Social Policy Task Force

The Social Policy Task Force was established by a range of UK networks and organisations whose primary purpose is to combat poverty and social exclusion. The SPTF is a joint working vehicle for following up the National Action Plans on Social Inclusion (NAPSinc). The SPTF meets regularly to develop its NAPSinc agenda and the organisations involved have held a number of events including NAPSinc awareness seminars and workshops on indicators of child poverty.

Representatives of the SPTF meet regularly with civil servants from the Department of Work and Pensions to pursue their NAPSinc agenda. Following consultation with the SPTF the DWP have established a working group that aims to develop recommendations concerning participation of those with experience of poverty in the NAPSinc process.

The central aim of the SPTF is to influence the process and content of the NAPSinc over its planned 10-year life, as one means to improve the effectiveness of the UK policy to combat poverty and social exclusion.

Through its connections with European level networks and organisations the SPTF aims to play its part in influencing the European Community and European Commission agendas for the Open Method of Co-ordination (OMC) in the field of social inclusion. The Social Platform of European NGO’s is following up the NAPSinc at European Union level.

The SPTF has close links to Social Platform through the European Anti-Poverty Network (via the UK Liaison Group which is made up of NIAPN, EAPN England, Scottish Poverty Alliance, EAPN Cymru/APNC), ATD Fourth World and other member organisations of the Social Platform.

Social Policy Task Force submission to Freud Review

The government has identified the importance of a ‘modern, active, welfare to work strategy’ to meet the challenges of the future and to get back on target to halve child poverty by 2010 and end it by 2020. We are writing to offer our thoughts on how this might be achieved, looking at the four themes that you have identified of simplifying the benefits system, greater conditionality, involvement of the private and voluntary sector in delivering welfare and how risk could be transferred to the private sector given the yearly savings required of the Department of Work and Pensions in the Comprehensive Spending Review.

We believe that there is no great mystery about the measures which would help people into work, and people who have experience of being in and out of work have made recommendations to the government in submitting evidence to the 2006 National Action Plan on Social Inclusion. Far from being unwilling to take responsibility, people have identified the need for more full time, long term work, more work which is available locally, affordable childcare, work which is of a higher quality and support to ensure that part time work is financially viable, particularly for lone parents, people re-entering work and disabled people. No one has disputed the effectiveness of these suggestions, and measures to meet these needs have invariably led to rises in levels of employment. We therefore suggest that these measures are the ones which should be at the heart of any review which investigates how to break the cycle of benefit dependency.

Seeking to transfer existing welfare programmes from the state to the private and voluntary sectors will not work because the state will either have to bear the risk and step in if the programmes fail, or else abandon the target of reducing child poverty. There is therefore no genuine transfer of risk, and hence very little scope for reduced spending by the DWP. Even enterprises which have been successful for a number of years and with a proven track record of helping people into work can run into financial difficulties, as the closure of One Plus in Scotland, a social enterprise which worked with more than 1,000 families per year. The experience of other countries which have transferred services to the private sector has not been a positive one, with very variable experiences for customers depending on which provider holds the contract, and problems arising when customers’ individual needs cannot be met without reducing profits. For example, different providers have different policies on enforcing sanctions. Transferring decision-making and sanctioning powers to non-statutory agencies creates a problem of accountability, a particular concern when sanctions could involve reducing benefits so that people and their families are living below the poverty line. Increasing the range of providers will mean that the experience of people trying to get back into work will be much more variable, with programmes being tailored not according to their needs, but according to the need to prioritise or de-prioritise individual cases in order to meet targets set in a contract with the state.

Partnership working between the state and voluntary sector can help to deliver more personalised services, for example in providing more holistic support for people who face many barriers in their lives to moving into work or education. Joint working can help to deliver innovative projects which are tailored to the needs of individuals, and can also help to make state services more sensitive to the complexity of the issues facing people and ground programmes in the reality of people’s lives. It can also help to challenge the culture where programmes which initially are personalised become ‘routineised’, with customers not being given the tailored support which they need and instead forced to choose from a limited range of unsuitable options.

The support which voluntary groups can offer to help improve services would be undermined if it involved them having to impose sanctions or as part of a programme which involved greater conditionality. The trust and understanding which is key to successful partnership working would be broken if they were required to sanction benefit recipients. You will be aware of the research that the more coercive conditionality becomes, the less engagement there is from those furthest from the labour market most in need of support, and the less likely front-line caseworkers are to implement the sanctions.

