"Hang on"

Perhaps you watched the interview with Iain Duncan Smith today on The Sunday Politics.  It was much as we have come to expect, although Andrew Neil did try, for once.  But from the moment IDS opened his mouth he lied.  Neil tried to nail him on Universal Credit.  There's no need to go over the true history of that epic failure.  IDS has rewritten history, as he always does.  He is the hero who spotted what was going wrong and got it all sorted out, and now it's all going swimmingly.  Neil confronted him with graphics to show that a normal, low-paid family in his own constituency would be worse off.  But it's pointless confronting Smith with figures; they don't register with him.  Today he was shown a graph and maintained completely different figures.  Whenever Neil tried to move on to a different point, Smith said, "Hang on," and reiterated the falsehood he was insisting on.  There was one whopping, blatant lie which stood out.  "The Treasury hasn't signed off Universal Credit," said Neil.  "Yes it has," said IDS, and nothing could move him.  Neil hates this, so after the interview he produced confirmation in the form of a direct quote from a Treasury official at the Public Accounts Committee recently.
The Feeding Britain report was brought up.  The bulk of people needing food banks were suffering benefit delays and sanctions.  No, "benefits were now being paid more quickly - from 88-89% being on time under Labour, to 96-97% now."  I have no idea whether that's true, but since IDS said it I assume it isn't; certainly the delays are much, much longer now.  And anyway, he said, food bank use "is tiny in proportion here compared to a place like Germany which has more generous benefits and in which you have a higher level of pay.  So just saying it is to do with benefits is quite wrong. What I do say is there are lots of other reasons lots of people go to food banks."  For Andrew Neil it must have felt like banging one's head against a brick wall.
There was nothing to provoke a headline until the end of the interview.  He was shown clips of various ministers saying that the "welfare" budget would have to be cut still further.  Where would those cuts fall?  Would you limit child benefit to two children, asked Neil, echoing something the hard right has been pushing lately.  IDS said he would certainly consider it.
We can rant and rage and heap abuse on this man.  But try to take a step back and consider what's going on.  Does Smith actually believe what he says?  Or does he know that he's lying and not care?  I suspect it's a bit more complicated.  We have a toxic combination of fixed ideology and grandiose self-delusion.  And it persists because his party loves it.  Who else could they find to do their dirty work for them with such enthusiasm?  Possibly Chris Grayling.  But all the other Tories who would do the job with gusto are even more stupid than Smith (think McVey, or Philip Davies or Alec Shelbrooke).  Those with ability tend to maintain a tiny morsel of compassion.  So IDS sails on.

Marking time

Right, I'm back.  Sorry about the hiatus.  What has been going on in my absence?

On the A4e front, very little.  There is no news about the fraud trial, which surely should have finished by now.  But FE Week reports that the £17m London prison education (OLASS) contract, which A4e gave 3 months notice of handing back in August, will continue in A4e's hands until the new year, because the Skills Funding Agency can't find any college willing to take it on.  This seems to back up A4e's claim that the contract was no longer viable.  The prison system is in such a mess that prisoners are being shifted around too often to make education possible.  

On the wider subject of "welfare", I don't need to detail the antics of Iain Duncan Smith.  He was on Radio 4's Today programme on Tuesday, setting out the new timetable for Universal Credit.  Mishal Hussein, who interviewed him, raised the obvious points about missed targets and wasted money.  Now for IDS, that is not how the BBC should behave.  The interviewer should just listen respectfully to whatever fantasies he chooses to spout.  I feared for Hussein at the time.  And sure enough, the next day IDS was reported to have lodged a complaint about her being "negative".  At the same time the National Audit Office warned that any further delays in UC would be hugely costly.  It said that there were no contingency plans to deal with delays.

There's a report in the Independent today about single parents being wrongly threatened with sanctions, or having those sanctions imposed.  I was struck by the blatant lie in the DWP's response: "Sanctions are a necessary part of the benefits system but they are only used as a last resort for a tiny minority who don’t follow the rules and hardship payments are available if people need them.”  This is utterly dishonest propaganda.  But then, if the man at the top of the department is a fantasist it's going to permeate the whole organisation.

Two verdicts on Universal Credit

Two programmes looked at UC last night (I had to catch up on both online this morning).

The first was a Channel 4 Dispatches programme.  Now, Channel 4 brought you Benefits Street, and the producers of that pernicious propaganda recently insisted that they wouldn't be "censored" and will go ahead with the next rotten slice; so could we trust the channel to do something truthful on UC?  Amazingly, yes.  Liz MacKean, a real journalist, went to Warrington earlier this year to look at how it was working.  They found four claimants, who could never be describes as scroungers, who had suffered problems and hardship because of mistakes, delays, confusion and poor staff training.  There were tales of the system not being able to cope with a change in circumstances; of the huge hike in rent arrears and debt.  A whistle-blower from a DWP service centre spoke of staff being overwhelmed by the workload.  Significantly, perhaps, it was Mark Harper, the newish minister for the disabled, who was put up to answer for all this.  He seems to be the new face of the DWP; Iain Duncan Smith and McVey are both, perhaps, seen as liabilities.  Harper talked blandly, of course; but there seemed no recognition that real people are suffering real harm as they "learn from their mistakes" at the DWP.

