Sanctions, sanctions, sanctions

Channel 4 had a programme about the sanctions regime last night which I wasn't able to watch.  I'd intended to catch up on it today, but decided not to bother.  When the producers seek an opinion from the odious Tory front group The Taxpayers' Alliance you know it's not an impartial programme, and posts on Twitter suggest it followed the government line.
The need for truth was highlighted in an extraordinary way in a Twitter exchange this morning.  Kevin Maguire, the Mirror journalist, tweeted: "Imagine being late for work one day and the boss docks your pay for a month.  That's how benefits sanctions work."  Someone replied that he had been 7 minutes late for an appointment and was sanctioned for 3 months.  In came the journalist Julia Hartley-Brewer.  She asked, politely enough, whether he'd been late before and if he'd been given a warning before.  Someone else waded in to point out that there are no warnings in the system and that sanctions are automatic.  Back came the snappy response from Brewer: "not true".  She was asked how she knew that, told politely she was wrong and the point about no warnings was repeated.
Ms Hartley-Brewer obviously doesn't like to be contradicted.  She snarled back: "have you ever tried talking to people who work in the benefits office AND people who've been sanctioned.  It helps."  (She was obviously too cross to pay attention to punctuation.)  The respondent said that she had worked in the system and would like to explain it to her, politely.  But it was too late.  Others waded in, one with a string of obscenities which played into Brewer's hands; she retweeted it.  The polite respondent left the fray and it descended into childish name-calling.  That Brewer was wrong in her original statement was never addressed, and those who were angry and feel themselves provoked were made to look like the baddies.
And that's the trouble.  It's usually impossible to contact a journalist directly, and that's understandable.  But it reinforces the power relationship.  She has a platform.  Whether she is telling the truth about her conversations we can't know.  It seems unlikely, given that she doesn't know what she's talking about.  But like everyone on the right she can ignore all the evidence and repeat government lies.  If she has read the recent reports by various churches she has discounted them.  If she followed the evidence given in the Work & Pensions Select Committee enquiry, she has discounted it.  She prefers to believe IDS, McVey et al because to do otherwise would be to shake her faith in Conservative politics.
There are lots of links I could post, but I'll stick to just one, which is very relevant here, although it's mainly about Universal Credit.  Helen Lewis wrote this excellent piece in the New Statesman last week.
If you haven't yet read Owen Jones' latest book, The Establishment, you really should.  (A4e gets coverage in a section on outsourcing.)  We knew the gist of Jones' argument; but he provides a wealth of facts and figures and pulls the threads together to present a frightening picture.  His concluding chapter contains a hopeful picture of what needs to happen.  But it won't, and that is depressing.

The battleground

Issues of welfare and low pay are set to become the battleground in the 2015 election.  Opening shots have been fired this week, and, as always, factual reports quickly get countered by ideological nonsense.

The stories about zero hours contracts started a little while ago.  The numbers of people estimated to be trapped on these contracts rapidly rose, while noises from government about what they were prepared to do about it petered out.  Then came a report that a relatively sensible Tory strategist has said that his party won't make any headway in poorer areas of the country unless it is prepared to raise the minimum wage and work towards the living wage.  A detailed story in the Independent shows how nervous the Tories are about this.  Naturally their paymasters don't want to pay higher wages; they would much prefer to be subsidised by the taxpayer (which is all of us).  While Labour and the Lib Dems have more or less committed to this, the Conservatives remain ideologically bound to the concept of an untrammelled free market in wages.  Today the BBC news website published some interesting figures from the Resolution Foundation, showing that 20% of all workers earn less than the living wage.

But any attempt to have a sensible discussion on such issues is derailed by far-right pressure groups like the odious Taxpayers' Alliance, which often puts out press releases like a brattish child demanding attention.  As the BBC site headlined it, "Force claimants to work for benefits, government urged".  It displays the TPA's usual ignorance of the current system, but it got the publicity they wanted, not least from the Express.  In a typically hate-filled and untruthful report, the paper repeats the TPA's made-up figures of a saving of £3.5bn a year.  It accompanies this with a photograph, apparently authentically taken outside a jobcentre of the most unprepossessing youths they could find.  The Express also has a piece, complete with maps, to show where the highest numbers of households without work are.  Again, with criminal disregard for truth, all of these households (which include disabled people and their carers, for example) are labelled "work-shy".  And the areas where most people are out of work are called unproductive, as if they could be thrown away.

So, while we need a genuine debate on welfare and wages, we need to base it on truth.  And that will probably be impossible.

