It has been shown
time and time again that the current state of the Deliberately Wasted
Potential (formerly known as the Department of Work and Pensions), along
with its plans for the future, is both woefully inadequate and badly
lacking in terms of actually meeting the goals it exists to meet. One
only has to look to common sense to fully get an idea of what these
goals are, as well as highlight exactly how terribly they're performing.
Way back in the post-war years, the government set up some basic
legislation that would ensure that people in the UK would not fall into
endless spirals of unemployment, social exclusion, poverty, sickness,
plus a whole line of other things that really shouldn't be an issue. At
least, they shouldn't be an issue in a country that has a well balanced
economy and a chancellor who can do sums more challenging than 2+2. Of
course, the economy isn't well balanced The entire country seems to be
leaning on the financial industry, rather than having some solid
industries that might continue to thrive in, and help heal, a domestic
moneypocalypse, such as manufacturing and export. (Thanks, iron lady,
for replacing 'steelworks' with 'steal: works!'). Iain Drunken Stiff
(and, by proxy, our very own Green Goblin, George Osborne) can't seem to
calculate the difference between 100% (the percentage of people on
welfare who will certainly be affected by cuts, reforms and clampdowns)
and 0.7% (the percentage of people on welfare who are actually cheating
the system) [ http://opinion.publicfinance.co.uk/2013/01/fact-and-fiction-on-welfare-spending/
]. Well, If IBS (EDIT: sorry, that should say IDS. One is an
untreatable pain in the backside that gives you diarrhoea and nausea,
and the other is a medical condition they can give you pills for) needs a
hint... 100% is a pretty big number that means 'all of it', and it's
rather a lot bigger than 0.7%. 0.7% is the rat you can hit with a
hammer. 100% is your house. Well, Mr Smith, if you're getting the big
hammer out for that rat you've found, by all means, you can employ me to
redecorate your house for you.
Or maybe you can't. For a start, I don't have the relevant degree to be able to pick up a paintbrush. I also haven't spent 5 years in university, studying to be a professional burger-flipper (or in today's terms, a 'crew member', because cooking and selling burgers for minimum wage is a lot like manning a starship. It's continuing mission: to give everyone diet-induced heart attacks. To seek out new meat sources and set up shop everywhere where there might one day be a hungry person. To boldly go where every fast food chain has gone before). I'd ask for training, but while there are experts arriving at Heathrow daily, there's really not much point helping the 7.7% of the UK's workforce [ http://www.tradingeconomics.com/united-kingdom/unemployment-rate ] who aren't in work gain skills that will actually get them work. Training from the job centre. Pipe dream. This is problem number 1. Getting people into work.... failed.
Onto the actual cuts and reforms. This should be fun. Universal Credit will be a single monthly payment that basically brings together all your existing benefits [ http://www.dwp.gov.uk/policy/welfare-reform/universal-credit/ ]. How bad can it be? A single monthly payment for people already struggling to get by on £142 a fortnight might potentially be a little bit bad for those people. Oh, I forgot to include housing benefit, so they'll get substantially more than that. So no longer will some of the taxpayer's money be going direct to landlords, it'll be going to the people who are most likely to prioritise finally being able to feed themselves over paying the rent. I'm not saying people on benefits are bad with money. In fact when you factor in how much money they get with how much they technically need, I'd say the vast majority of them are pretty good at balancing a budget. Unlike the chancellor. Anyway, being handy with a budget is a little irrelevant when that budget mysteriously gets bigger. Especially when you have a spare room. If your rent is £100 a week and you have an extra room, you're only going to get £85 a week to pay your rent with. The other £15 comes out of your already stretched £71 a week income, meaning that before long you'll hit the jackpot and activate homeless mode. Not having an address has a tendency of negatively affecting a person's chances of finding work, applying for universal credit, and a whole host of other things considered important to the upkeep and maintenance of a human being. Either that or you move, giving up your spare bedroom, along with the ability to offer any guests a bed to sleep in. Tackling homelessness.... failed.