The second programme was a Radio 4 Analysis episode.  Most of it is summarised in the presenter's own piece in yesterday's Guardian.  Jonathan Portes used to work at the DWP so has an insider's view of what has gone on.  The radio programme was striving for "balance".  We got Kwasi Kwarteng, a Tory MP, making excuses for Duncan Smith.  Worse, we got a sizeable contribution from Fraser Nelson.  He's the editor of the Spectator, a small circulation right-wing magazine, and he also writes for the Telegraph, for which he has produced the most deluded tosh about "welfare reform".  He repeated it on the radio.  (For balance, Margaret Hodge told the truth.)  We got a damning description of the failures of IDS, in UC and in the Atos fiasco.  There was no mention of the dreadful damage that's been done to real people because of IDS's delusions, just a description of the financial costs.

Everyone except IDS seems now to agree that UC is a write-off, and will be ditched whoever is in power after May.

Harking back to yesterday's post, A4e have tweeted an apology.

Whose fault?

One of our regular commenters (is that a word?) has been pressing a story on me which I saw yesterday and was a bit reluctant to post about because it's not clear who is at fault here.  The story appeared in the Liverpool Echo first.  It concerns a 58-year-old unemployed man (worked all his life, made redundant) who was told by the Jobcentre that he was to be referred to A4e.  He then had a heart attack.  His wife phoned the Jobcentre and asked them to inform A4e.  The man lay in hospital waiting for major surgery.  But a phone call was put through to him - from A4e.  This is where it gets contentious.  The message about his illness obviously hadn't got through, but the DWP's comment is that "correct procedures had been followed"; that actually means, "I haven't a clue about this case but it wasn't our fault".  A4e says they didn't know about his illness, which is feasible, but they also say that they ended the call as soon as they realised Mr Rogers was in hospital.  But Mr Rogers himself says, "This guy was persisting about wanting to discuss the next plan of action but I said I was ending the conversation and put the phone down.”  Whichever, it's not good publicity for A4e, especially as the Mail has now taken up the story.

There's a programme on Channel 4 tonight about Universal Credit.  Should be worth watching.

The shape of things to come

So now we know what's in store if we get a Conservative government in May.  Benefits will continue to be frozen - everything except those for the disabled and the elderly.  This includes ESA for the WRAG group and working tax credits.  It will affect 10 million people.  We're told that this is in the interests of fairness, because wages are static.  Now before anyone starts blaming pensioners because we're safe for the moment, just think that you'd be doing exactly what the Tories want you to do - turning your anger on the wrong people.  It's not only that pensioners vote in greater numbers than young people (and it's a myth that we most often vote Tory), it's that exempting us deflects the wrath and persuades some people that it's all our fault.  It must not be a case of everyone should suffer except the wealthy.  And you can be sure that they will come for us after the election.
For young people the prospects are very bleak.  You will get work (probably a bogus apprenticeship on £2.73 an hour, or an unpaid "internship") or you will be sentenced to community work.  Don't ask where that community work is going to be found, that will be up to the outsourcing companies that get the contracts.
That was just from George Osborne.  It left Iain Duncan Smith with a couple of announcements.  Universal Credit will be rolled out across the country next year.  (Stop laughing.)  This morning we learned that the chap in charge of it, Howard Shiplee, has quit.  He has been ill for some time.  And - the real shocker that has barely been reported by large parts of the media - IDS, without waiting for the election, is trialling the payment of benefits on smart cards, aimed at those with bad habits so they can't spend their money on alcohol or drugs.  It's for the good of their families, of course.  Apart from the moral issues here, which we've examined before, the practical issues are huge.  Not least, there is no way of stopping the trading and selling of these cards to put cash in the claimant's pocket.  And it's very clear that this would be the only way of paying benefits under a Tory government.  How does this fit with Universal Credit, which encompasses housing benefit?  Will a landlord have to accept the card?
Before anyone starts advocating UKIP as an alternative, their welfare policies are equally disgusting.

Why Iain Duncan Smith should go

Someone yesterday started a story of a conversation supposedly overheard on a train to the effect that in the forthcoming reshuffle "Ian" was to be replaced by "Esther".  Despite there being no substance to this story at all it's made it as far as the BBC website.  One thing that this demonstrates is that Iain Duncan Smith's future is the biggest talking point in the reshuffle.  Will Cameron move him?  Will he have the guts to fire him if he refuses to be moved?  Who would replace him?

I have blogged before about IDS's failures, as have a great many people.  There's an excellent piece on the Labour Left website which lists "Iain Duncan Smith's 100 biggest failures".  It's a heroic effort, well worth study.  But let's distil it into the most obvious areas where his ambition has far exceeded his competence.