Finally, I couldn't resist this from an American website.  Iain Duncan Smith is giving a lecture later this month to a right-wing organisation on "21st Century Welfare Reform".  "He explains how transforming the country's welfare system goes hand in hand with transforming people's life chances - continuing a historic mission that Conservatives from William Wilberforce, Lord Shaftesbury and Abraham Lincoln have always had to help people improve the quality of their lives."  What?????  I don't know much about Lincoln but I know a great deal about Wilberforce and Shafesbury.  IDS, you are no Wilberforce and you are no Shaftesbury.

More truth, more lies

Iain Duncan Smith has been taken to task by the official statistics watchdog over his claims that the £26,000 a year benefits cap spurred 8,000 unemployed people to find jobs.  Andrew Dilnot, the chair of the UK Statistics Authority, has written to the TUC (following a complaint from them) to say that he did not comply with the code of practice on the way ministers handled figures, and wanting assurance that he won't do it again.  It sounds mild enough, but the language is strong for that kind of official letter.  The Huffington Post has the full letter, and the Independent dissects it.  Channel 4 News' FactCheck has also described the situation.  They all point out that this isn't the first time that IDS has been officially rebuked for making false claims.  At last, this morning, the BBC has reported the story, talking briefly to MP Dame Anne Begg who was copied into the letter.  She talked about using figures to make a political point and referred to the false claims about 1 million people who were supposedly fit for work.
But "lies, damned lies and statistics" are the stuff of much modern journalism.  Ministers are fond of talking about "fraudanderror" (as if it was one word) costing vast amounts of money.  Left Foot Forward publishes the official figures from the DWP, which show that just 0.7% of total benefit expenditure (£1.2bn) is down to claimant fraud.  0.9% is due to claimant error, 0.4% to official error.  A poll carried out for the TUC shows that the public believes that the fraud figure is 27%.  Now, how could they get that false impression?  Could it be the result of disgusting "journalism" like that in the Express today?  Somebody called Martyn Brown writes an article headlined "Call for new blitz on benefits to cut £3.6bn fraud bill".  Hang on, where did that figure come from?  Oh yes, it's 3 years' worth.  And there's a great big photo of "benefit scrounger Mick Philpott" (who is referred to again at the end of the article as if he's typical).  The only reference to percentages in the piece is the fact that the figure for official error has fallen to 0.4%.  Brown dissects the fraud figures to show what huge amounts of money are involved, and drags in the odious Taxpayers' Alliance in support.  There's nothing in the piece which is actually false (I think) but it's pure propaganda, selective use of the figures to create a false impression.

... and the truth is buried

I pointed out the claim that there were 2,000 vacancies in Hull, an area of high unemployment.  Despite the exposure of this claim as at best highly misleading, it has taken wings.  Today the Express has turned it into "Unemployment 'blackspot' that has 7,000 jobs going begging".  Yes, you read that right, 7,000.  Because, as everyone knows, only about 30% of vacancies are advertised in the Jobcentres.  The story does point out what some of those vacancies actually are; highly specialised and requiring qualifications (and they include Army jobs!).  But that doesn't deter the DWP chap.  "Stuart Griffiths, Hull district manager for the Department for Work and Pensions, said unemployed people had a misconception that there were no jobs on offer.  He said: 'It is a myth that there are no jobs out there.  People sometimes come into our offices and say there are no jobs out there but it is simply not true.  These might not be the jobs of people’s dreams – we accept not everyone wants to be a carer or a butcher, for example. We all want to create and attract new jobs into the city, and we all want the jobs from large companies.  But what we are saying is, if people want to train to work in renewables, for example, why not take a job now and earn money so you can train towards the career you want?'"
Hang on, how many of these jobs are open to trainees with no experience?  And it doesn't deter the odious Taxpayers' Alliance.  "Last night Robert Oxley, campaign manager of the TaxPayers’ Alliance, said: 'It is ludicrous that we are paying out so much in jobseekers’ allowance when there are jobs out there waiting to be filled.  The welfare system has long needed reform so that it both equips people for work and ensures they take the jobs on offer.  With money tight we can’t afford for people to remain out of employment. It is vital that the welfare system ensures that work pays and that dodging it does not.'"
That's the agenda, of course.  All those people in Hull, and elsewhere, who are desperate for work have now been branded as workshy, and it feeds the far right's determination to destroy the welfare system.
Strange, but no one has mentioned the Work Programme.  You would think the providers in the area (they don't include A4e) would have a comment to make.

Who benefits?

