Punishing the poor

ON Monday, Secretary of State for Work and Pensions James Purnell presented his green paper entitled No-one Written Off to the House of Commons.

His opening lines were: "The welfare state is a vital part of the fabric of our country. We take pride in it. It is how we come together as a nation to support those who are vulnerable and in need of help."

So far, so good. Purnell, an avid supporter of former prime minister Tony Blair, cited "Beveridge's attack on the four giants of disease, ignorance, squalor and idleness and then, rather bizarrely, claimed that the third principle of Beveridge had been lost and that the social security system in Britain was stifling incentive, opportunity and responsibility.

He then went on to outline a series of rather sharp criticisms of people on benefit and proposals for changing them.

The main proposals in his green paper are that people unemployed for more than three months will have to comply with challenging back-to-work action plans, which will include many checks, including health and training.

Those out of work for more than a year will be moved onto schemes run by private or voluntary-sector providers who will be paid by results. Claimants will be forced to undertake at least four weeks full-time voluntary work to help them to refresh their skills.

Anyone still on benefits after two years will face full-time work programmes and could have to sign on every day.

Drug addicts will lose their benefits if they don't deal with their problem and incapacity benefit will be replaced by a new payment known as employment support allowance. This allowance and the claimant's capacity to work will be assessed by doctors.

Under the present system, single parents can claim income support until their youngest child is 16. The plan is to reduce this to seven.

The weekend spin in advance of the statement was all designed to appeal to the Daily Mail philosophy of punishing the poor for their own poverty and assuming that many people on benefit are, fundamentally, scroungers.

Purnell's plans and his statement completely ignored the extreme poverty that many people who are legitimately on benefits have to survive with or the Herculean tasks that many people with disabilities make in order to try to gain employment, only to be rebuffed by crass discrimination within our society.

While proudly telling the House of Commons that the benefit system now costs much less, he failed to say anything about the enormous problem of tax evasion by the richest people in our society, which cheats the system of billions every year.

While it's true that, since 1997, a lot has been done to improve children's allowances and that the introduction of tax credits has helped some of the poorest families, as has the national minimum wage, it is also true that Job Centre staff work very hard to try to assist people in finding work or career opportunities appropriate to their skills.

Purnell seems to think that, by reducing the number of civil servants by 30,000 in his department and handing some of the department's work over to payment-by-results companies and agencies, he is going to deal with the problems that many of the long-term unemployed face.

The genesis of his ideas actually comes from the far right in the United States, where, in Wisconsin, lifetime benefits amount to a maximum of two years and, after that, total poverty beckons.

Anyone living on benefits in Britain does not lead a life of luxury and the vast majority of people want to work and be able to contribute to society, but, if jobs are not there or discrimination against the disabled and those who have suffered industrial injuries continues, then the logic is that, under the green paper, poverty will beckon for some of those people.

During the 1980s, the Labour opposition quite correctly opposed the 1986 Social Security Act for the draconian measures that it proposed to take against the poor and unemployed and, indeed, the whole history of the Labour Party has been supporting a comprehensive welfare state to ensure that no-one ended up either homeless or destitute.

The green paper does not seem to bare any resemblance to the principles of the Labour Party and, in the words of Mark Serwotka, these proposals are regressive and draconian, going further than even Thatcher did in the 1980s.

Polly Toynbee, by no means on the left of the Labour Party, pointed out that, on the same day that Purnell "cracked the whip on scroungers," Alistair Darling had retreated from closing key tax loopholes on foreign earnings. She asked the rhetorical question, "Why are there always more rights for the rich and more responsibilities for the poor?"

The proposals are born out of a review from David Freud and were immediately welcomed by Chris Grayling on behalf of the Conservative Party. There was then a bit of banter between the two front benches as to who was the real author of this latest attack on the principles of the welfare state.

For those of us who represent poor inner-city communities, where unemployment has always been above the national average and a combination of poor-quality housing and underachievement in schools leads to a cycle of deprivation, we look to public services to provide solutions, not threats.

Tragically, Purnell missed the opportunity to deal with some of the benefit loopholes, which make it almost impossible for homeless people to work.

Since there are very few council tenancies allocated to the homeless, these people tend to be placed in hostels or private rented accommodation, for which they can legitimately claim housing benefit.

If they are lucky enough to get a job, they then lose housing benefit and can only claim a maximum of £60 a week in work benefit for an initial period in their new job and have to pay the rest of the rent themselves, which can amount to over £200 weekly, thus making them considerably worse off in work than they were on benefits.

These people are not scroungers or benefit cheats but are victims of a cycle of poverty and deprivation compounded by greedy landlords charging huge sums of money for inferior accommodation.

This is a green paper and therefore open to consultation and debate. No doubt, much of the debate will be dominated by the notion that this is an attack on scroungers and people who are trying to work the system to their advantage.

Nobody supports benefit cheats or scroungers. What we want is a system that ensures that we eliminate poverty within our society and doesn't use Wisconsin-style "work for dole" programmes or cajole people who need help and support, not threats and punishment.

Jeremy Corbyn is Labour MP for Islington North. He can be contacted at corbynj@parliament.uk