• The Work Programme.  This was the first of IDS's grand schemes to be put in place.  It was going to solve unemployment; and the most revolutionary aspect of it was "payment by results".  But it was never that.  The providers were guaranteed an "attachment fee" which would keep them going if they did nothing; and they were able to look forward to an "incentive" payment even if they failed badly.  And fail badly they did.  After 4 years it's clear that job outcomes (below even the minimum performance demanded and way below the providers' promises) depend on the economy and not on anything the companies do.  Helping to drag down the WP is:-
• ESA.  The companies were never going to be able to help those on ESA into work.  Indeed, most have been parked.  And overall, the companies have spent less than half the amount per client which they promised.  Remember, they get contracts because of the promises made in the bid documents.  And now they've got contracts to scoop up the people they've failed into:-
• Community Work Placements.  Okay, these appear not to have actually started yet.  But that's because a huge chunk of the voluntary sector want nothing to do with them, and a growing number of councils have also refused to take part.

There were a number of other, almost incidental, schemes along the way which have also been disasters, notably

• The bedroom tax.  (Let's face it, no one was ever going to call it "the removal of the spare room subsidy".)  It has cost councils a fortune, saved no one any money and inflicted huge distress and misery on thousands.
• Universal Jobmatch.  This was, it seems, entirely IDS's baby.  A grand one-stop-shop for employers and jobseekers alike which would have the added advantage of monitoring the activities of claimants.  The contract was given to a company with a poor record but which claims that much of what went wrong with UJM could have been prevented - but they were told not to put the necessary refinements into the software.  The system has been used to control and punish claimants without ever being the wondrous solution IDS envisaged.  But its costs are enormous.
• The sanctions regime.  A ludicrously impractical "claimant commitment" has been coupled with a vicious imposition of punishments which breach people's human rights.  Yet time and again IDS and his ministers have simply lied about sanctions; McVey repeated again this week in Parliament that they are "a last resort".  The human cost is appalling.  

The biggest failure of all, however, is:-

• Universal Credit.  This was to be the lasting legacy of Iain Duncan Smith, transforming "welfare".  At the outset opposition parties said yes, great idea, but it's never been done because it's too difficult.  Not for IDS, though.  Millions have been spent on IT that didn't work, more millions on trying a different IT system, and on patching up the problems thrown up by the very limited trials of UC.  We needn't rehearse all the problems.  But through them all IDS has insisted that it will all be fine.

We're told that it's Osborne who is keen to get IDS out because the Chancellor wants to slash the welfare budget and IDS resists that.  We're also told (in the Mail today) that Smith will again refuse to go.  This man's failures have cost us dear.  Surely he must go.

What news?

I haven't been able to blog for a while.  But now, looking over what's been happening, I have to conclude that nothing is changing, except for the worse.  Iain Duncan Smith has lost another court battle, this time to keep secret the damaging documents on the mess that is Universal Credit.  But it won't make any difference.  The ruling will be ignored.  The Financial Times devoted an article to Labour's intentions on outsourcing and the Work Programme.  They would get rid of the big, centrally organised contracts and devolve the responsibility down to a more local level.  This is similar to the system which operated up to 2006.  But Rachel Reeves said nothing about payment by results.  She did say that outsourcing companies would have to pay their workers more than minimum wage.
Labour has forced a debate in the Commons next Monday on the shambles in the DWP.  Expect no Tories except the minister to attend, and certainly expect no coverage at all in the media.
And that brings me to the growing concern about BBC bias.  A friend of mine - intelligent, thoughtful, well-informed - was completely unaware that a peaceful demonstration by around 50,000 people against austerity had happened in central London.  Like many other people (reportedly a majority) she relies on the BBC for news; and the BBC didn't report it, until very late and then as a tiny item.  If there is political bias in the BBC it matters far more than the built-in ideology of the printed media.
It used to be said - and still is by right-wingers - that the BBC is biased towards the left.  That can't be sustained any longer.  We know that in 2010 Mark Thompson, then head of the BBC, had a meeting with David Cameron in 10 Downing Street and agreed not to attack the new government's approach.  Four years on we see Conservatives and their agenda dominating.  Remember that the BBC decides what is news.  Producers or editors choose what to put in their bulletins, what items to include in politics programmes, who to interview and what approach to take.  If they don't report something, most people won't know about it.
In the run-up to the May elections people began to complain about the amount of coverage that UKIP was getting.  This apparent determination to promote UKIP was also evident in the aftermath of those elections.  Of course, the BBC spokespeople, as well as individual editors, insisted that they had merely given "parity" to the various parties, based on their electoral support.  It was nonsense, because it wasn't the issue.  UKIP and its policies were being allowed to set the agenda; immigration and Europe dominated.  After the elections one would have thought, from the BBC's coverage, that UKIP had beaten Labour, and the Tories hadn't actually taken part.
One could understand, though not excuse, the reluctance of the BBC to cover issues related to the DWP.  But this dodging of issues extends across many areas of government business.  When did we last hear an analysis of what's going on in the NHS?  In Justice?  And when did we last hear an opposition spokesperson interviewed with the same respect and deference accorded to the government?
Tory-supporting presenters and interviewers now no longer have to pretend to neutrality.  Andrew Neil will tear into Labour MPs, talking over them, sneering at them; the contempt is very obvious.  The Tory MPs with whom he dines get a very different treatment.  Andrew Marr and John Humphrys are not much better.
Before you say that this has nothing to do with the subject of this blog, think again.  If you rely on the BBC for your knowledge of what's going on in this country then you will have a very limited and partial view.  You will know nothing about A4e and only a little about the other outsourcing companies.  You will not understand the inherent dangers of outsourcing and privatisation.  And we will wake up in May 2015 to a majority Conservative government which will complete the flogging-off of all our public services for private profit.

