Category Archives: Welfare reform

Youth Contract shrouded in mystery as Minister refuses to publish data

Ministers are refusing to publish any data for the Youth Contract more than one year after the flagship scheme began. In a response to a Parliamentary Question Ministers pushed back the date for release data again amidst growing rumours that the scheme is failing.

 

Three years after this government came to power youth unemployment is still hovering around the million mark – and still higher than it was at in May 2010.

 

The Youth Contract began in April 2012. The main part of the scheme is a wage subsidy of £2,275 to employers if they employ a young person who has been unemployed for nine months. In the 2011 Autumn Statement the Government boasted that the Youth Contract would offer 160,000 wage incentives to employers.

 

Ministers originally promised to release data in “early 2013”, yet in response to my parliamentary question last month asking when the statistics for the wage subsidy will be released, ministers could not give us a date.

 

Almost a million young people are locked out of work but the government’s flagship Youth Contract is nowhere to be seen. Ministers are hiding the scheme in the very same way they hid the Work Programme, and that turned out to be performing worse than doing nothing.

 

Britain is in the middle of a youth jobs crisis that shows no sign of ending – we simply cannot allow government schemes to continue to fail. Ministers must now come clean, publish the results they have been hiding and bring forward a real plans to get our young people back to work, starting with Labour’s Real Jobs Guarantee.

 

You can read the FT’s report here .

 

My interview with the Today Programme. Thursday 6th June 2013

LIAM BYRNE – Social Security reform  

 

Today Programme

Thursday, 06 June 2013

 

Speakers:        Liam Byrne

                        Evan Davis

                       

           

ED:                  I want you to avoid critiquing the Conservatives, the coalition’s, welfare policies because we’ve got a lot of debate about that…

 

LB:                  I’ll do my best…

 

ED:                  Tell us what you think is most important in this speech today.

 

LB:                  First that the way to put the system back on the even keel for the long-term is to get people back to work so you are absolutely right to highlight that core-argument. Long-term worklessness is now at the highest level for 16 years. We’ve got to do more to get people back into jobs and that is why we are saying people should only be allowed to spend a couple of years on JSA and at that stage they should have to get a job and you are right to say we are also saying we’ll invest in helping make sure those jobs are available. Second, we do think that a cap on structural social security spending is a good idea because it forces you to make some long-term reforms and what Ed is doing today is he is setting out what Labour sees as the Labour way to do this, so we’re saying, we spend £30bn on tax credits, that bill is going up, not least because of levels of low pay in many firms so if we did more to actually force through a living wage in different parts of the country you could bring that bill down, but we are also saying, as you rightly highlight, the Housing Benefit bill is going up and up and up, we’re spending 95% of the money we spend on housing on Housing Benefit and only 5% on building houses. That doesn’t make sense and what a lot of councils are saying to us is that if they had more power to regulate and control prices in the private rented sector, they could create some savings which we could recycle into building more homes. And then finally we’ve got to do something about raising the employment rate amongst disabled people. The current Atos assessments are failing very badly, you are ten times more likely to end up in court than you are in a job and I’m afraid that isn’t good enough so we need some fast and fundamental reform of those systems too.       

 

ED:                  Ok. Can I ask you just to give a very brief assessment of what you think the last Labour government did wrong because clearly it is a pretty big change in direction. This government is trying to change direction, you want to change direction, I mean it starts in a sense doesn’t it, with a sense of what you didn’t do when you were in office, so what is your analysis now of the last Labour government?

 

LB:                  If I was reliving, if we were going through that period again I suppose there are two things that we would have done differently in my view. I think we would have moved faster on Incapacity Benefit reform. It is a highly sensitive issue, you have got to do it carefully, the government frankly is making a mess of it but I think we should have moved faster on that, and second I think we should have done more to put the ‘something for something back’ in the social security system. One of the really important arguments Ed is highlighting today is that a lot of people feel they put a lot of money in and they don’t really get much back out when they need it and that is especially true for working parents and it is especially true for people in their 50s and so we are just beginning to float a few ideas today about how those who put more in do get more out, particularly support that might help them get back into work and retrain for a different career if they lose their jobs.

