The Welfare Reform White Paper, Policy Making, Implementation, and the Government of Narnia

(This is quite long at 4,400 words, and the word version here may be easier on the eye) 

1          INTRODUCTORY COMMENTS 

I’ve reserved judgment on the Welfare Reform White Paper ‘Raising Expectations’ until I had time to read it, and to revisit in the light of the accompanying documents – the Green Paper ‘No-one written off’ and Professor Paul Gregg’s report ‘Raising Expectations’.  Always the best way, I reckon, though it certainly slows down blog commentary. 

In the meantime, there’s been blogoland comment aplenty on it, with, I guess, most people taking up the expected positions.  Just for example, Tom Harris , Howard Dawber and Cambridge Universities Labour Club stand full square behind the proposals, while Harpymarx – who’s done more to keep the issue ‘alive’ during the whole process than most of the ‘anti’ bloggers now expressing outrage as though it’s the first they’ve heard of it – Dave Osler, Grimmer Up North, Jon at his Union blog and Penny Red (very angrily) and many others suggest the whole thing is pretty, well ‘criminal’ (see below). 

And just as James Purnell and his civil servants must have intended the mainstream media, whom I’ll represent by reference to Nick Robinson, have latched on the the ‘carrot’ elements quickly enough to suggest that it’s not as stick-y as everyone had been making out and that they’ve definitely, definitely understood where the government’s coming from with its cute Tory vote-grabbing strategy for presentation. So I expect there is a very wide readership out there desperate to know what I think of it all, and I aim to please, but first a word on the process for this White Paper.   

Doesn’t anyone else find it a little odd that we get a Green Paper in August, with the normal consultation period, but then Paul Gregg’s report ‘Realising potential’ published on 02 December, containing a huge amount of detail about how the ‘three groups’ of benefit-claimers will be treated, with no opportunity to comment, just 8 days before the White Paper is published. The White Paper is very heavily based on Gregg’s recommendations, and devotes a whole chapter to a response to each and every one of them, for example.  The paragraph in the Gregg report acknowledging that it goes much further than the Green paper reads as follows: ‘The recommendations in this Review are wide-ranging and challenging and will keep the UK in the vanguard of nations reforming their welfare systems in a progressive manner. Nonetheless they fundamentally build on what is already good about the current system, and some of the major changes and pilot activities planned in coming years (for example the changes to ESA planned for 2010, the introduction of the Flexible New Deal and many of the proposals made in the Green Paper, No One Written Off, earlier this year) can be seen as partial stepping stones towards the vision.’ 

Call me a stickler for tradition if you like, but I prefer to be consulted on all the things that are being proposed for the White Paper, not just the few (relatively) broad statements of intent in the Green Paper, with any focus there is principally on the long term sick as opposed to everyone on benefit.  Very naughty. 

Now that that’s off my chest, where do I stand on what makes it into what is a more detailed White Paper than you often get – this reflecting Paul Gregg significant contribution? I separate my response into three main areas; 
a)      An assessment of the actual proposals in the White Paper, working on the assumption that they are implemented largely as written; 

b)      A critique of the assumptions made about implementation, with the argument that the implementation risks being much more draconian and ‘impersonal’ than intended by ‘policy makers’; and 

c)     A view of how the Left should react in practical terms to the White Paper and its implementation. 

2          THE ACTUAL PROPOSALS SET OUT IN THE WHITE PAPER 

Who is work good for? 

The first thing to say is that I do accept the very general premise that having a job is good for lots of people.  There’s pretty good research evidence around now that being in work is the best way to be or become ‘socially included’ not just through the cash it brings in but also through the network of contacts and social relations you build up beyond your home environment, which become self-perpetuating so that if you lose work it’s easier to pick it up again.  Conversely, ‘social exclusion’ may be multi-faceted and different for everybody, but I accept there’s a general correlation between it and worklessness. All this is summed up well enough in this 2004 Social Exclusion Task Force report: 

‘In the case of people of working age, the principal dimension of social exclusion is, arguably, exclusion from the world of work, as this group of people is defined in terms of their availability for work (working age). This is not to say that exclusion from work is the only dimension of social exclusion affecting working age adults. Nonetheless, a lack of access to work is central to social exclusion amongst this age group. Lack of participation in the labour market is not only a key indicator of social exclusion but it is also a factor reinforcing and exacerbating other aspects of social exclusion, including poverty, homelessness, ill health, restricted mobility, and so on.’ 

