Tag: welfare-to-work

The politics of punishment and blame: in-work conditionality

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The Department for Work and Pensions has submitted a document about the Randomised Control Trial (RCT) they are currently conducting regarding in-work “progression.” The submission was made to the Work and Pensions Committee in January, as the Committee have conducted an inquiry into in-work conditionality. The document specifies that: “This document is for internal use only and should not be shared with external partners or claimants.” 

So please share widely.

The Department for Work and Pensions claim that the Trial is about “testing whether conditionality and the use of financial sanctions are effective for people that need to claim benefits in low paid work.” The document focuses on methods of enforcing the “cultural and behavioural change” of people claiming both in-work and out-of-work social security, and evaluation of the Trial will be the responsibility of the Labour Market Trials Unit. (LMTU). Evaluation will “measure the impact of the Trial’s 3 group approaches, but understand more about claimant attitudes to progression over time and how the Trial has influenced behaviour changes.”

Worryingly, claimant participation in the Trial is mandatory. There is clearly no appropriate procedure to obtain and record clearly informed consent from research participants. Furthermore, the Trial is founded on a coercive psychopolitical approach to labour market constraints, and is clearly expressed as a psychological intervention, explicitly aimed at “behavioural change” and this raises some serious concerns about research ethics and codes of conduct. It’s also very worrying that this intervention is to be delivered by non-qualified work coaches.

The British Psychological Society (BPS) have issued a code of ethics in psychology that provides guidelines for the conduct of research. Some of the more important and pertinent ethical considerations are as follows:

Informed Consent.

Participants must be given the following information relating to:

• A statement that participation is voluntary and that refusal to participate will not result in any consequences or any loss of benefits that the person is otherwise entitled to receive.

• Purpose of the research.

• Procedures involved in the research.

• All foreseeable risks and discomforts to the participant (if there are any). These include not only physical injury but also possible psychological.

• Subjects’ right to confidentiality and the right to withdraw from the study at any time without any consequences.

Protection of Participants

Researchers must ensure that those taking part in research will not be caused distress. They must be protected from physical and mental harm. This means you must not embarrass, frighten, offend or harm participants.

Normally, the risk of harm must be no greater than in ordinary life, i.e. participants should not be exposed to risks greater than or additional to those encountered in their normal lifestyles. Withdrawing lifeline support that is calculated to meet the costs of only minimum requirements for basic survival – food, fuel and shelter – as a punishment for non-compliance WILL INVARIABLY cause distress, harm and loss of dignity for the subjects that are coerced into participating in this Trial. Participants should be able to leave a study at any time if they feel uncomfortable.

The Economic and Social Research Council has recently issued a new research ethics framework, and the website has lots of useful guidance that is also worth referring to.

In the UK, the Behavioural Insight Team is testing paternalist ideas for conducting public policy by running experiments in which many thousands of participants receive various “treatments” at random. Whilst medical researchers generally observe strict ethical codes of practice, in place to protect subjects, the new behavioural economists are much less transparent in conducting behavioural research interventions.

Consent to a therapy or a research protocol must possess three features in order to be valid. It should be voluntarily expressed, it should be the expression of a competent subject, and the subject should be adequately informed. It’s highly unlikely that people subjected to the extended use and broadened application of welfare sanctions gave their informed consent to participate in experiments designed to test the theory of “loss aversion,” for example.

Unfortunately there is nothing to prevent a government from deliberately exploiting a research framework as a way to test out highly unethical and ideologically-driven policies. It is not appropriate to apply a biomedical model of prescribed policy “treatments” to people experiencing politically and structurally generated social problems, such as unemployment, inequality and poverty, for example.

Some background

I wrote last year about the Work and Pensions Committee’s in-work progression in Universal Credit inquiry. The Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) intends to establish an “in-work service”, designed to encourage individual Universal Credit claimants on very low earnings to increase their income. Benefit payments may be stopped if claimants fail to take action as required by the DWP. The DWP is conducting a range of pilots to test different approaches but there is very little detail about these. The new regime might eventually apply to around one million people.

We really must challenge the Conservative’s use of words such as “encourage” and “support” and generally deceptive language use in the context of what are, after all, extremely punitive, coercive  policies.

I wrote a statement at the time regarding my own submission to the inquiry, prompted by Frank Field’s spectacularly misguided and conservative statement. Here are a few of the issues and concerns I raised: 

Field refered to the Conservative “welfare dependency” myth, yet there has never been any empirical evidence to support the claims of the existence of a “culture of dependency” and that’s despite the dogged research conducted by Keith Joseph some years ago, when he made similar claims.

In fact, a recent international study of social safety nets from The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and Harvard economists categorically refutes the Conservative “scrounger” stereotype and dependency rhetoric. Abhijit Banerjee, Rema Hanna, Gabriel Kreindler, and Benjamin Olken re-analyzed data from seven randomized experiments evaluating cash programs in poor countries and found “no systematic evidence that cash transfer programmes discourage work.”

The phrase “welfare dependency” diverts us from political discrimation via policies, increasing inequality, and it serves to disperse public sympathies towards the poorest citizens, normalising prejudice and resetting social norm defaults that then permit the state to target protected social groups for further punitive and “cost-cutting” interventions to “incentivise” them towards “behavioural change.”

Furthermore, Welfare-to-Work programmes do not “help” people to find jobs, because they don’t address exploitative employers, structural problems, such as access to opportunity and resources and labour market constraints. Work programmes are not just a failure here in the UK, but also in other countries, where the programmes have run extensively over at least 15 years, such as Australia.