 

ED:                  Let’s look at some of the proposals here and I’m assuming by the way that these are not detailed policy yet, there are approaches that you are outlining and you haven’t…

 

LB:                  Correct, these are the principles that will guide Labour’s approach to long-term social security reform.

 

ED:                  One of the areas which is sort of, a bit difficult for you is of course, that times are going to be financially constrained, and that much has been agreed by everybody and quite a lot of the proposals look like they involve spending more money rather than less, or at least spending more in the short-term rather than less, because, for example, if you want to deal with the problem of low-pay in order to save welfare support for the low-paid, and if you propose to pay companies to pay their workers less, that is more money to less money isn’t it, and there are a number of other things, if you want to, for example, build more houses, I mean obviously it is not quite the same kind of extra spending, but that is more money rather than less spending isn’t it?

 

LB:                  Great question. So if you take for example, low pay, lots of people say to us, ‘why are we subsidising low pay with tax credits?’ And I think people have got a point and so we can deal with this partly by tackling abuse of zero-hours contracts, tackling abuse of the agency workers freedom’s too, but the idea of living wage zones is that you bring employers together to say ‘look, if you’re prepared to put people on a living wage, which in London is about 1/3rd higher than the national minimum wage, over the course of time as savings are made we’ll recycle some of those savings into helping you upgrade skills and upgrading capital equipment, basically making your firms more productive.’ So you are right to say there isn’t upfront money to ‘prime the pump’ as it were but there is a shared savings way of doing things. The same is true on Housing Benefit. A lot of councils are saying, if you take my home council in Birmingham, they spend about £200m on Housing Benefit in the private rented sector, and what councils like Birmingham are saying is ‘if we had some more power to regulate the private rented sector, used some kind of collective purchasing, we could drive that bill down and what we could then do is use the savings to help build more social housing which would bring rent-levels down over the long-term.’

 

ED:                  I think there has been some scepticism about whether that is going to make any difference. I mean if you re-introduce rent controls it might make a difference but you are not going to help the long-term problem of supply by capping rents and making it less profitable to build and to produce rented accommodation I wouldn’t have thought.

 

LB:                  But these are medium-term changes, these are not kneejerk, overnight success stories…

 

ED:                  Are you talking about a regulated rental sector, the re-introduction of rent controls and the like.

 

LB:                  I think that might be going a bit far. What we are saying is that local councils are saying that they’ve got lots of ideas for how they can make savings and they’d be prepared to crack-on with that if there is a promise on the table to share in the savings to build more houses but, I guess, the reason that we are saying that a long-term cap on social security spending makes sense is because it forces you to engage in these long-term reforms and these long-term reforms are quite a contrast to the kind of kneejerk, salami slicing un-strategic approach the government is taking…

 

ED:                  Long-term reform, no-one is going to disagree with that. What happens if you have a cap, say measured over a three year period and in the end of the second year you can see blatantly you are going to breach the cap, where would you be looking to claw back the savings, is it going to be tougher eligibility requirements, is it going to be reductions in the level of benefits for those who might have suspected to get quite generous benefits?

 

LB:                  I think this is at the core of the debate and what we’re saying is if you have got a long-term cap it forces you to plan ahead and grip things that are not working, so I’ll give you an example. The Work Programme at the moment, we know is not doing especially well. Now at the moment the government, arguably, is taking a bit of a hands off approach to sorting that problem out, if you have got a cap on social security spending I’m afraid you just don’t have that latitude, you have got to get a very quick handle on things that are going wrong.

 

ED:                  I fear you haven’t really answered the question as to where you look to sort of claw things back… because the cap isn’t a target as I understand it, it is different from a target isn’t it that you are allowed to breach a target, and you say ‘well, that is disappointing.’ But a cap is a cap.

 

LB:                  A cap is a cap and obviously you set your social security budgets each year within that cap but what a long-term approach forces you to do is not let problems lie. It forces you to get absolutely stuck into fixing things…

 

ED:                  Doesn’t avoid the difficult decisions…

 

LB:                  It certainly doesn’t avoid the difficult decisions but what it does force you to do is actually get a grip on stuff that frankly is failing.