The wonderful world of workfare. Recently deemed illegal [ http://www.newstatesman.com/politics/2013/02/workfare-ruled-illegal-only-narrow-terms ], workfare continues to be the flagship idea for the government (to be fair, this was Labour's long before the Tories grabbed the reins) to tackle long term unemployment for those without skills. On the surface, it looks ok. People do a bit of work experience, to gain skills, get back into a working mindset and many other cool and interesting things that might be a bit helpful. What actually happens is people get forced into doing work that's irrelevant to anything they'd want, under threat of sanctions, and can be doing it for up to 2 years. Unpaid. Unpaid work is fine if it's voluntary (i.e the person wants to be there, doing that work and chose it personally). Not so fine if it was either that or go without food, when the work is hell. Especially when out of 20 people working there, 18 are on minimum wage and the other 2 are on less than half minimum wage (benefit money is designed to just about cover the minimum costs of living. minimum wage is substantially higher, although given how it also just about covers the minimum costs of living, it all gets confusing from there). Of course workfare is illegal. To make it legal, forget looking for new rules and stuff and being inventive with paperwork, either pay people for the work they do, or make these voluntary schemes actually voluntary, instead of the voluntary choice between a carrot and a stick. I'm not a rocket scientist but even I can work out where there's ethical issues here. Just to add my own demands in here, why not reform workfare to be completely open with regard to industry, and attach training for nationally recognised qualifications to it? That way, people will be able to re-train via workfare, in an industry of their own choosing, thus answering problem number 1. Still take away the carrot and stick stuff, though, seriously. Blackmail doesn't belong in an equal society.
The Work Programme. Sounds fun, really. A load of very handsomely paid private organisations masquerading as charities (presumably for tax reasons) offering to take on swathes of unemployed people (presumably for unemployment figures reasons) and get them jobs. This is a scheme that definitely works. It works as well as a TV does after a bath. 2.3% of the time [ http://www.leftfutures.org/2013/01/the-work-programme-still-worse-than-useless/ ]. Actually I think the TV would have a better success rate. But what do you really expect when practically all the support for people to find work is gone, and these private businesses 'help' you find work by.... making you do exactly what you do at home every other day of the week. Seriously, they sit you in front of a computer for 2 hours a week to look on the internet for work. So essentially the DWP pay these people to do... nothing, really. Oh the irony. Taxpayers' money being squandered on booze and nice TVs. Ok that was sort of an assumption, but I think if I was on 22k a year [ http://jobs.cdguk.org/ ], I'd probably nip down the pub pretty often before watching Newsnight on a brand new 48" behemoth.
But of course, there's always a backup plan. Workfare is failing, the work programme is failing, what shall we do next? I know, how about revamping our websites? Well yes, of course. All our jobseekers want to do for a living is be drug runners, sex workers, or identity fraud victims [ http://johnnyvoid.wordpress.com/2012/12/09/could-universal-jobmatch-mean-government-enforced-sex-work/ ], so why not? 'You WILL apply to be a prostitute, or you will be sanctioned' I could apply to be personal intelligence sales staff, working in partnership with international agencies based primarily in Nigeria and China, selling personal info and bolstering the biggest industry in the UK at the moment. Fraud. Although the thing about fraud is that it's a pretty specialist industry. If you're very good at it, and steal billions of pounds, you're a credit to the economy, and you get to have a chat with your mates in the Commons. If you can just about fraud up a couple hundred here and there, you're a criminal.
I noticed that Atos were Olympics sponsors. Kind of a good thing they weren't organising it, otherwise the paralympics would have suffered from like 80% of the athletes being disqualified for being alive. 'you're not disabled, look at you. You're breathing!' Turns out it doesn't matter whether you keep your legs in a box under the sink, as long as you still have a pair of legs you can drive a tanker, or at least do 9 hours of customer service a day while giving everyone your norovirus-coated plastic hand full of change, before finally your alzheimers and dementia kick in and you have no idea why you're even at work, so you go home and promptly get fired, and then can't even get your benefits back because you're intentionally unemployed. Of course you can be a telesales operative, you're only completely deaf. With all the prosthetics we've had to give you since your accident, the customers are all afraid you might try to assimilate them. Depression? You call that a disability? There haven't been any cases of Morrissons employees hanging from the rafters...... yet. Well, Atos people, this is because disabled people have been quite sensibly not required to work until now. There are good reasons for this. If a doctor says no, it means no. If a penpushing two-bit chartered accountant with a money saving agenda and a smug, slightly deranged, sadistic grin decides the doctor is wrong... the doctor is still right. Listen to the GP. That wasn't difficult for the 60 or so years pre-Atos. It shouldn't be difficult now. meanwhile that ties in well with all these cuts, because instead of spending billions on some overseas company carrying out assessments, they could rely on the NHS, which already has its own budget for doctors to do doctory stuff... like declaring that sick people are sick.