The focus is on sickness and disability benefits today, as Channel 4 and the BBC both screen programmes on the assessment system (Channel 4 at 8.00 and Panorama on BBC at 8.30).  Panorama has questioned the "government appointed adviser on testing welfare claimants", Prof Malcolm Harrington.  According to a preview in the Telegraph, the professor admits that there are flaws in the system.  The programme highlights a particular case, a man who suffered from heart failure and "died 39 days after being declared fit for work". However, the familiar loathing of anyone on benefits is on show in a particularly nasty way in the Express this morning.  "New war on sick benefits" it shrieks.  The language in this article would make a fine case study in right-wing propaganda.  Note the verbs.  Taxpayers "shelled out"; families are "mired" in dependency; claimants are "raking in" money.  And the statistics are absurd.  But they have a quote from the disgusting Taxpayers' Alliance, so that must validate it.

No doubt they would approve of the plan which is about to be rolled out across the country, according to the Guardian; to make people who have been unemployed for 3 years do "community work" for 6 months. The paper has the views of the Centre for Economic and Social Inclusion, which says that it could result in 1.06 million people being forced onto the scheme because the Work Programme will not work.  The article also says that the decision in the Jamie Wilson case is expected before 10 August.  He's the chap who took the DWP to court along with Cait Reilly.

The Guardian also has revelations about how donors to the Tory party are making millions from welfare companies.  A firm called Sovereign Capital owns ESG which has £73m worth of government contracts, including for the WP in the Midlands.  The article details all the donations and connections.  There's a rather half-hearted quote from Labour's Liam Byrne.  He's in a difficult position, of course.  David Blunkett and A4e?

Where is the anger?

That's the question asked by John Harris in a Guardian article last week.  He is provoked by the story we reported on that the W2W providers are demanding more and more "sanctions" - wanting to stop the incomes of clients.  It's a long and eloquent piece, and he can't understand why people are not more angry about what's happening.
It's not a difficult question to answer.  We could start with a story which appeared in the Express last week: "One Scot in 10 would rather skive than get a job".  It's a story designed to misinform.  It even quotes the odious Taxpayers' Alliance.  But the point is that it feeds the belief, in people who know no better, that the welfare system allows the idle to live in comfort on the back of the industrious.  Once this would have been seen as far-right propaganda.  Now, people have been persuaded that it's true.  They see their own insecurity not as the fault of the elites who have messed up the economies of the world in their own greed; they blame the people who are even lower down the ladder than they are.
Many of us know people who believe that there are vast numbers of "scroungers", living comfortably on benefits with no intention of working.  They will tell you about families that have all the luxuries you could desire and don't want a job.  There is just enough truth in the fiction to turn it into a generality.  Never mind that all such families are up to their eyes in debt, or criminally inclined.  It's no use telling them that many thousands are desperate for work.  How many read such reports as this one in the Yorkshire Post: "Hull: City where 18 people chase every job vacancy".  They don't believe it.  Write about food charities and they don't believe it.
So cut welfare.  The only people who will suffer don't matter.  The reason that the government is reluctant to cut benefits for the elderly is that the elderly have an annoying habit of voting.  As for the poorest, most of them don't vote, and the calculation is that more people will approve of "cracking down" on scroungers than will have sympathy with the sob stories.  


G4S are getting a mauling in the press today.  But rely on the BBC and you'd never know that the company has W2W contracts.

Jumping the Gun?

Anyone watching the BBC's Politics Show in the North today would have to assume that the Work Programme contracts are already done and dusted.

The introduction to the item talked about a "Sheffield company" which was going to do what is already done in Germany, work with whole families. They then looked at Orchard Park Estate in Hull, where unemployment is very high and women say there are no jobs for the majority who want to work.

Cut to Emma Harrison of A4e, even more ebullient than usual. Cities like Hull, she said, need more support. A4e are going to be allowed to work with whole families, isn't that wonderful? The new Work Programme will mean "a massive breakthrough" because of this working with entire families. Cut back to a Hull councillor. who said that the programme was about cutting benefits rather than creating jobs. Back to Emma, who talks about the trap of Incapacity Benefit, and how the "radical reforms" will stop this.

A brief studio discussion followed, in which a Labour MP said that the last government did focus on whole families, and this was just re-badging. A woman from the Taxpayers' Alliance talked about making work pay and the need to create jobs.

So what are we to make of this? The company have been pushing for this "whole families" concept for a long time, and it looks like all that lobbying of ministers which Harrison brags about has paid off. The new government's advisers are oblivious to the dangers of giving the employees of a private company the right to interfere in the lives of families. Presumably where A4e has the current FND contracts they will accept the new, "re-negotiated" WP contracts, and that's why Harrison appears to be jumping the gun. If their clients in Hull want to question the new approach they can always seek legal advise - from the CLAC run by A4e.