to rush her off the phone.

We’ve lost that human touch.

Over the years, there’s been a recurring problem.  The central administration of the Department is convinced that  the  reason why the system doesn’t work is that the boneheads in the offices can’t do it right.  The people in the offices, meanwhile,  do everything they can to make things work, despite their instructions.

Benefit Officers should be able to help people and use initiative. The current system is too rigid.

They (managers) just look at whether you are following the script and not if you’ve helped the person.

The officials know what needs to be done.  They want to be able to sort people’s problems out.  Lots of them say that they want to be able to follow problems through until they’re dealt with properly.  It’s the system that stops them from doing it.

The Way to Work … won’t work

I didn’t respond immediately to the Government announcement of new rules for unemployed people, because I can’t actually make sense of those rules.  All I’ve found to go on is a press release, which tells me that unemployed people will be expected to find work in any job, regardless of skills, after four weeks.  More specifically, the press release says this:

 those who are capable of work will be expected to search more widely for available jobs from the fourth week of their claim, rather than from three months as is currently the case. … Under existing rules claimants have 3 months to find a job in their preferred sector before facing the prospect of sanctions. New rules will mean that sanctions could begin 4 weeks after their initial UC claim, if they’re not making reasonable efforts to find and secure a job in any sector or turn down a job offer.

The way the system is supposed to work is this.  People make a claim for Universal Credit when they become unemployed.  They are then invited to a meeting with a work coach who gets them to sign a claimant commitment.  They do not receive benefit before five weeks.  So it seems that

      • the claimant commitment will be established and signed at a point where the obligations allow them to specify what their expertise and competence makes reasonable.
      • After four weeks, the claimant commitment will have to be torn up and replaced with other obligations.
      • The renegotiation is going to happen before claimants are actually paid anything.

I may have this completely muddled – I can’t tell from the details that have been made available – but if this is right, what I’d expect to happen is this. Some work coaches will  jump the gun – if they don’t, it would double their workload. People with skills will not bother claiming at all, because the extreme economic prejudice of taking any job will outweigh the potential benefit. Others will be sanctioned because they don’t turn up to a second meeting with the work coach. Employers will be flooded with inappropriate applications.

Stepping back from the details, there’s much more wrong with this policy.  The first misconception is that sanctions encourage people to get into work.  There’s no evidence to back that up.  The main use of sanctions in practice is to ensure compliance with the benefit rules – the vast majority of sanctions are given for not coming to meetings – and it’s not clear that they even do that.  Second, there is the myth that unemployed people won’t work otherwise.  Before the government started messing about, about 90% of unemployed people were back to work in a year.  That figure has fallen to about 80%, I suspect largely because of the forced transfer of many people from Incapacity Benefit or ESA – those who are too sick to work.  And the third is the ridiculously misconceived position that Universal Credit is mainly a benefit intended to get people into work.  It isn’t. It covers people on low wages, and as the transfer is proceeding there are increasing numbers of people without jobs who  are chronically sick or caring for young children – people who would previously have been receiving Incapacity Benefit/ESA  or Income Support.  The numbers of long-term unemployed people are relatively small, but policies have been driven by the myth that dealing with them is the main purpose of the benefits system. No wonder it’s a mess.

 

Evidence to the Welsh Affairs Committee on Universal Basic Income

I gave oral evidence to the Welsh Affairs Committee at a session on November 3rd, and have only just got round to reading the transcript, which is here. I made three important reservations about Universal Basic Income: the distributive impact, especially if it was to be funded by closing down existing benefits; the impossibility of defining a level that would be ‘adequate’; and the many other purposes that benefits have.

There are two points in the transcript at which the MPs misconstrued what I was saying, and while the format of the session wouldn’t allow me to go off on a tangent to explain, I can clarify the points here.

Q116 was not addressed to me – it was answered by Jonathan Williams.  Q117 was, and Geraint Davies MP seems to have taken me to mean that people should be forced to work. I can’t see where he got that from, which makes it difficult to answer; I said no such thing, and wouldn’t.  I did say that conditionality does not work and was counter-productive.

In Q143, Robin Millar MP thought I was arguing to ‘tweak’ the system. This, at least, is an understandable misapprehension; I should have been clearer. I have argued, here and elsewhere, to break up big benefits into smaller ones.  However, I don’t think that’s a ‘tweak’ – it would be a fundamental reform.  See, for example, my blog on How to abolish Universal Credit.  The rationale for redesigning the system about simpler,  smaller benefits with common pay-days is that then ‘income packages’ – the money people finish with – can be adapted to their needs without massive intrusion or putting everyone on the same conveyor belt.