But the key point about this statement is that it doesn’t prescribe ‘getting a job’ as the social exclusion remedy for everybody.  It actually accepts that for some people the key issues in their lives are different.    For some people, and some family units, having to get a job in the way set forth in the White Paper proposals will surely have the reverse effect on their level of exclusion.   

What about the woman with those ‘hidden’ caring responsibilities who have a strong network of friends to keep them going but will never see them now?  What about the young man who’s had lots of jobs but always loses them after three days because he’s on the autism spectrum but grew up in such a deprived household that nobody ever thought to seek help – they just thought he was a bit thick.  What about that 48 year old bloke who’s been having panic attacks for 12 years and which got him laid off in the first place but has never been to the GP because his mates would call him a sissy, and for whom the thought of having to go back to it all is making him think about whether it’s worth going on at all now that the wife and kids are gone? Is work really the best ‘cure’ for their ills? 

There really is a big assumption in the whole White Paper that the health and social services have ‘captured’ all the people with work ability-affecting life problems and sorted them out, either into a fit state to get on with work, or into the third small group of people who’ll get less hassle than everyone else from Job Centre Plus.  Just check the GP registration rates in deprived areas, and especially amongst BME communities and those with housing needs, for a feel of how invalid this assumption might be – see here for example. 

And, yes, I know there’s going to be increased ‘adviser flexibility’ for the ‘second group’ – a matter I’ll come back to –  but many of the kind of people I’m talking about above are fair and square in the first group, for whom there’s no such flexibility.  In any event, the notion that EVERYONE stands to gain from being pushed towards work simply doesn’t stand up to sensible scrutiny. In fact, in terms of ill health, the Gregg report recognizes this fact when it says: ‘in the context of those with more serious health conditions on ESA, there is no assessment tool available to reliably inform an adviser as to whether any particular individual can cope with any particular job given their condition.’  Unfortunately, recognizing it is not the same as doing something about it, and the White Paper does not reflect this refinement of thinking by Gregg. 

And what, finally about employers?  Do they really want people in their workforce who may end up being a danger to themselves and others, and who they know from Day 1 may not be able to cope?  What does that do for continuity of business operation?  I’m not sure that employer ‘buy-in’ is mentioned at all in the White Paper. 

The minimum wage revisited 

The idea of what might be called ‘work for welfare’ in the White Paper but might also, if we wanted to give it whole different connotations, be called ‘Forced Labour’, is the element of the proposals which has brought the most  criticism, for example from John here. That’s hardly a surprise.  It does seem strange or a government that brought in the minimum wage now to be introducing a wage rate for its own ‘services’ far below the minimum wage.  If people are going to be put to ‘community service’, then isn’t that the same thing as ‘public service’.  And don’t public servants merit a living wage?   

It may only end up for being for a small number of people in the long run, not least because quite frankly I can see people starting to ‘game’ the system in order not to have to comply – even if that means going without benefit for a few weeks and then signing back on (the loan sharks will be licking their lips at that prospect) – but I still can’t see it as anything but wrong in principle. 

After all, this announcement comes just shortly after the announcement that people serving community sentences will have to wear orange day-glo vests to mark them out from respectable society – I wonder what colour the long term unemployed (and the unemployable) will have to wear while they are on the job (which will be a lot more hours than those serving community sentences, which range between 40 and 240 hours in total). 

As the White Paper notes ‘This proposal provoked differing responses during the Green Paper consultation. Some were supportive, but others have suggested that Work for Your Benefit could be seen as a punishment. This is certainly not our intention.’ 