 

ED:                  Now what this new approach to welfare, let’s call it a new approach to welfare and let’s assume that you can put flesh on all these sort of ideas that are out there, they are not going to get you out of some very ordinary decisions that have to be made and that the current government is going to confront you with. I mean most notably they have removed Child Benefit for higher rate tax payers, is that something the Labour Party believes is a good idea or a bad idea.

 

LB:                  If we were in office today that is not a change that we would have made, we think it is the wrong idea. But we are being completely candid that the inheritance in 2015/16 is going to be bleak. The budget that we inherit is our starting point; any changes that we make to that budget have got to be fully funded. We are going to be introducing some quite tough long-term controls on social security spending, a triple-lock if you like which means a 2 year limit on JSA…

 

ED:                  But basically Child Benefit for higher rate taxpayers is not coming back under Labour is it, it is gone now.

 

LB:                  We can’t make any changes that are not fully funded and this is a couple of billion quid, that is a large amount of money and there will be a big queue of things that we want to get done.

 

ED:                  Just one other quick one, there’s been a bit of a debate about whether people who have more children than they can support themselves, than they could reasonably have expected to support themselves. Whether how much generosity the benefits system should bestow upon them. Would you ever agree with the idea that people who have, say more than two children should get no more benefit than those who stick with two.

 

LB:                  I personally think it is a very bad idea. Because one of our proudest achievements in government was lifting a million children out of poverty all that good work is being undone by this government and what we should be doing, frankly, is helping parents work and indeed, one of the things Ed is talking about today how we do more to help lone-parents prepare for work as their child approaches school age so, look, child poverty remains a great cause and crusade for the Labour party and we are not going to back away from that.

 

-ends-

 

 

 

 

Ministers seem to have got jobseekers wasting time on mumbo jumbo personality tests when they should be looking for work

The Guardian reports that that jobseekers are being asked to complete ‘bogus psychometric tests, as reported here: http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2013/apr/30/jobseekers-bogus-psychometric-tests-unemployed

No wonder unemployment is higher today than when this government came to power.

Ministers seem to have got jobseekers wasting time on mumbo jumbo personality tests when they should be looking for work.

This country desperately needs real action to get people into jobs not pointless tests. That’s why we need Labour’s compulsory jobs guarantee to get anyone out of for more than two years into a job – one they would be required to take.

 

50,000 disabled people pushed into poverty as Bedroom Tax approaches

Liam Byrne MP, Labour’s Shadow Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, at a summit on the impact of the Bedroom Tax on disabled people, today revealed fresh evidence of the devastating impact this Government is having on disabled people.

At the event in Southwark, Liam Byrne revealed fresh evidence that the Welfare Uprating Bill will drive 50,000 disabled people into poverty, just one week before the Bedroom Tax hits 440,000 households home to a disabled person.

Liam Byrne MP said:

“In two weeks 13,000 millionaires get will get tax cut of £2,000 per week, but hundreds of thousands of people hit by the Bedroom Tax will pay an extra £728 a year.

“Hundreds of thousands of disabled people will be punished by the hated Bedroom Tax, yet the budget offered them not a penny of help. Instead we have got the spare home subsidy for Britain’s richest families to add to the £100,000 a year tax cut arriving in a few days’ time.

“That tells you everything you need to know about this Government’s values.

“In no world is that fair. Disabled people are seeing attack after attack after attack – from unfair changes to DLA, a Work Capability Assessment that is out of control and now changes to benefits that will drive 50,000 disabled people into poverty. The Government’s plans are in chaos, and that’s why it’s so important to hear what disabled people have to say.

“We are very proud to be the party who appointed the first minister for disabled people. And we want to carry on listening to the views of disabled people. We want to hear your ideas for the future, but also we want to hear what’s going wrong now.”

Ends

Editor’s Notes:

1.   In a response to a Parliamentary Question tabled by Liam Byrne, DWP Minister Steve Webb admits that “we estimate that around an extra 50,000 disabled individuals will be considered to be in poverty under the relative income measure as a result of the Welfare Benefits Up-rating Bill. We also estimate that the average change for households containing a disabled person will be around -£3 a week.” (Hansard 11 Feb 2013 : Column 508W)   http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm201213/cmhansrd/cm130211/text/130211w0003.htm#13021150000029

 

2.   The Government will cut housing benefit for people with a spare room in their social or council let home, despite the DWP impact assessment acknowledging that there is a shortage of smaller properties for tenants to move to. The DWP’s impact assessment says that of the 660,000 people affected, almost two thirds are disabled. The average loss is £14 a week.