Welfare week

The subject of welfare (which I will stubbornly continue to call social security) has been prominent this week.  It wasn't only Labour's announcement of its policy, although that may well have sparked it off.  The BBC belatedly discovered the scandal of ESA, the delays and the failure of the Work Programme to help those supposedly able to work.  Of course, being the BBC, it headed the story with the speculation that the cost would mean that the government breaches its self-imposed cap on total welfare spend.
Then the Public Accounts Committee reported on the even bigger mess of PIPs.  An embarrassed Mike Penning was allowed to get away with blaming Labour, and insisting that it was now fixed.  But it all added to the impression of government that "something must be done".
Where was Iain Duncan Smith?  He was proudly announcing that Universal Credit is being "rolled out" to 90 Jobcentres in the North West.  But it will still only apply to single unemployed people with no complications, and there are no predictions beyond that.  It was unfortunate timing; another major failure was added to the list.  The Economist, normally Tory-supporting, published a devastating article headed "Universal discredit" rubbishing everything this government has done on "welfare reform".
Last night BBC's Newsnight had a discussion on the subject between Owen Jones and Nadhim Zahawi.  The former is a socialist and columnist who is often critical of Labour.  The latter is an ultra-loyal Tory whose expenses claims caused a furore and who will trot out the party line.  The innate bias of the BBC was evident in the use, several times, of the term "welfare dependency" and in using a clip from Benefits Street as if it was an appropriate illustration.  And IDS's lackey Christian Guy from the Centre for Social Justice was presented on the film as he was an independent expert.  Who "won" the argument depends on who you agree with.  These discussions rarely change opinions.  But at least the subject is now being discussed.

Burying bad news

You probably missed this.  Only readers of the Guardian and the Independent got to know about a damning indictment of Iain Duncan Smith's massive failure, Universal Credit.  The news was sneaked out at the weekend when attention was elsewhere.  (Not that the BBC would have mentioned it anyway.)  The government has a body called the Major Projects Authority which monitors progress on big, expensive schemes.  It then codes them as green, amber or red, the last being for something that is “unachievable within reasonable timescales and to a reasonable budget without urgent remedial action”.  And that was the code it was going to give to Universal Credit, a step down on last year.  But, according to the Independent, IDS managed to stop it.  Instead UC has been excluded from the list altogether on the grounds that it has been "reset" since February.  Clever, eh?  Our friend the DWP spokesman, wearily having to defend the move, just trotted out the stuff he knows no one believes: "The reality is that universal credit is already making work pay as we roll it out in a careful and controlled way. It's already operating in 10 areas and will start expanding to the rest of the north-west in June.  Jobseekers in other areas are already benefiting from some of its positive impacts through help from a work coach, more digital facilities in jobcentres, and a written agreement setting out what they will do to find work."  Notice how that last bit has nothing to do with UC.
Duncan Smith's habit of refusing to tell his employers (us) anything which reflects badly on him, or which we might not like, is now ingrained.  He told the Work & Pensions select committee that he didn't have to tell them everything because he ran the department, not them.  He has refused a court order to publish the list of organisations involved in workfare.  Meanwhile, the latest Work Programme Official Statistics document was very quietly put out, with no one taking much notice.  (It's here if you're interested.)  The success rate has gone down a bit.  Since it started, around 19% of its alumni have got a job, but for at least a third of those it was only temporary work.  It's the number of ESA people, they claim, which is bringing the outcome rate down.  (A4e scores just under the average for outcomes at 12 months.)  It's another huge slab of wasted money; and more follows it into the pockets of the corporates as "Help to Work" gets under way.
But with the elections over IDS can face the public with a message his favourite papers have made a big deal out of; that they're planning a "crackdown" to limit immigrants' benefits even further.  Except that not many immigrants claim benefits anyway.

