Once upon a time there was a great idea for helping the unemployed into work. It was called the Community Allowance, and various well-intentioned people spent years trying to make it happen.
It was basically a structure that would have allowed unemployed people keep their benefits and earn a bit extra on top if they took on useful community work with local charities. It was proposed by a group of local infrastructure charities and it looked like a very effective way of helping those out of a job – caring, intelligent and designed by experts in helping the poor out of unemployment.
Proponents of the scheme pointed out that current labour rules mean that if you take on a part-time job you lose benefits, making you, in many cases, worse off than before. As a result, they said, many important positions in the community were going unfilled. The difficulty finding lollipop ladies was the most quoted example.
It would be a gentle scheme that would hurt no one. It would cost little. It would benefit the community and the people involved. It would be, in short, a perfect example of how to go about encouraging the poor out of the benefits trap.
In 2010, the Labour administration looked on the verge of giving it a go, but the new coalition-led Department for Work and Pensions appears to have shelved it. Instead we have “mandatory work activity” – “workfare”, to its many detractors – which takes the unemployed and shoves them into Poundland and assorted charity shops whether they want to work or not.
So the question is, if you’re a charity and you want people for community work, do you take them on through the various compulsory work schemes the coalition government has introduced?
Several charities have done, and been denounced by lobby groups that campaign against it.
I can understand why a number of national charities have offered placements to the unemployed people involved in these schemes. After all, they must think, better to be on workfare in a charity shop than Poundland.
A lot of charities feel they’ve genuinely helped the folk they’ve taken on, and the evidence seems to suggest that they’re right, too. Unemployed people have stayed as volunteers. Others have used their experience on their CVs to find permanent work.
The trouble is that forcing people into work under threat of removing their benefits is such a troublesome, nasty, pernicious thing to do that being associated with it tarnishes you, even if you’re doing good.
So this is a plea – in hope rather than expectation – that we should sweep away these schemes, and instead place at centre stage the Community Allowance – work activity for the unemployed as it should be done.
Then charities could take on the unemployed with a clear conscience, and crossings up and down the land would have lollipop ladies once again.