 

Universal Credit never fails to confuse

A research report from the IPR at Bath University began by trying to examine the impact of the £20 uplift on claimants, but hit a snag; many claimants haven’t a clue about how the uplift works, or even if they were receiving it. “Of the 56 participants, less than half said they were aware of the uplift (25/56); over half (31/56) were either not aware (28/56), or not sure (3/56).”

I didn’t even notice to be honest … because it doesn’t say that on the statement I don’t think … because his wage … can be different every
month, I never really know what we’re going to get UC, it doesn’t stay the same …

This shouldn’t come as a surprise.  Over time I’ve reported a catalogue of problems with the design of the benefit, and this one comes up repeatedly. More than ten years ago, I was complaining that “It can be hard for claimants to know whether they are entitled, how much they are entitled to and – just as important – when they should stop receiving the benefit.” The same point has been made by an All-Party Parliamentary Group.  The IPR report concludes:

We hesitate to call these effects ‘unintended’ or ‘design flaws’ because, in the main, they reflect how UC is intended to work.

“Experts by experience”?

A group of ‘experts by experience’ have developed a series of proposals for the reform of social security.  I’ve just been listening to their presentations.  They claim that

“Commissioners as Experts by Experience cut through organisational and interest group silos and fragmented debates about poverty, instead providing a holistic perspective, with an ability to focus on fundamental core issues and anchored in lived experience of the system.”

I don’t think that’s borne out in practice.  The Commisson’s principles, asking for dignity, respect and adequate benefits, are unexceptionable.  The point which set the alarm bells ringing for me, however, was the proposal to replace PIP with a different benefit to meet the costs of disability. If we look now at the rules for PIP, or at the previous rules for DLA, we should be able to see that the assessment is not an assessment of costs; that the levels of benefit are not related to the costs, but to the severity of the disability; and that another service which does consider the costs, as part of the social care system, has a different reach and scope to these  benefits.  The idea that PIP was meant to meet extra costs largely began with the introduction of DLA, 1993-94.   But the benefits it was based on – Attendance Allowance and Mobility Allowance  – weren’t there to meet extra costs.  Attendance Allowance, despite the name, was always a benefit for severe disability rather than attendance as such, and it was explicitly introduced (in 1970) to supplement the depressed incomes that people with disabilities had to suffer over the long term.   That’s an important principle, that we shouldn’t lose sight of.

When people claim to be ‘experts by experience’, it seems to chime with a lot of the ideas that have informed participation and diversity in the development of policy.  The central claim, which I have  no problem with, is that people with disabilities have expertise relating to their own disability.  That squares with one of the core propositions that has guided social care policy in recent years: Nothing about me, without me.  There’s an influential literature about user participation in policy-making.  Over the years, I’ve done a certain amount of work, as a researcher and policy analyst, based on the principle of empowerment.   A lot of qualitative research consists of listening and recording what people say, and I’ve mentored groups of people in poverty undertaking participative research projects, so that they can do as much.  That’s less a matter of expertise than of attitude: valuing what people say, treating it seriously, conveying people’s feelings and experiences in their own words.   

The claim to be ‘experts by experience’, however, goes some way further than that.  The group  which has formed these proposals had drawn on a combination of people with disabilities and community activists.  The idea that they are “expert” appears to stake a claim that people with  personal experience  have an expert’s general understanding of people with different personal experiences from theirs.  And there, with regret, I must beg to differ. There are three evident problems.  The first is that a group of this kind can’t conceivably represent the range and diversity of experiences out there.  Most benefits go to pensioners: this is a group which is largely of working age. Most unemployment is transitional. Most people with disabilities don’t identify themselves as disabled: they’re ‘managing’, or ‘not really disabled’, or disabled ‘sometimes’. The claim to ‘expertise’ dispenses with the need to cover the range of experience.

Second, activists are different.  This is well-known in political research, where the views of activists are always a bit more pronounced than the mainstream – that’s why they’re activists.  Activists in social security are more likely to be long-term recipients, from which it follows that they’re also in situations that change less rapidly than many others, in more unpredictable and precarious situations.

Third, the kind of ‘expertise’ that people develop is typically formed in relation to current policies and politics.  Claimants’ understanding of the arcane systems they’re being asked to comply with are conditioned by the current shape of benefits.  Very few people will know or remember that there were once earnings-related Unemployment Benefits, or higher rates of Invalidity Benefit for people who suffered disability at an earlier age, or a One Parent Benefit, or a Non Contributory Invalidity Pension; this kind of option disappears from view.

We need, of course, to take the voices of claimants seriously.  They have a right to be heard, and information we can’t obtain without engaging them.  Calling them “experts by experience”, however, is not the way either to get the greatest level of participation, or to get to the meat of a policy.

Is the government replacing its £6bn cut in Universal Credit with a £1bn reduction in the taper?