I’m sorry, that’s just weak.  If lots of organizations who actually work with the long term unemployed tell us it will be seen as a punishment, for the government simply to tell us not to take it like that is not helpful. If it feels like punishment, then it is punishment, surely.  Interestingly this paragraph (6.9) is immediately preceded by the stark warning that ‘simultaneously claiming and working’ is ‘unacceptable’. 

Well, no-one is disputing that – it’s already a criminal offence for which the DWP regularly brings prosecutions – and the phrase simply gives the game away about what is the implicit intention of the work to welfare proposals, I’m afraid. 

There is another way to be had with the very long term unemployed, who do make up a very small percentage of the total on benefit – a tried and tested way.  In the mid to late 90’s the Intermediate Labour Market (ILM) was all the policy rage, as were its proponents like the organization now known as the Wise Group (now tendering to offer the Flexible New Deal across swathes of Scotland and Northern England) and Liverpool’s Furniture Resource Centre (for which I seem to remember I did some of the early business planning or pilot evaluating or something).  

ILM projects were about combining benefits and other sources of funding – for example what we now call Learning and Skills Council funds – to create a living wage for people to go into appropriately supported employment. 

It worked well – without them being compulsory – with the percentage of people finding sustained employment beyond the ILM period far higher than those entering training programmes etc..   Yes, it was relatively expensive on the ‘input’ side, but the ‘outcome’ – people off long term benefit made it value for money.   Sadly, such schemes were largely shelved or restricted to ‘Employment Zones’ (and even there the ‘living wage’ was cut back, as was the length of time people could spend on the project) because policy decisions were made before proper evaluations had been carried out – just like they are in this White Paper (see below). 

A challenge for those of us who want to constructively oppose the compulsory ‘work for welfare’ proposals is to promote the rebirth and roll out of properly resourced ILM mechanisms across the country. 

The small matter of childcare 

According to the White Paper, a relevant ‘work-related activity for a parent with a child aged 1-7 will be to: ‘stabilise their own or their family’s situation, for example, assessing childcare options, activities to stabilise health conditions, seeing a debt adviser about stabilising their financial situation and looking at options for improving their housing situation, or joining a Children’s Centre; (box 4.5).

Quite aside from the fact that you do not ‘join’ a Children’s Centre – you use its services – the childcare issues set out in the White Paper (and the Gregg report) raise more questions than they provide answers. 

First of all, though, it’s important to stress what we’re dealing with here.  We’re not dealing with leaving your car at the garage, but where to leave your most treasured possession in the world – your child.  As someone who runs childcare provision (as Director of a not-for-profit company), I can tell you that where to leave your child in care, if you do it all, is one of the decision in life that parents tend to take seriously.   The whole notion of having a Personal Adviser, however well meaning they are, having a significant hand in that decision as a condition of continued benefit seems beyond the pale. 

The key question is:  what will happen if a parent goes back to the Advisor after reviewing ‘options’ and says ‘To be honest, I’ve looked at all the provision in both day nursery settings and childminders within reasonable travel distance, and there’s just no provision I’d feel comfortable about leaving my child at, especially with his asthma the way it is.’  Will that be a valid outcome?  Or will the Adviser be inclined to say ‘Well all the other mothers I’ve dealt with are happy to use ABC nursery at the end of the village.  What makes you so special, Ms Snooty Pants?’ 

Frankly, childcare in the UK is a mixed bag.  Some of it great; some of it is still the ‘pretty basic childcare’ that Matthew Taylor refers to – not a formal title for childcare provision, but I think we know what he means.  That’s precisely why the government introduced its 10 Year Childcare Strategy in 2004, and backed it up with an Action Plan in 2006, in recognition that the childcare ‘industry’ was and still is largely a low-wage, low esteem area in urgent need of ‘professionalisation’ as appropriate.  The plans are laudable, and Children’s Centres have contributed to improvements, but these improvements are patchy and not helped by the fact that the large providers will generally not operate nurseries below 50 places because the economies of scale don’t work for them.  