Anyway, on to solutions. As I said already before, it would get more people working if the few jobs that are left weren't slowly disappearing out of reach. Also if employers employed more people instead of advertising jobs where you have to be able to everything from answering phones to juggling live grenades one-handed while sweeping the floor, standing on your head, dancing gangnam style and typing a suicide note for your boss. All in all, an injection of cash into schemes that actually give people skills and get them jobs, rather than spending billions into black holes that only train people to get angry. As for housing, keep paying rent to landlords, not tenants. Paying it to the tenants is a sure-fire way to free up the housing market by making everyone homeless, so no. Fix the website, too. Workfare can work, but needs radical amounts of reform, not a little itty bitty tweak or two.
Final thought: After reading newspaper reports of people living on taxpayers' money, and getting themselves in loads of debt from booze and parties, I thought 'oh ok... Cameron and Osborne?'. Then it turned out to be yet another barrage of class warfare stigma. Apparently the plebs are revolting. Not nearly as revolting as the ministers, for sure.
Final final thought: They say if you want a job done properly, do it yourself. Like this if you want to see me replace Mark Hoban as minister for employment. I'm serious.
Or maybe you can't. For a start, I don't have the relevant degree to be able to pick up a paintbrush. I also haven't spent 5 years in university, studying to be a professional burger-flipper (or in today's terms, a 'crew member', because cooking and selling burgers for minimum wage is a lot like manning a starship. It's continuing mission: to give everyone diet-induced heart attacks. To seek out new meat sources and set up shop everywhere where there might one day be a hungry person. To boldly go where every fast food chain has gone before). I'd ask for training, but while there are experts arriving at Heathrow daily, there's really not much point helping the 7.7% of the UK's workforce [ http://www.tradingeconomics.com/united-kingdom/unemployment-rate ] who aren't in work gain skills that will actually get them work. Training from the job centre. Pipe dream. This is problem number 1. Getting people into work.... failed.
Onto the actual cuts and reforms. This should be fun. Universal Credit will be a single monthly payment that basically brings together all your existing benefits [ http://www.dwp.gov.uk/policy/welfare-reform/universal-credit/ ]. How bad can it be? A single monthly payment for people already struggling to get by on £142 a fortnight might potentially be a little bit bad for those people. Oh, I forgot to include housing benefit, so they'll get substantially more than that. So no longer will some of the taxpayer's money be going direct to landlords, it'll be going to the people who are most likely to prioritise finally being able to feed themselves over paying the rent. I'm not saying people on benefits are bad with money. In fact when you factor in how much money they get with how much they technically need, I'd say the vast majority of them are pretty good at balancing a budget. Unlike the chancellor. Anyway, being handy with a budget is a little irrelevant when that budget mysteriously gets bigger. Especially when you have a spare room. If your rent is £100 a week and you have an extra room, you're only going to get £85 a week to pay your rent with. The other £15 comes out of your already stretched £71 a week income, meaning that before long you'll hit the jackpot and activate homeless mode. Not having an address has a tendency of negatively affecting a person's chances of finding work, applying for universal credit, and a whole host of other things considered important to the upkeep and maintenance of a human being. Either that or you move, giving up your spare bedroom, along with the ability to offer any guests a bed to sleep in. Tackling homelessness.... failed.
The wonderful world of workfare. Recently deemed illegal [ http://www.newstatesman.com/politics/2013/02/workfare-ruled-illegal-only-narrow-terms ], workfare continues to be the flagship idea for the government (to be fair, this was Labour's long before the Tories grabbed the reins) to tackle long term unemployment for those without skills. On the surface, it looks ok. People do a bit of work experience, to gain skills, get back into a working mindset and many other cool and interesting things that might be a bit helpful. What actually happens is people get forced into doing work that's irrelevant to anything they'd want, under threat of sanctions, and can be doing it for up to 2 years. Unpaid. Unpaid work is fine if it's voluntary (i.e the person wants to be there, doing that work and chose it personally). Not so fine if it was either that or go without food, when the work is hell. Especially when out of 20 people working there, 18 are on minimum wage and the other 2 are on less than half minimum wage (benefit money is designed to just about cover the minimum costs of living. minimum wage is substantially higher, although given how it also just about covers the minimum costs of living, it all gets confusing from there). Of course workfare is illegal. To make it legal, forget looking for new rules and stuff and being inventive with paperwork, either pay people for the work they do, or make these voluntary schemes actually voluntary, instead of the voluntary choice between a carrot and a stick. I'm not a rocket scientist but even I can work out where there's ethical issues here. Just to add my own demands in here, why not reform workfare to be completely open with regard to industry, and attach training for nationally recognised qualifications to it? That way, people will be able to re-train via workfare, in an industry of their own choosing, thus answering problem number 1. Still take away the carrot and stick stuff, though, seriously. Blackmail doesn't belong in an equal society.