The mess that is Universal Credit

If you depended on the BBC for your news - and apparently many still do - or if you thought that the Sun, the Mail and the Express were newspapers, you would know nothing about Universal Credit beyond the vague assurances that it's coming and will "make work pay".  But there are still some real journalists who take an interest in such matters.  One of them is Emily Dugan, who wrote a disturbing piece for the Independent on Saturday.  She went to Warrington, one of the pilot areas, and spoke to the people who are having to suffer the consequences of UC; the claimants whose benefit wasn't paid or who found themselves in rent arrears because the money which was supposed to go straight to the landlord didn't; the Housing Associations trying to cope with a haphazard system which puts tenants at risk of eviction through no fault of their own; the CAB worker who says that the problems are increasing.
Sheila Gilmore MP is on the Work & Pensions select committee.  She has written a piece on the Progress website about what they are being told and why they don't believe it.  The meaningless waffle they get from civil servants is familiar to many of us, but it's trying to hide the fact that UC is a grotesque failure.
There are still only about 6,000 people on UC, and they are all the "easy" cases - single, no complications.  Yet the IT obviously doesn't work even for them.  I reckon that the plan for the Tories is simply to coast towards the 2015 election, delaying the roll-out.  After that, whoever gets in can make the decision on whether to cancel the whole grisly project or to plough on since the only people who will suffer don't count.

The same may well apply to Help to Work.  It was supposed to have started, but the workfare component was delayed to give at least the semblance of legitimacy to G4S's chunk of the contracts (no one was fooled but the DWP doesn't care).  The rest of it - signing on every day, spending all day every day doing "jobsearch" in the Jobcentre - was never feasible and hasn't started either.  But as far as Iain Duncan Smith is concerned, who cares?  The propaganda has been successful beyond his wildest dreams.  And there are very few journalists out there willing to report the truth.

Back to work?

It's back to work tomorrow - assuming you have any work to return to.  So what has been going on over this rather disjointed few weeks?

On the outsourcing front, I would have said until an hour ago not very much.  A4e set up a new website, reminding us of one of the less well known aspects of their business - "Independent Living Services".  This all began 9 years ago when local councils had to offer direct payments for social care, so that users could shape their own care packages and employ people directly.  A4e were quick to see an opportunity here and scooped up contracts.  It didn't always work out well; Middlesborough council was not happy with how the contract was delivered and brought it back in-house.  But the company is now running the show in 15 areas.  Let's hope the website doesn't herald the regrowth of all those websites A4e used to have before the makeover.
There's now a new privatisation in the pipeline (although A4e won't be involved in this one).  The Guardian has the story that the land registry is to be flogged off.  That may not mean much to many people, but it's the body which keeps all the records of who owns what land and property in this country.  The paper says: "Former executives from the body ....... say that a sell-off 'beggars belief' because it will allow the private sector to adjudicate on what can be conflicting interests between sellers, buyers, lenders and neighbours."
George Monbiot, writing in the Comment is Free section of the Guardian, may have been reading this blog.  If not, he's one of the few who has picked up on the fact that G4S must have been bidding for contracts while it was supposedly banned.  He says: "Was it ever banned at all?  Six days after the moratorium was lifted G4S won a contract to run HMRC services.  A fortnight later it was chosen as one of the companies that will run the government's Help to Work scheme.  How did it win these contracts if in the preceding months it wasn't allowed to bid?"  Quite right.  But why have so few journalists picked up on this?

A story doing the rounds in the press tonight seems shocking to some, but unsurprising to many.  Labour MP Sheila Gilmore asked the wretched Esther McVey a question about sanctions and got a worrying answer.  At the moment JSA claimants are not required to apply for zero hours jobs.  Under Universal Credit they will be.  Jobcentre "coaches" will be able to force people to take such work, on pain of having their benefit stopped.  (See the Guardian.)  The DWP confirmed this.  Gilmore pointed out that this would stop people taking training courses to improve their prospects.  Others have said that people will be caught in a trap; told to increase their hours or be sanctioned while unable to increase their hours.  But this was always part of the point of UC, in the wonderful world of Iain Duncan Smith.

The future of "welfare", part one

In my last post we looked at the history of the concept of welfare, or social security.  An understanding of that history is essential to any discussion of the future.

First, let's get to grips with Iain Duncan Smith's concept.  There are those who believe that he wants to end the welfare system altogether.  I don't think that was his intention when he came into the job.  He had a messianic sense of his personal mission to transform it, certainly.  First, with the Work Programme, he was going to put the majority of the unemployed back to work.  But the first year's results were so terrible that his own party were furious with him.  The second year was little better, and it was obvious to everybody that people were only finding work because the economy was picking up.  The long-term unemployed, young people and those kicked off incapacity benefits onto ESA, remained stubbornly out of work.  IDS turned his wrath on them.  They were the enemy, scuppering his vision, and he has become more and more determined to punish them.  Then, Universal Credit was going to remould the system, "making work pay"; and it would bear his name as its creator for ever, just as the NHS was the creation of Aneurin Bevan.  But that hasn't worked either.  So IDS is an angry and disappointed man who has no place in the future.

