Jobseekers should be required to do more for their benefit - new Policy Exchange report

No Rights Without Responsibility: Rebalancing the welfare state, a new report from the Policy Exchange thinktank, argues that conditions on benefit claimants should be increased so that they have to spend more time each week looking for a job.

They claim that DWP research finds that the average jobseeker currently spends one hour a day looking for work, so the study recommends that current work search requirements should be expanded to make sure that claimants can stay in - or get into - the habits of a normal working lifestyle.

The report makes five main recommendations:

1) Doing more for benefit - conditions on claimants should be increased, so that job search becomes more like a typical 35 hour working week. This should apply to anyone receiving a state benefit (including in-work recipients) and could also involve workfare placements.

2) Work-first and ‘prefered work’ - the length of time some claimants can search for prefered work should be reduced, with anyone not entitled to JSA(CB) being required to search for any work from day one of their claim.

3) Effective sanctions - Sanctions should be closely related to total benefit eligibility, should not necessarily be topped up by other government payments, could be paid through smart cards that limit the range of goods that can be bought, and managed payments for rent, bills and non-financial sanctions also considered.

4) Reinstating a link between contributions and benefit receipt - creating a stronger link between national insurance contributions (NIC’s) and benefits received, through stronger conditionality for anyone without a contribution record, and higher benefit levels for those who have contributed. Explore the creation of a personal welfare account, funded through NIC’s.

5) Segmentation and early referral - Fine better ways to segment and fast track claimants to the Work Programme who need the most help into employment.

Matt Oakley, one author of the report, is Head of Enterprise, Growth and Social Policy at Policy Exchange since 2011. Prior to this he was an economic advisor at the Treasury, where he worked on a number of tax and welfare issues for the previous eight years. Most recently he worked on welfare reform for two years – including the labour market policy responses to the recession, and the Green and White Papers on Universal Credit. The other author, Peter Saunders, is an independent consultant, who was highly critical of The Spirit Level book on social inequality published last year, leading to a letter and an lengthy online discussion on the Guardian’s website

If you want to read the whole report, see the Policy Exchange website No Rights Without Responsibility: Rebalancing the welfare state

Some of the “findings” are frankly laughable, or would be if they weren’t likely to have significant influence over future welfare reforms though Jan.

Take, for example, their use of the a statistic (from a DWP report) that 11% of benefit claimants “feel fully justified being on benefits and believe they have discovered that life without the added complication of work has much to recommend it” - this transmutes later in the report into representing “a large portion of claimants were happy to live a life on benefits”.

Now, I’m no statistician but proposing reforms that will affect a 100% of benefit claimants on the basis of the suggested views of a tenth of that population would seem a little draconian, to say the least, and certainly doesn’t support the assertion that this is, per se, a “large portion” of the claimant population as they claim.

Likewise, their claims that their proposals are “supported by the British public” are based on polls commissionerd by, you guessed it, the Policy Exchange…it’s turkeys voting for Christmas in their world….

They make claims that workfare works, even though a DWP research report suggested that these schemes actually inhibit job-search activity and are ineffective for those farthest from the labour market, they very people they claim need more encouragement to get off benefits and into work. In relation to sanctions and a recent IDS statement offering reassurances that child-related payments wouldn’t be affected by sanctions, they note in calling for tougher and wider-reaching penalties that “We realise that withholding money from families with children poses serious dilemmas” which is nice of them.