The Work Programme. Sounds fun, really. A load of very handsomely paid private organisations masquerading as charities (presumably for tax reasons) offering to take on swathes of unemployed people (presumably for unemployment figures reasons) and get them jobs. This is a scheme that definitely works. It works as well as a TV does after a bath. 2.3% of the time [ http://www.leftfutures.org/2013/01/the-work-programme-still-worse-than-useless/ ]. Actually I think the TV would have a better success rate. But what do you really expect when practically all the support for people to find work is gone, and these private businesses 'help' you find work by.... making you do exactly what you do at home every other day of the week. Seriously, they sit you in front of a computer for 2 hours a week to look on the internet for work. So essentially the DWP pay these people to do... nothing, really. Oh the irony. Taxpayers' money being squandered on booze and nice TVs. Ok that was sort of an assumption, but I think if I was on 22k a year [ http://jobs.cdguk.org/ ], I'd probably nip down the pub pretty often before watching Newsnight on a brand new 48" behemoth.
But of course, there's always a backup plan. Workfare is failing, the work programme is failing, what shall we do next? I know, how about revamping our websites? Well yes, of course. All our jobseekers want to do for a living is be drug runners, sex workers, or identity fraud victims [ http://johnnyvoid.wordpress.com/2012/12/09/could-universal-jobmatch-mean-government-enforced-sex-work/ ], so why not? 'You WILL apply to be a prostitute, or you will be sanctioned' I could apply to be personal intelligence sales staff, working in partnership with international agencies based primarily in Nigeria and China, selling personal info and bolstering the biggest industry in the UK at the moment. Fraud. Although the thing about fraud is that it's a pretty specialist industry. If you're very good at it, and steal billions of pounds, you're a credit to the economy, and you get to have a chat with your mates in the Commons. If you can just about fraud up a couple hundred here and there, you're a criminal.
I noticed that Atos were Olympics sponsors. Kind of a good thing they weren't organising it, otherwise the paralympics would have suffered from like 80% of the athletes being disqualified for being alive. 'you're not disabled, look at you. You're breathing!' Turns out it doesn't matter whether you keep your legs in a box under the sink, as long as you still have a pair of legs you can drive a tanker, or at least do 9 hours of customer service a day while giving everyone your norovirus-coated plastic hand full of change, before finally your alzheimers and dementia kick in and you have no idea why you're even at work, so you go home and promptly get fired, and then can't even get your benefits back because you're intentionally unemployed. Of course you can be a telesales operative, you're only completely deaf. With all the prosthetics we've had to give you since your accident, the customers are all afraid you might try to assimilate them. Depression? You call that a disability? There haven't been any cases of Morrissons employees hanging from the rafters...... yet. Well, Atos people, this is because disabled people have been quite sensibly not required to work until now. There are good reasons for this. If a doctor says no, it means no. If a penpushing two-bit chartered accountant with a money saving agenda and a smug, slightly deranged, sadistic grin decides the doctor is wrong... the doctor is still right. Listen to the GP. That wasn't difficult for the 60 or so years pre-Atos. It shouldn't be difficult now. meanwhile that ties in well with all these cuts, because instead of spending billions on some overseas company carrying out assessments, they could rely on the NHS, which already has its own budget for doctors to do doctory stuff... like declaring that sick people are sick.
Anyway, on to solutions. As I said already before, it would get more people working if the few jobs that are left weren't slowly disappearing out of reach. Also if employers employed more people instead of advertising jobs where you have to be able to everything from answering phones to juggling live grenades one-handed while sweeping the floor, standing on your head, dancing gangnam style and typing a suicide note for your boss. All in all, an injection of cash into schemes that actually give people skills and get them jobs, rather than spending billions into black holes that only train people to get angry. As for housing, keep paying rent to landlords, not tenants. Paying it to the tenants is a sure-fire way to free up the housing market by making everyone homeless, so no. Fix the website, too. Workfare can work, but needs radical amounts of reform, not a little itty bitty tweak or two.
Final thought: After reading newspaper reports of people living on taxpayers' money, and getting themselves in loads of debt from booze and parties, I thought 'oh ok... Cameron and Osborne?'. Then it turned out to be yet another barrage of class warfare stigma. Apparently the plebs are revolting. Not nearly as revolting as the ministers, for sure.
Final final thought: They say if you want a job done properly, do it yourself. Like this if you want to see me replace Mark Hoban as minister for employment. I'm serious.
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