Making Work Pay?

It's an admirable ambition - the idea that people who work should be better off than those who don't. It's great politics because it carries the suggestion that people are choosing not to work and all we need to do is to put the right incentives in place to stop the "benefit scroungers" leaching off of hard working people.

Now, if you're a temporarily unemployed merchant banker, the incentives to get a job paying £100,000 and stop claiming £71.70 a week Jobseeker's Allowance are pretty massive. Some more humble folks have an incentive too:

• Take Mr Single Youth, aged 23 and still living with his parents. His JSA will be £56.80/week. Out of that he'll have to pay jobseeking essentials such as travel, phone, Internet and newspapers (although he may wangle some of these for free). He gives his mother £10/week towards his food and then there's clothing replacement and maybe an occasional drink with friends (which can be partially "justified" as networking)
• He may even end up with £10/week to do what he likes with.
• Now, suppose  Single Youth gets offered an apprenticeship at the miserly minimum wage of £2.65/hour a short walk from home. He only has to work around 22 hours/week to be (slightly) better off. If the apprenticeship is full-time or if he gets an ordinary job at £6.19/hour it's even better.

So, this person has a real incentive to work unless he's comfortable with only £10/week pocket money.

• Now take Ms "Benefit Scrounger", a single parent, in a large  house with 5 unruly children. I calculated her benefit payment using the government's own calculator as £651.82/week but very soon this will drop to £500/week because of the "benefit cap".
• She has very little chance of getting a job that  pays £651.82/week
• If she has a job at all, around 70p of every pound will be lost as her benefit reduces.

An effective "tax" rate of 70% is little incentive to work as those on the top rate of income tax (recently reduced to 45%) will tell you.

Worse still, the price of having this "incentive to work" available is that if  she fails to find work through no fault of her own, she's £150/week worse off.

Some will criticise her for having five kids in the first place. Years ago, you could get away with comments about her being unable to keep a man. Some politicians will talk about sending "messages" that you can't just bred like a rabbit and have the state pick up the bill.

The problem is that she didn't plan to end up as a single parent on the dole with five kids - very few people do.

So, "making work pay" can't be achieved for everyone. We know and respect the fact that it can't work for many people living with disability. The sad truth is that  Ms Benefit Scrounger cannot realistically earn herself out of the "benefits trap". It's also quite unlikely that she can train herself out of it either. "For you have the poor always with you"

Gloucester and Sharpness Canal

Distraction Politics

There's something quite familiar about our government's recent "hate crime". The target is immigrants Apparently, "Immigrant families will be kept off council house waiting lists in England for at least two years, under plans set to be announced by the prime minister"

It's only a couple of weeks since the last "pop" at immigrants - the target then being "benefit tourism". And benefit recipients in general are another target - it's especially common for the more extreme cases to be singled out for press attention. EG: the recent case housing of  the mother of eleven children

So, are these issues real "problems"? For a start, not all of the 11 children are dependents. I dug up some statistics on large families and found some here (see Table 1) and if you look at dependent children, there are no 9-children families and only 0.05% of Children live in 8-children homes. That's just over 5000 children which means there are under a thousand such families in the UK.

The real reason for drawing attention to these stories is political - it stirs up hatred against these handy scapegoats so that politicians can crack down on them and look good. It's not new - and neither was the persecution of the Jews in Nazi Germany.

Matching education to jobs

This is a hardy perennial - with a touch of recycling. Employers routinely complain about school/college leavers not having the skills required. They've been doing that for forty years to my knowledge and I doubt if there ever was a golden age when there was no difficulty recruiting staff who could spell properly.

Then there is the problem of the aspirations and training/education of young people not matching the employment marketplace. Here's the "latest" on this from the BBC but it isn't really news.

So why is it that "there are 10 times as many people aiming for jobs in the culture, media and sports sector than there are jobs likely to be available whereas "almost a quarter of jobs are in the distribution, hotels and restaurant category, only about one in 40 youngsters are considering careers in these industries"?

Here's a number of possible reasons:

•  Culture, media and sports are far sexier than distribution, hotels and restaurant work and often better paid with more social hours.
• It's satisfying for a Careers Advisor to inspire a young person to consider sports work. In contrast, selling the idea of jobs involving flipping burgers at 11pm on a Saturday night is a harder sell.
• Although Further/Higher education does adapt to the jobs market to some extent, it can be slow and it can feel like a betrayal of academic values. Meanwhile, someone gets on and sells the courses they currently have in stock. Sometime education looks like a racket!

Some ideas:

• Make it difficult for the education sector to run courses with poor employment prospects.
• Communicating data about employment prospects to young people is probably of limited use. Only a sub-set of them will be directly motivated by such data. Even if they know that their chances in a particular area are small, they may just decide to work harder and be the best. In itself, laudable and great for those who succeed but a terrible waste of the others.
• Not a new idea at all but canny employers who can see a skills shortage can try to attract students into suitable training with bursaries, opportunities for vacation work, etc.