I have said before that the mindset of the right today reminds me very much of the climate of opinion which produced the Poor Law Amendment Act of 1834.  There was then no real concept of a "public sector".  Governments and councils (corporations) could hire people to carry out the work.  And there was no thought of insurance against misfortune for the masses, at least not administered officially.  The poor did create "friendly societies" into which they paid a few pennies a week, as well as burial clubs which ensured that there was money for a decent funeral.  But National Insurance had to wait until 1911.  It has now become almost irrelevant.  Worst of all, we have gone back to the notion of the deserving and the undeserving poor, with the former being thought of as very few in number.  (In the mind of the right, of course, there are contradictions.  There's plenty of work out there if people were not too idle to do it; but some unemployment is necessary for capitalism to work.  People should equip themselves with skills and qualifications; but employers shouldn't have the expense of training their workforce.)
A clear demonstration of the "new" thinking comes in an article in the Express today.  It's not so much in the plans put forward by a member of the Conservatives' policy board, Nadhim Zahawi MP, as in the phrases he uses.  Take, "Mr Zahawi said that the welfare state was established as a 'last resort, not a lifestyle choice'" and it was "trapping people into a life of dependency on the state".  Later he says that he wants to "help the next generation think more carefully about their relationship with the welfare state".  His words show no understanding of how "the welfare state" grew up, or why.  He sees it as a project set up by the tax-paying majority to provide benevolently for the non-working minority, rather than as what it was; a system of mutual aid and insurance.  Not a "safety net" (as he also describes it) but a guarantee of security for all.
The right has, in effect, scrapped all the thinking which produced the progress of the twentieth century, the progress towards social security paid for out of general taxation.  Indeed, it has gone further than its 19th century predecessors by putting all services in the hands of profit-making companies.  In this vision of the future there would only be private insurance against misfortune, not public provision.  The state pension will have less and less value at the same time as the pension age rises, so private pensions will replace the state pension.  What about those who never earn enough to pay private insurance?  Tough.  Perhaps they'll come round to the idea that for those who really can't do anything for themselves and would otherwise be littering the streets, there should be special hostels ....

It doesn't have to be like this, as I shall explore in another post.

A damp squib

A lot of people were looking forward to Iain Duncan Smith's appearance in front of the Work and Pensions Committee, believing that there would be an interrogation that would skewer him and expose his sins.  Those people were always going to be disappointed.  By all accounts he got more and more bad-tempered under questioning.  When Glenda Jackson MP had a go at him he accused her of "conflating so many issues here, it's almost becoming risible".  (Yes, I'm sure we were all amused.)  Debbie Abrahams MP was accused of "moaning".  What she raised has only been reported, as far as I can see, in her local paper, the Oldham Evening Chronicle.  She has a whistle-blower, a JCP employee with 18 years experience, who told her about quotas for sanctions and how "claimants are being set up to fail to meet benefits criteria - without regard for justice or welfare".  IDS's response?  He is unaware of the claims.  "I would like to see the evidence for it.  He's making allegations about people who work very hard.  I'd be prepared to meet him to discuss it but there is someone in charge of this they should meet first.  If he's got an issue to raise I would want to know".  Well done for trying, Ms Abrahams, but this is yet another lie from IDS.
As for those dodgy statistics - it wasn't his fault.  Surprise, surprise.  It was actually Grant Shapps' fault.  Well, one story was, let's not talk about the others.
The main focus was on the progress, or lack of it, on Universal Credit.  He admitted to a write-off of £40m on the IT so far, but, hey, what's £40m when you're IDS?
Among all the accounts in the press, the one in the Spectator is the most informative.
One suspects that Margaret Hodge, chair of the Public Accounts Committee, would have given him a worse time and wound him up more spectacularly.  The PAC might even have raised the matter of sanctions, and all the cruelty being perpetrated by the DWP.  But in the end it wouldn't have changed anything.

Burying bad news

In the big news towards the end of this week, stories about "welfare" got rather lost.  Iain Duncan Smith finally admitted that his Universal Credit target isn't going to be met; but everybody knew that.  Various reports should have caused trouble for the government, but few noticed.  There was a report pointing to the failure of HMRC to police the minimum wage legislation properly, said the Guardian.  Only a couple of employers have ever been prosecuted, and only one named and shamed, although 10,777 firms have been investigated.  On the same day the Independent's Charlie Cooper wrote about the "public health emergency" of food poverty.  That's the verdict of a group of expert doctors and academics, following a report commissioned by Defra - a report which, in a familiar move, the government has not published, claiming that it needs a "review and quality assurance process".  The Trussell Trust, which runs a lot of food banks, says that they've tried to talk to the DWP, but been refused a meeting.  Meanwhile the experts cite recent figures showing a surge in the number of malnutrition cases diagnosed in English hospitals.
The people who read those two articles probably didn't read another in the Express.  The paper which has done so much to spread hatred of the unemployed found a story which ticked a different set of boxes.  "Veteran loses his jobseekers benefits for selling poppies" it yelled.  The 60-year-old former soldier gets £71.20 a week and has done everything he can to find work.  However, he "admitted" to the jobcentre that he'd spent 24 hours over a two-week period selling Remembrance Day poppies.  He was promptly sanctioned for a month for not "actively seeking work".  The response from the infamous, anonymous DWP spokesperson was predictable: "We make it clear to people what the rules are and they risk losing their benefits if they don't play by them.  Sanctions are only used as a last resort."  The Express's outrage is commendable.
But none of this made much of an impression on the public as a whole, and it all faded away as other news monopolised the media.

