Two weeks ago, government sources announced, in stories in the Sun and the Daily Mail, the expansion of a scheme that forces unemployed people to do compulsory community work or lose their benefits, if the staff at the Jobcentre decide that they’re not pulling their weight.
The stories quote an unnamed government source, who says that next month, the employment minister Chris Grayling will announce that the scheme will be expanded to 50,000 people, and will cost around £5m.
I originally planned to write a news story about this, so I contacted the DWP to verify these figures. But the DWP has now told me that, officially, there’s been no change of policy since May last year. The scheme is already running, will cover 19,000 people, and will cost £8m.
Without knowing what’s really going on inside the DWP, it’s difficult to know why this disparity in the figures exists. Have these two national newspapers both got it wrong, or has a change in policy been announced in cloak-and-dagger fashion by a nameless source?
What remains clear is that there is a major drive to force people on benefits to carry out unpaid work, rather than just sit at home. It will impact on the voluntary sector, which, according to the papers, at least, will be asked to find work for many of these people for month-long placements.
It appears the sector will be paid for this, but not much. If the DWP’s figures are right, it will be worth around £100 a week, although much of that will be hoovered up by prime contractors such as A4e who are responsible for finding placements.
The people involved in this scheme are not likely to make good volunteers, either. These are people who are being asked to do community work to prove they aren’t moonlighting as, for example, roofers or exotic dancers.
The people who’ll sign up, therefore, are likely to be a mixture of those who were actively on the fiddle, those who genuinely can’t work for reasons of mental or physical health, and a fair few who are working part-time but aren’t telling the Jobcentre because doing so would render them worse off under the current arcane, archaic benefit rules.
Of course, many will go to stack shelves in Poundland, but I can’t believe that even Poundland will want that many unmotivated, unskilled suspected fraudsters.
Charities should make certain they aren’t lumbered with too many of the rest of them.
Since I started looking into this story, it has transpired that some people who are already volunteering for charity are being ordered out of those roles to work in Poundland and other placements.
I suspect it will not be long before this scheme forces some poor soul to stop volunteering for a charity they want to work for, in order to volunteer for another charity they are not all that interested in.