Freedom of Information and the Job Centre

If you've had the misfortune to become unemployed or sick, you've probably experienced “Jobcentre Plus” – the UK government's benefits and job-finding “shop”. They also do employee finding for employers too.

Your experience with this arm of government is probably mixed. Some of the staff are hardworking, knowledgeable, reasonable, helpful, sensitive and even kind. Unfortunately, quite a few are lazy ignorant bullies. I know this from being a “customer” a few times over the years and because my in my working/volunteering life I sometimes hear stories from other customers – mainly bad ones.

If you encounter one of the less pleasant staff, it's very bad news. They have the power to reduce your income to zero if you don't do what they tell you to do. Since last October, this could mean destitution for up to 3 years. You might think that such “sanctions” as they call them are reserved for “lazy benefit scroungers” but you'd be wrong.

 Say your “Personal Adviser” wants to get a load of unemployed people to attend yet another workshop to have their CV tweaked for the Nth time. There is no need to mess around explaining how helpful this is going to be or anything namby-pamby.  They just issue a load of “Job Seekers Directions” telling customers to attend on pain of destitution. There you are, sorted!

Except they can't. They don't tell you but they can't. Their website doesn't help either - nor Google. You need to look at the internal guidance for Job Seekers Directions.

How do you do that? Well, you follow the lead of one D Batters who made Freedom of Information request to the Department for Work and Pensions (via the WhatDoTheyKnow site) asking for the guidance and as you'll see if you follow this link, they answered. It tells us that Advisers must (amongst other things):

• have a full understanding of the claimant's circumstances;
• be aware of what action the claimant has already undertaken;
• know why the claimant does not want to do the particular activity;

and the action must be:

• linked to an action to improve the claimant's chances of finding work;
• personalised and appropriate for that individual claimant;

So, there's no way an Adviser should greet a customer with a pre-prepared Job Seeker's Direction. There really should be a discussion and they need to establish that the activity is appropriate to you and your individual situation. If you don't want to take up their suggestion, they have to find out why. So, if you're being really silly, and declining something useful, you deserve and should get a JSD to help you stop being a burden on our taxes.

Trouble is, some Advisers either don't know or don't care about all this and are rather more generous with their JSDs. Without WhatDoTheyKnow, no one else would be any the wiser. There's loads of other useful answers to questions about government there. The only things missing are the answers to questions people haven't yet asked.

Sadly, the only way I can avoid being a customer of the  Department for Work and Pensions again is to die early. Perhaps they'll order me to do just that!

Cheltenham Races: In Town

The cry of the touts is everywhere "Tickets! spare tickets! Buy or Sell!" This year, I've tried to capture the atmosphere in the town

A clue in the High St

Bookmakers in festive mood

Fancy a bet?

Even the charity collectors exploit the theme

The town crier outside Ladbrokes trying to lure custom away to William Hill

Abu Qatada on a bike

The bail conditions he's alleged to have breached do seem draconian. According to the BBC:  

• Tagged and allowed out of his home only between 08:00 and 16:00
• Banned from traveling on the Tube, or by train, car, motorbike or bus
• Banned from contacting a number of named individuals
• Only family members, his lawyer, emergency workers and social workers can enter his home without approval
• Banned from using mobile phones, computers and other devices
• Banned from attending mosques, leading prayers and giving lectures
• Needs approval to take a job or enroll on a course
• Allowed one bank account and must surrender his passport

So, it would seem he's Ok on push-bike or he could try a helicopter. One hopes that if he has a medical emergency, he will be allowed in one of those smaller cars adapted as an ambulance? What if he's taken sick in the middle of the night?

Banning him from mosques would seem to be restricting his rights to practice religion unless a visiting Iman is allowed. The ban on the use of computers looks bad too - many services are going online-only.

According to Wikipedia "Regularly imprisoned in Britain as a threat to national security since he was first detained under anti-terrorism laws in 2002, he has not yet been prosecuted there for any criminal or conspiracy offences" but a number of less than savoury governments allege terrorist offences.

If you believe and trust our politicians, he's a very dangerous man. I'm not sure I do.

Of Cars and CIX

Learnt a couple of things today.

The first concerned the car. I'd not used it for over a week although I had briefly started it up once. Yesterday evening, it wouldn't start. It whirred away merrily but wouldn't fire. The battery started to give out so I put it on charge. I wondered what might be wrong and posted about it in the "cars" conference on CIX.

It was CIX that got me into this Internet thing nearly 20 years ago. It was a crude "bulletin board" similar in some ways to many modern Internet "forums". The technology was unbelievably old-fashioned and still is not particularly modern but that's not the point. It's the community of people that make it so great. Next morning, someone had replied pin-pointing the problem -  brief start up that had wetted the plugs with petrol and they'd stayed wet for several days waiting for me to try another start. The solution was simple - run the starter for 30 seconds - something I could now do with a fully charged battery and the engine reluctantly came to life. A five mile drive and it was starting normally.

So the learning points were:

•  Don't run the car briefly like that - especially in less than ideal weather.
•  That paying about £7/month to the antique CIX service continues to be great value