The Queen's speech on Thursday is likely to contain proposals for significant changes to the way unemployment benefits are paid, with a greater emphasis on using the stick, such as withdrawing benefits from those who refuse to cooperate with efforts to get them back to work. This is always a delicate issue, with on the one hand a populist desire to get 'scroungers' off benefits and the need to ensure people are not punished and left to suffer. One target is likely to be single parents.
Yet I find it strange that these measures are being considered during a recession, when the recently unemployed will be competing with the long-term and hard core jobless. I think the opportunity to make permanent structural changes to welfare have been missed. We have just come out of a very long boom, which included an abundance of jobs. That was the time to encourage the hardcore jobless back to work. Instead what happened was that most of the extra jobs were filled by those coming from abroad, which in turn helped to inflate the housing boom, thereby making it even more difficult for the jobless to join the property ladder and entrenching poverty and dependence further.
Now that we are in a recession, many of the (more scrupulous) private companies who are bidding for contracts to help people find work are beggining to have second thoughts about the contractual targets. Unless there is a quick, miraculous change of economic conditions, we could have another fiasco similar to the Individual Learning Accounts one.
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