 

Why Conservative benefit cuts won’t get Britain working

In place of the Tory party’s heartless and hopeless policy, Labour proposes full employment and the old principle of contribution

Shadow Work and Pensions Secretary Liam Byrne | The Observer | 7 April 2013

These are desperate times for the government and I expected a desperate argument from George Osborne last week. This was when he would slash not only Britain’s vital social safety net, but also help for working people – just at the very moment when he hands out tax cuts for the very rich. It’s a vicious strategy and horrible politics.

Yet Osborne went still further. He disgusted me and demeaned the office of chancellor by using the crimes of Mick Philpott to support his attacks on people who claim benefit. David Cameron’s decision to act as his chancellor’s echo chamber was as predictable as it was depressing.

They both want to play “divide and rule”. To distract the public from their failure to get the economy growing and control the rising bill for unemployment, they point the finger at families struggling to get by in an economy where opportunity has grown very, very thin.

The truth is that, for all their rhetoric about making work pay or supporting strivers, it is working families and those in real need who are footing the bill for the government’s catastrophic economic failure. In the same week when millionaires receive a tax cut, families will on average lose £891 a year and 400,000 disabled people will be hit by a bedroom tax which is deeply unfair.

The government’s supposed reforms are not only heartless, but also hopeless. Housing benefit changes cost more than they save, tax credit changes are making families better off on benefits, the work programme has become all programme and no work, and universal credit is descending into universal chaos. Our “one nation” approach to reforming social security is very different. Instead of seeking to divide people, we want to ensure everyone plays their part so we can rebuild Britain together.

I know as well as anyone that there are going to be difficult decisions. But let’s be clear: the best way to save money is to get people back into work. As David Miliband put it earlier this year, the enemy within is not the unemployed, but unemployment. The biggest problem is not the rate of benefits being paid, but the number of people being paid benefits. That’s why we need a different approach founded on three principles.

First, people must be better off in work than living on benefits. We would make work pay by reintroducing a 10p tax rate and supporting employers who pay the living wage. Second, we would match rights with responsibilities. Labour would ensure that no adult will be able to be live on the dole for over two years and no young person for over a year. They will be offered a real job with real training, real prospects and real responsibility. This would be paid for by taxing bankers’ bonuses and restricting pension tax relief for the wealthiest. People would have to take this opportunity or lose benefits.

Third, we must do more to strengthen the old principle of contribution: there are lots of people right now who feel they pay an awful lot more in than they ever get back. That should change. We should start by letting councils give priority in social housing allocations to those who work and contribute to their community.

Rather than divide and rule, we believe Britain can only overcome the enormous challenges we face if all of us – from top to bottom – play our part.

 

The government tries to talk tough on welfare, but their failure is locking millions out of work, and is sending the benefits bill through the roof.

“This government talks to tough on welfare but their failure to end Britain’s jobs crisis is locking millions out of work and sending the benefits bill through the roof.”

“We urgently need a work programme that works and real action to get young people into jobs. That’s how to get welfare spending under control.”

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/politics/9951213/Benefits-spending-up-6.4billion-in-just-three-months-but-LibDems-insist-budget-cannot-be-cut.html

 

Trasnscript of the Second Reading of the Jobseekers (Back to Work Schemes) Bill

For your reference, here is the link to the transcript of yesterday’s debate:

 http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm201213/cmhansrd/cm130319/debtext/130319-0002.htm#13031966001906

 

BYRNE DEMANDS WEST COAST MAINLINE STYLE ENQUIRY INTO DWP’S £130MILLION FIASCO

Labour’s Shadow Work and Pensions Secretary, Liam Byrne, is today demanding a West Coast Mainline style enquiry into government incompetence which has placed at risk £130 million of public money at risk.

Liam Byrne MP, Labour’s Shadow Work and Pensions Secretary said:

 “Bungling DWP ministers have turned their back to work schemes into a West Coast mainline-style fiasco. Hundreds of thousands of sanctions have been put at risk by the sheer incompetence of Iain Duncan Smith and his department.