It wasn't me, it was him

The Public Accounts Committee has published its report on Universal Credit.  It's pretty damning.  There's a comprehensive account in the Guardian.  Since then, there has been a concerted attempt by Conservative MPs to place the blame squarely on Robert Devereux, the Permanent Secretary at the DWP and the accounting officer for the project.
The Times said this morning that Iain Duncan Smith had tried to get Tory members of the committee to blame Devereux.  That's been denied.  The report doesn't blame individuals, but Margaret Hodge said this morning that the responsibility was from the top down.  Since then I've heard three different Tories blame the civil servants.  Francis Maude was driven to explicitly exonerating IDS.  He commissioned the review in 2012, says Maude, which identified the problems; and he described him as "visionary".
Whatever happened to ministerial accountability?  Younger readers won't be aware that there was a time when the ministers took responsibility and resigned even when the disaster clearly wasn't their fault.  Not now.  But if Devereux does go, he will be free to speak.  That might worry Duncan Smith.
Many people have asked why IDS is still in his job.  Surely his track record should have got him reshuffled to the back benches ages ago.  My feeling is that IDS is so hated, so much the focus of people's anger at the cruelty of the welfare "reforms", that it's better for Cameron to leave him in place and let him soak it all up than to put someone else in the firing line.

Despair

Having read this article in the Express, "Despair" was the only title I could think of for this post.  I remember my own long spell of unemployment in the 1990s, and wonder how I would have coped with this vicious, dehumanising regime.  And I suspect I would not have survived.  I had been working for nearly 30 years; I had paid plenty of tax and National Insurance.  Now it was time for me to claim the benefits to which I was entitled, while I tried everything to get a job (which I eventually did).  I never allowed myself to feel humiliated; I had done nothing wrong, and life was difficult enough without being denied any self-respect.  If it was happening now - I think I would be looking into the abyss.
Some of you who comment here and have been passed back to the Jobcentre after wasting two years on the WP, have already experienced this "claimant commitment" demand, which officially came into force today where UC is being implemented, and are bemused as to how it's going to be possible to meet it.  Others have asked what "commitment" is being made by Jobcentres and government to help them.  The article gives us no answer.  "The radical plan is the idea of Work and Pensions Secretary Iain Duncan Smith who said a job search should be a full time occupation in itself.  The unemployed will be expected to fill their 'working' weeks searching for work, attending interviews, training, assessments and workshops.  If they deviate from their signed commitment, their benefits will be stopped for 13 weeks for a first offence, then 26 weeks and then 3 years."  That's the Express's words in bold, not the DWP's.  But they strike a chill, don't they?  Criminalised for something trivial.  What the DWP's infamous anonymous spokesperson does say is rather puzzling: "Those claiming out-of-work benefits will be expected to dedicate their working week not only to searching for work but also to invest in training and the skills necessary to make getting a job easier."  Apart from lousy grammar, what does this mean?  That the unemployed person has to "invest" in training and skills?

My only advice on how to cope with this is:
 i) keep a detailed diary, not only to prove that you're doing what is demanded, but to show to yourself and others just how punitive and demeaning this regime is.  Start a blog about your experience if you're in a position to do so.  Writing down your thoughts can be therapeutic in itself.
ii) always remember that they cannot rob you of your self-respect unless you let them.

Weekend round-up

A4e was at all the party conferences this year, as usual.  They don't record what interest they drummed up amongst the Lib Dems or Labour, but describe on their website the "event" they hosted in Manchester for the Tories.  They've had to amend the story in the last couple of days - it was "former minister" Mark Hoban who led the praise for 6 A4e "customers" (I do hate that word) who have found jobs through the WP.  Apparently 40 people turned up.  Now, as I've always said, I'm happy for anybody who gets work, with or without the help of A4e.  But it seems slightly over-optimistic for A4e to be lobbying just at the point when they've lost market share for getting poor results.

There was a little-noticed piece on the BBC website yesterday about the poor quality of prison education.  Ofsted has been very critical about current standards, and it's pointed out that prison education and training is outsourced to private companies.  No companies are named, but A4e has several contracts.

BBC Radio 4's "The Report" programme last night looked at the state of Universal Credit.  There was nothing which hadn't already been in the press, but the programme pulled it all together to show how the project went off the rails.  Around £200m has been completely wasted, there are no effective financial controls, and there is no chance that it will come in "on time and on budget", as IDS insists it will.  UC is being rolled out to 6 more jobcentres, but it's still limited to new claims by single people with no dependants, on JSA only and with no complications.  It was pointed out that you can't do a change of circumstances, or even sign off, online.  You have to phone an 0845 number, at your own expense.  The whole thing is supposed to be completed by 2017, but as the reporter said, whether IDS would still be in post by then is doubtful.

