The government’s white paper, Get Britain Working, isn’t bad. It’s reflecting on a long-standing failure of policy. For the best part of forty years, the focus has fallen on the failings of unemployed people, rather than the structural deficiencies of the labour market. Successive governments have tried to remedy this through increasingly punitive actions, impoverishment by design and the development of a bewildering series of agencies that are supposed to guide people into work.
This ‘White Paper’ devotes much of its attention to the problems rather than the responses – stuff that would more conventionally be the subject of a consultative Green Paper. It does commit, however, to a substantial increase in opportunities for young people who are not in work or education. That is no bad thing.
In my book “How to Fix the Welfare State”, I pointed to a series of misjudgments:
- ‘Active’ labour market policy shifts the burden of unemployment to the people who experience it.
- Incentives are not a simple matter of comparing benefit levels with wages.
- The standard microeconomic analysis, presenting unemployment as a matter of personal choice, is an ideological prejudice, not social science.
- Employment services have suffered by being muddled with benefits.
It’s more worrying that the White Paper has been announced by ministers in terms that are openly punitive. “Starmer declares war on benefits Britain”, says the Mail. “Young people who refuse to work to lo0se benefits”, says the BBC reporting Liz Kendall. This language is poisonous. One would think that forty years of failing to drive people with skills they don’t have into jobs that don’t exist might have given policy-makers reason to think things through.
I want in this blog, however, to point to another aspect of the same policy failure, which relates to sickness and disability. There’s rather less about this, with a Green Paper promised for next Spring. The previous (Conservative) government issued a DWP Green Paper about disability benefits, Modernising support for independent living, which showed a disturbing failure to understand the simplest things about disability benefits: that
- these benefits are a supplement to income
- they are not based on an assessment of extra costs
- they are not means tested
- they are not about the ability to work, and so they are not lost if people work.
I have made fuller comments about that Green Paper here. For present purposes, what matters is that these benefits hold the answer to the supposed problem that the new White Paper says it wants to address: “to change the system of health and disability benefits across Great Britain so that it better enables people to enter and remain in work.” That is exactly why we need benefits that are a supplement to income, not means tested and unrelated to the capacity to work.