To be suggesting in the White Paper that, universally, we can impose ‘childcare options’ is not yet a valid prospect, and the risk is that option’s will be imposed by the state rather than chosen by the parent. This flies in the face of the government’s own ‘choice agenda’. Then there are the practical issues.  At the moment free nursery education provision is available 15 hours per week for 33 weeks per year, expanding soon to 38 week per year, but only for 3 and 4 year olds. To take up employment this will have to be accessed alongside paid-for care, which may be at the same place or may be somewhere different like a childminder. 

The issues of constant changes to what’s being paid for and what’s free through the year (when a child may become three, or five and off to school which may or may not have decent quality after school club) will all now be fed back towards the Personal Adviser, presumably? All in all, the whole childcare thing has not been thought through, and will be difficult to work at best, and an intolerable invasion of personal and family autonomy at worst. 

3          THE DEVIL IN THE DETAIL OF IMPLEMENTATION 

Even if the issues set out fairly briefly above (and believe me, there’s a much longer critique to be made) were of no great importance, the success of the proposed reforms will – obviously enough, depend on how successfully or otherwise the changes to the benefit system are implemented. This whole area makes for some interesting reading in both the White Paper and in Paul Gregg’s report – interesting indeed because they appear at variance with each other. 

Here’s what the Green Paper said: ‘We have built up a strong base of evidence about what works. But until now we have not been able to extend the successful Pathways model to large numbers of existing claimants.’ (para 3.18). 

Here in contrast is what the Paul Gregg says: ‘However, there is not a great deal of evidence that points to which adviser flexibilities would drive better outcomes, and on how these should best be structured and operated.’ (p15)  

It’s actually honest of Paul Gregg to accept this, and he does go on to acknowledge that approaches should be tested and piloted before being rolled out.  This is laudable, but it doesn’t get over the fact that ‘Adviser Flexibility’ pilot schemes are already taking place in Derbyshire and South Wales, but that the White Paper has already effectively announced – in advance of any evaluation of the pilots – that the Advisers will have greater ‘flexibilities’ – for which we should read ‘discretionary power over benefit claimants’. 

The key point here though is that Paul Gregg is acknowedging that there is no evidence of whether’ Adviser Flexibility’ actually works or not.  Paul Gregg is primarily an economist, so from his vantage point there is no data to indicate whether benefit claimants reduce in number because of flexibility in intervention. 

The problem is that he’s looking in the wrong place, in a policy environment fixated with positivistic statistical data collection and secondary analysis, at the expense of naturalistic/realist review and evaluation (for a longer discussion of this, see my post here). 

If he had looked away from the economics literature and towards political and social science he’d have found what he was looking for, though it wouldn’t make very welcome reading.  Whilst it’s not made it big  in UK political science until fairly recently (thanks to people like Dave Richards at Sheffield

These findings are confirmed by other studies, including the multi-State coverage in Riccuci N, Meyers M, Lurie I and Han J (2004) The Implementation of Welfare Reform Policy: The Role of Public Managers in Front Line Practice, Public Administration Review Vol 64, No.4, 439-448.   What the latter study adds is that intensive performance management techniques and training can get some front line workers to change their interactions with clients to become more ‘flexible’ in accordance with the new ‘reform’ policies, but that this still doesn’t easily alter deep-rooted work cultures overall. 

Taken together, this and other studies give reliable evidence that front-line staff adopt policy to make it fit what they are able to do under resource constraints.  Just writing a White Paper with policy prescriptions for ‘Adviser Flexibility’ doesn’t mean you’ll get ‘Adviser Flexibility’ in real life.  In fact with the ‘welfare reforms’ now proposed there’s a real risk that, given the additional bureaucracies inevitably involved, mechanisms will evolve that produce less flexibility, more ‘processing’ (i.e.  dehumanising) of clients. In the US at least front-line staff’s starting culture was one geared to just processing benefit claims with no great expectation of what might happen next; in the UK, the invasive New Public Management techniques of the last 25 years mean that front line staff in Job Centre Pluses already start from a more a negative standpoint, just as inclined to ‘process’ but to do so with more of a mind to benefit withdrawal.   