That dismal excuse for a newspaper, the Express, gleefully reported a survey which purports to show that a majority of people think that benefits claimants "should find a job or work harder".  Surprisingly, a lot of the comments under the article are not supportive of the Express's stance.  For the actual figures, read a better article on a website here.  But all such polls are suspect.  We don't know the sample size, but we do know that sampling methods tend to exclude the poorest people, and that would certainly skew the results here.  Of course, the government is jubilant, and Labour is flummoxed about how to respond.

Not working enough

It is fundamental to the government's approach to welfare to believe that claiming benefits is a choice people make.  They call it "languishing on benefits" and describe it as a "lifestyle choice".  When it dawned on them that most people on benefits were actually in work, and were able to claim tax credits because their pay was so abysmally low, or because they were working part-time - well, that must be a choice, too.  Little noticed some time ago was the announcement that in order to claim working tax credits people would have to be working 30 hours a week.  Clearly, and explicitly, the delusion was that people working fewer hours than that could find some more somewhere.  And now comes the plan to deal with those "not working enough".  Last Saturday's Guardian had a chilling article about it.  "People earning between £330 and £950 a month - just under the rate of the national minimum wage for a 35-hour week - could be mandated to attend jobcentre meetings where their working habits will be examined as part of the universal credit programme."  This makes perfect sense in the government's thinking.  UC will ensure that "work pays"; so people must be pressured into working more.  And if you're not making enough effort, you can be stripped of your benefits.  There will be seven categories of claimants, apparently, including those "too sick to work" and those "too committed to work" (which would include lone parents), as well as those "not working enough".  The language of the documents seen by the Guardian includes horrible phrases like "the claimant journey".   The TUC has responded with the obvious objections, including forcing people to live in constant fear and insecurity.
All of this is called "in-work conditionality", and the Resolution Foundation has published a report on the implications.  It's well worth reading.  One point which has been raised by many people is that the resources simply aren't there to implement this.  More contracts, perhaps?  The private sector is already cashing in.  A system called Worktrack is set to replace Universal Jobmatch.  It's a much more sophisticated system - take the tour on their website.  But then look at the pricing - between £500 and £600 per adviser license, with discounts for multiple advisers.  And consider that it is extremely unlikely that it will be voluntary for the client to sign up for this.

One company's opinion on how to make the Work Programme better has been published.  G4S, like all the providers, has been invited to submit ideas for the "next generation" of the WP.  It's not encouraging for anyone who wants to see an end to this useless scheme.  Naturally, the providers want to "reform" it in their own financial interests.

The shambles that is Universal Credit

I really have nothing much to say.  Iain Duncan Smith has been all over the news today because of the National Audit Office's report into how Universal Credit is going, and we've said it all on here before.  The only thing which strikes me is how keen IDS has been to blame everybody except himself.  Mainly, it's been the civil servants being made to carry the can.
I know people want to comment on all this, so go ahead.  But don't go overboard.

Round-up

I'm sure we were all looking forward to hearing Iain Duncan Smith questioned about his and his department's use of statistics on 4 September.  But according to a blog, this is not now going to happen.  The writer quotes Sheila Gilmore MP, a member of the Work and Pensions Select Committee as saying that the Department's Annual Report isn't ready, and since the main purpose of the meeting was to examine that, it's had to be postponed.  How fortunate for IDS.  As fortunate, perhaps, as the fact that they're still examining the quality of the sanctions data, so can't publish that either.  At what point do we conclude that facts are being deliberately suppressed?

One fact that hasn't been suppressed (it's been leaked) is an internal survey of civil servants working on Universal Credit.  The Guardian has the details.  Staff talk about terrible management, poor decision-making, no communication and dishonesty.  It's utterly damning.

Then there's ATOS.  It's been disclosed that the company has been paid £754 million for its sickness and disability testing since 2005.  £754m.  That's your money and my money.  The Independent reports that Lord Alton has got the National Audit Office to investigate the contracts, calling them "a licence to print money".

So-called zero hours contracts are not IDS's responsibility, but the consequences of them are.  Yet it's only the Lib Dems, including Nick Clegg and Vince Cable, who are expressing concern.  The Office for National Statistics (ONS) has just upped its estimate of how many people are working on these terms to 250,000, but this is almost certainly too low.  Are people being forced to apply for, and take, these jobs under threat of sanctions?  

Finally, an unusual reference to A4e in a regional paper.  The company still occasionally gets PR pieces in local papers, but this one, in the Oxford Mail, won't please them.  It quotes a 27-year-old woman who says that the WP wasn't very effective for her, and her adviser had no time to spend with her.  She got help from the charity Crisis Skylight, whose CE says that the WP has been a huge disappointment, offering minimal support.  Strangely, the county's Tory MP, Sir Tony Baldry, doesn't completely disagree.  He acknowledges that the need in the area is for people with skills and qualifications, and they are not getting those.