It’s being proposed, apparently, that the way to compensate for cutting Universal Credit by £20 a week is to reduce the taper from 63% to 60%.  This is, from the point of view of claimants, a very small concession.  It would mean that, if they earn £200pw, they would be able to retain all of £6pw in UC, or potentially less than £4 pw lif they’re then subject to tax, National Insurance or loss of Council Tax Reduction.

This very marginal change will cost, according to government sources, will cost £1bn, in place of the £6bn that the current uplift is costing. The second of these figures makes some kind of sense.  There are currently about 5.8 million claimants of UC, and at £1040 per year the cost would come to just over £6bn.  But the first figure is one I can’t untangle at all, and the scrappy information available on the DWP’s Stat-Xplore site doesn’t help much.

I’ll start with a previously published figure, one which I have to admit I’d simply let pass without even noticing it. It was a claim, when the taper came down from 65% to 63%, that the cost would be £700m. On that basis, each percentage point on the taper costs the government £350m or so.  From that, it seems to follow that pulling down the taper by another 3% would cost  over £1bn.

When I start to think about it, however, that crude calculation doesn’t look as if it can be right. On current estimates (a forecast for this year) there are 2.3 million people  working and receiving UC. Cutting the taper for someone who is already earns £10 pw would allow them to keep an extra 30p in benefit. (If they’re not working, and have no other additional income, they wouldn’t get anything extra.)  To cost £1bn, the average income of people who are working and claiming benefit would have to have an income in the region of £300 pw – more or less, a full time minimum wage – and that would bring them all to the point of paying tax and National Insurance, which would claw back more than a quarter of the apparent benefit.  Are all the working people who get UC on at least a full time minimum wage?  Perhaps others can find the data to support this, but I can’t tell.

The situation is more complicated,  because the rules are complicated.  The work allowances (which aren’t actually ‘allowances’, but let’s not go there) are only there for families with  children, who might well use them, and people with limited capacity, who probably won’t.  There’s a difference in the allowances between people who rent and people who don’t. For higher total incomes, there’s a benefit cap.  It’s hard, then, even to say how many UC claimants are directly subject to the taper, or what their total income will be. The tally will certainly include single persons in employment, and it will probably include low-income families who are buying  a house, but I haven’t been able to extract figures that give me a sensible size for either group.  What I think I can say, at least, is that there isn’t a firm, clear constituent group who will certainly benefit from this concession.

It would be possible, and distributively fairer, not to reduce the taper, but to increase the work allowance, ideally making it available (as it used to be) to people without children. That would give a limited but determinate benefit to anyone  who works while on UC.  A government that was better disposed towards people on low incomes might be more inclined to retain the £20 uplift; but then, a government that was better disposed wouldn’t have introduced this nightmarishly complex system in the first place.

A utopian vision of money for everyone

One of the Zoom sessions I went to today was fuelled by optimism about a most unlikely scenario: the idea that the United Nations should provide people around the world with a universal basic income.  The advocates were arguing that the money could be raised to pay everyone $30 a month, and that it should be.   Their position paper can be read here.

I don’t want to dismiss this as a thoroughly bad idea.  In the course of the last 20 years or so, many countries have been introducing cash support for their populations, that support can make a huge difference to people’s lives, and the support doesn’t have to be conditional. The case is well made in a short book by Hanlon and others, Just give money to the poor (2010), and reinforced by the experience of small area provision in India and Kenya.  (These experiences don’t translate well into a case for the same policy in developed countries, where BI proposals are often being developed in terms that will not improve the incomes of many poor people, and may make some worse off.)

Nor do I see the proposal as being intrinsically unaffordable.  It would call for redistribution from richer countries, but that already happens in the form of Oversesas Development Assistance.  Asking the UN to take it on seems like a long shot, but the UN is at least an appropriate forum for discussion: the UN’s Guiding principles on extreme poverty and human rights marks out their interest in the area.

The core problems are somewhat different.  The first question to ask is obvious: is this the greatest priority? People in developing countries need money, but many of them are poorly integrated into any formal economy where the money can best be spent. Other contenders for support might be health care, education, water, and sanitation – all of which are essential to welfare, but probably better delivered without depending on private, commercial markets.-

The second problem is logistic.  How does one distribute money to seven billion people – or even to four billion?  I raised the point on the forum, and the answer came back: mobile money wallets.  For which people need first to have access to electronic devices, and the means of powering them, and local providers need to have the means to process the payments.   It’s not much of an argument to say this has been done in small communities.  Implementation changes with scale.

Advocates for Basic Income are not all utopians, but the curse of Basic Income schemes has been a common failure to think through how things can practically be done, and what the rules should be.  Who gets the money? Do they have to claim? How is the money paid? How are children to be treated? How can we ensure that the money is used by the person it’s intended for? What happens when someone dies?  These are the sort of details that experiments in BI ought to have engaged with and sorted long ago – not all the nonsense about incentives and behaviour change.