 “This monumental blunder has put over £100million of public money at risk. We now need an urgent enquiry, in line with the Laidlaw review, into how Ministers got this so badly wrong.”

 “The department for Work and Pensions is fast becoming the department where nothing works.”

 Background

 Following a Court of Appeal judgement all JSA sanctions issued over the last two years for people who would not participate in almost all of the Government’s work schemes might now be illegal because IDS botched the regulations introducing them.

 The Government has today been forced to bring forward emergency legislation to protect £130million of public money. Labour has secured vital safeguards from the Government to be inserted into the bill: 

  • Ministers must guarantee that appeal rights are protected for JSA claimants who have been wrongly sanctioned. This means that people who have good cause for not participating will still be able to claim their JSA back. Good cause is a wide ranging appeal right – and appeals can be made up to 13 months after sanctions
  • Ministers must launch an independent review of the sanctions regime, with an urgent report to parliament. This is because of real concerns about the way in which sanctions have been used in some cases.

 Detail:

 The Laidlaw Review into the West Coast mainline fiasco

 The West Coast Mainline fiasco has cost the taxpayer £40m already and could cost over £100m as a result of significant technical flaws in the procurement process for the West Cost franchise in October 2012. 

 The Laidlaw Review was set up by the Secretary of State for Transport and tasked with identifying lessons to be learned for the Department and what measures the Department should implement to ensure the sound running of future competitions.

 Attached, the terms of reference for the Laidlaw enquiry, as expressed to Sam Laidlaw in a letter from the Secretary of State for Transport

 DWP’s £130 million incompetence

 The DWP has been forced to bring forward emergency retrospective legislation to regain the general legal base for sanctions issued to around 220,000 individuals since 2011.

 All JSA sanctions issued over the last two years for people who would not participate in almost all of the Government’s work schemes might now be illegal because IDS botched the regulations introducing them.

 The Court of Appeal found that the Government had not provided enough detail in the regulations and not set out enough technical detail of the schemes in the letters sent out to jobseekers.

 Since the Government introduced almost all of their schemes in one set of regulations in March 2011, it now means that all of the sanctions issued under those schemes might be illegal and that they would need to be repaid. This puts £130million of public money at stake. As a result, the Government has been forced to bring forward emergency legislation.

 

Cameron’s Bedroom Tax has descended into total chaos

 

Liam Byrne MP, Labour’s Shadow Work and Pensions Secretary, responding to changes announced to the Bedroom Tax, said:

 “David Cameron’s Bedroom Tax has descended into total chaos. Today’s announcement doesn’t bring forward one extra penny for victims of this wretched tax.

“Ministers have said nothing today to guarantee disabled children will be protected from his hated Bedroom Tax. The truth is there is only 6 weeks help available for everybody hit and David Cameron mustn’t use smoke and mirrors about how this hated tax will hurt disabled children. They have said nothing to almost half a million households that are home to a disabled person who are set to lose over £700 at exactly the same time as millionaires receive a massive tax cut.

“Today this Government will oppose Labour’s plans today for a Mansion Tax – but they’re pressing ahead with a Bedroom Tax which will hit families with literally nowhere else to go.

“Labour will not rest until Ministers think again, admit they have got this wrong and drop this hated tax for good.”

Jim Murphy MP, Labour’s Shadow Defence Secretary, said:

 “For months head-in-the-sand defence ministers have denied there was a problem, but now they’ve backtracked. Ministers’ incompetence has been shown up in this humiliating move.

 “Government embarrassment is matched only by the fact this climb-down does not go far enough to include reservists, whose families could also be hit.

 ”The Government’s defence plans now rely entirely on increasing reservist numbers, yet we are not protecting those who protect our nation.

 “Not for the first time, Ministers should listen to Labour and the service community.”

Ends

 

My line in the Sunday Times story on yet more chaos in the bedroom tax – now even some families with small dining rooms will be hit.

“The Bedroom Tax is now in total chaos. This week the Prime Minister showed he hadn’t got the first idea how the scheme works and now we learn in some parts of the country even dining rooms will be hit. The whole thing is a complete mess. Ministers must get a grip of this shambles fast, before it’s too late.”