All taken together, there is a huge risk that the whole plus side of the reform – and at policy-making level increased personalized support is seen as a plus – will be ignored in favour of the downside; this will be about pushing people into (for them) counterproductive ‘work related activity’ in order to meet the newly introduced range of targets (and Paul Gregg’s paper is quite clear about the need for performance targets and ‘detailed guidance’ (p 78)). 

There is no mention of targets for the new reforms which relate, for example, to client satisfaction and life improvement; the targets will, as now, all be about driving down the claimant count, irrespective of the actual human cost to benefit-seekers and their families. 

And the boost in funding that will be needed for the ‘reforms’ to give any chance of proper flexibility developing will not be made available.  To give Personal Advisers the time and scope to ‘personalise’ their dealings with claimants requires not just additional training for a workforce which in civil service terms is already fairly well at the bottom of the heap, but also more time per ‘transaction’.  With a workforce bill that currently runs at around £1.7 billion per year according to the 2007-08 Job Centre Plus annual report, the additional frontline staffing and on-costs needed MIGHT be as much as say, £0.5 billion per year.   Paul Gregg, while operating within a clear remit to recommend changes within the existing budget, makes his views clear on the need for adequate investment: ‘‘The right level of funding. This is essential to deliver real incentives to Jobcentre Plus and to enable significantly improved outcomes to be delivered’ (p.81) 

But he is whistling in the wind.  I don’t suppose many Labour backbenchers who support the ‘reforms’, and certainly none of the Conservatives who are also backing them got that far in his report, or indeed as far as his suggestion that: ‘funding models that could allow upfront investment in return to work activity paid for through future benefit savings (the so-called AME-DEL financing mechanism)’ (p.19).  Certainly it gets no mention in the White Paper, and I just can’t see it getting much of a profile at the next Comprehensive Spending Review, whichever government is in charge – the resource needs will quietly be pushed to one side, allowing already overburdened staff to try to cope, and ultimately not cope, with new responsibilities, new targets, new forms of alienation from their client group. 

4          SO WHAT DO WE DO ABOUT IT? 

So how should the Left react to the ‘reforms’?  I’ve already indicated some ways in which we might seek to ameliorate the situation, given that the bill WILL go through and the ’reforms’ will be implemented, however badly.   In general, I think alongside the protest marches and the opposition in totality, we need to be thinking about the best way to deal with what is coming. To a large extent, I think the responsibility has to lies with the unions, especially the PCS, not just to protest, but to get their members thinking at an early stage where their priorities lie. 

In practical terms this means looking at the ‘detailed guidance’ that comes out in due course, arguing long and hard over the drafts to make them fairer, working to ensure that the performance targets imposed reflect real people, not numbers on a claimant count, and working with their staff and all their unions  supporters to enable them to stand up to managers driving their ‘performance, by empowering those staff to say ‘No, these people have a right to personalized and appropriate support – it says so in the guidance.   It also of course means arguing and if need be striking hard for extra resources – staff, time, office space – to do the job properly.  

This will not be easy, and it will take a huger effort not just from the PCS but the whole union movement and its support to make what for some branches at ;east will be a step change from arguing the vital but narrow case for member conditions, to a scenario where members realize that their conditions and fairness to clients are inextricably intertwined, and that some form of ‘strategic alliance’ is needed to combat what is bad in the ‘reforms’ and to bring out what might be good if it’s given a proper chance. 

For the rest of us, there is stuff to do around looking to advocate fairer and more ‘realistic’ models of provision, including (as above) the development of proper (but non-compulsory) ILMs for the longer term unemployed, and a barrage of ‘advice ‘ to government ministers and civil servants to correct what they think is happening on the ground with ‘childcare options’.  

More broadly the challenge is about ramming home to national politicians the fact – the evidence fact – that policy-making does not mean policy-implementing, and that there is a real risk that the whole thing will go more pear-shaped than they can imagine, with no-one receiving ‘personalised support’, but lots of people brutalized by a system which seems to care even less than it did before, one that doesn’t ‘raise expectations’, but dashes hope of a fair deal from the state.