Since announcing a review of the welfare to work strategy, ministers have repeatedly made threats of withdrawing benefits for people who do not accept greater responsibility for finding work. It is our view that this kind of language not only fails to understand why so many people are still in receipt of benefits and not able to find work, but is actively counter-productive, serving to frighten people, increases the risk of child and family poverty, and makes it harder for them to engage with programmes which can support them into work. Increasing conditionality and sanctions is also costly because of the increased level of administration needed, money which could be better spent on personalising services or reducing barriers to employment such as a lack of childcare or high housing costs.

For all of the real successes in reducing levels of child poverty since 1997, any modern, active, welfare to work strategy must start by acknowledging the barriers to employment that currently exist, rather than making assumptions about deficiencies in the character and motivations of people out of work. The ‘Voices of Experience’ workshop run by the Women’s Budget Group in 2005 identified how childcare – non-existent in many places, unaffordable even where places existed, even with the childcare tax credit – is a major barrier to finding work for many parents. The same workshop also highlighted the link between poverty and bad housing. People in receipt of housing benefit frequently find themselves worse off in paid employment than on benefit, and that is even before the extra costs of school meals or prescriptions are considered. Ministers have heard from young people who cannot find work because of a lack of public transport in their area, making it impossible for them even to be able to travel for job interviews. It is not a failure to co-operate, or to accept responsibility which caused these people to be out of work, and with proper support from government and from employers rates of employment could be increased significantly.

We welcome the fact that the Department of Work and Pensions is committed to evaluating all future policies by their effect on reducing child poverty. Ministers and their advisers must grasp the full implications of this. Threatening parents with a cut in their benefits will necessarily lead to an increase in child poverty. Redesigning the welfare to work system so as to put more responsibility and more pressure on parents necessarily puts more pressure and more stress on their children. A commitment to reducing child poverty means understanding the link between child poverty and family poverty – there are no rich children in poor families. Poverty also has a gender dimension. 90% of lone parents are women and women are more likely to be living in poverty than men.

The government’s own statistics show that in Wales there are now more people in work but still living in poverty than there are people who are out of work but in poverty. In work poverty is a challenge right across the UK, even with the introduction of a minimum wage which has been rising above inflation in the past few years. A modern, active welfare to work strategy must address this challenge, by ensuring that employers in the public, private and voluntary sectors take on their fair share of the responsibility to make work pay by ensuring that wages are high enough to end poverty for people who are in work and their families, and that workers have the flexibility to be able to combine work with looking after their children. Low wages are a strong disincentive to work, especially for young people and young women, and even once people have entered the labour market, another challenge which your review will have identified is ensuring that they remain in work. Employers have a vital role to play in treating employees with dignity and respect, offering them the flexibility to combine work with caring responsibilities, and offering them training and support to progress in work.

Employers, in the public, private and voluntary sectors, can help the DWP to meet its targets for reducing its budget each year by taking on more of the costs of reducing poverty amongst their employees. The experience of firms such as KPMG is that higher wages lead to a decrease in absenteeism, a reduction in staff turnover and higher productivity. Providing more support for self-employment is another measure suggested by lone parents, providing them with the opportunity to meet their needs for flexible working and use their skills. Unless wage levels rise significantly, no amount of additional personal responsibility amongst benefit recipients will make a difference to reducing and ending child poverty.

Work is not a panacea for all. There will always be some people for whom work is not and cannot be a route out of poverty, and levels of benefits need to reflect that and rise to lift people out of poverty, rather than falling further behind average earnings every year. The benefits system is complex, and we would welcome any recommendations which help to simplify it and improve the service that benefit recipients receive. Savings realised from simplifying the benefits system should be invested in helping to lift people out of poverty.

The tone of the review seems very much to view people in receipt of benefits as a problem, who need to be compelled to take up opportunities to break them out of being dependant. Our analysis is very different. We believe that a successful welfare to work strategy is one which understands the challenges that people out of work face, listens to their suggestions for tackling these and is explicitly ‘on their side’. This, not adopting the language of blame and policies of sanctions, is the way to overcome the barriers which stop people from working – low wages, benefit traps, lack of affordable childcare and a lack of personalised support.

Katherine Duffy
Chair, Social Policy Task Force

The Social Policy Task Force is a working group of anti-poverty groups and grassroots activists with direct experience of poverty, which has worked with the Department for Work and Pensions in recent years on the development of the National Action Plan on Social Inclusion. For more information, please contact Dan Paskins on 0151 709 3008, or dan.paskins@ukcap.org