Welfare-to-work programes are intimately connected with the sanctioning regime, aimed at punishing people claiming welfare support. Work programme providers are sanctioning twice as many people as they are signposting into employment (David Etherington, Anne Daguerre, 2015), emphasising the distorted priorities of “welfare to work” services, and indicating a significant gap between claimant obligations and employment outcomes.

The Conservatives have always constructed discourses and shaped institutions which isolate some social groups from health, social and political resources, with justification narratives based on a process of class-contingent characterisations and the ascribed responsiblisation of social problems such as poverty, using quack psychology and pseudoscience. However, it is socioeconomic conditions which lead to deprivation of opportunities, and that outcome is undoubtedly a direct consequence of inadequate and discriminatory political decision-making and policy.

It’s worth bearing in mind that many people in work are still living in poverty and reliant on in-work benefits, which undermines the Libertarian Paternalist/Conservative case for increasing benefit conditionality somewhat, although those in low-paid work are still likely to be less poor than those reliant on out-of-work benefits. The Conservative “making work pay” slogan is a cryptographic reference to the punitive paternalist 1834 Poor Law principle of less eligibility.

The government’s Universal Credit legislation has enshrined the principle that working people in receipt of in-work benefits may face benefits sanctions if they are deemed not to be trying hard enough to find higher-paid work. It’s not as if the Conservatives have ever valued legitimate collective wage bargaining. In fact their legislative track record consistently demonstrates that they hate it, prioritising the authority of the state above all else.

There are profoundly conflicting differences in the interests of employers and employees. The former are generally strongly motivated to purposely keep wages as low as possible so they can generate profit and pay dividends to shareholders and the latter need their pay and working conditions to be such that they have a reasonable standard of living.

Workplace disagreements about wages and conditions are now typically resolved neither by collective bargaining nor litigation but are left to management prerogative. This is because Conservative aspirations are clear. Much of the government’s discussion of legislation is preceded with consideration of the value and benefit for business and the labour market. They want cheap labour and low cost workers, unable to withdraw their labour, unprotected by either trade unions or employment rights and threatened with destitution via benefit sanction cuts if they refuse to accept low paid, low standard work. Similarly, desperation and the “deterrent” effect of the 1834 Poor Law amendment served to drive down wages.

In the Conservative’s view, trade unions distort the free labour market which runs counter to New Right and neoliberal dogma. Since 2010, the decline in UK wage levels has been amongst the very worst in Europe. The fall in earnings under the Coalition is the biggest in any parliament since 1880, according to analysis by the House of Commons Library, and at a time when the cost of living has spiralled upwards.

In-work conditionality enforces a lie and locates blame within individuals for structural problems – political, economic and social – created by those who hold power. Despite being a party that claims to support “hard-working families,” the Conservatives have nonetheless made several attempts to undermine the income security of a significant proportion of that group of citizens recently. Their proposed tax credit cuts, designed to creep through parliament in the form of secondary legislation, which tends to exempt it from meaningful debate and amendment in the Commons, was halted only because the House of Lords have been paying attention to the game.

The government intends to continue formulating policies which will punish sick and disabled people, unemployed people, the poorest paid, and part-time workers. Meanwhile, the collective bargaining traditionally afforded us by trade unions has been systematically undermined by successive Conservative governments, showing clearly how the social risks of the labour market are being personalised and redefined as being solely the economic responsibility of individuals rather than the government and profit-driven big business employers.

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Scottish Welfare Reform Committee hear evidence of Jobcentre staff bullying benefit claimants

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The Scottish Welfare Reform Committee has heard evidence at Holyrood about Jobcentres bullying claimants, often reducing them to tears.

The Committee heard from witnesses who are claimants on a first-name basis only because of fears that the disclosures may lead to sanctioning by the Department of Work and Pensions (DWP).

However, one witness, Nicholas Young, whose firm Working Links has a £167 million contract to find jobs for people on the Department for Work and Pensions’ (DWP) Work Programme, said conditionality – specifically benefit sanctions – “has had a really positive impact over a number of years”. He claimed such “conditionality” is a way of “encouraging active participation.”

He didn’t provide evidence of his claim, and he didn’t elaborate how punitive state sanctions that remove people’s lifeline social security – calculated to meet only basic needs such as food, fuel and shelter –  could possibly be regarded as “encouragement.”

His evidence to the Welfare Reform Committee was at odds with other witnesses, including the director of another DWP contractor. Paul de Pellette, director of fellow Work Programme contractor Ingeus, said  that sanctions are a “disincentive” to building trust.

He said: “If you’re an employment adviser working in the Work Programme, one of the most important things to have is to build trust and rapport with the people that are coming through the door.

“Therefore, the sanctions regime in some regards could be viewed as a disincentive for that because the reality is you want to have trust and rapport.”

Contractors delivering the DWP’s voluntary disability employment scheme Work Choice also warned the UK Government’s decision to devolve the employment schemes to Holyrood but keep the responsibility for implementing sanctions was a recipe for confusion.

SNP MSP Joan McAlpine said the Work Programme contractors appeared “unmoved” by research which found people on the work programme “are three times as likely to be sanctioned than find a job”.

Mr Young said: “I am absolutely not unmoved at all. The plight and the personal circumstances of our customers is incredibly important to us.”

He went on to say: “Single parents have long had conditionality attached to their benefits regime. I think it has had a really positive impact over a number of years.

“Again, some disabled people will have conditionality attached to their benefits regime. I support the role of conditionality.”

He added: “I support the principle of conditionality as a way of encouraging active participation.”

However, although the Conservatives conflated sanctions with welfare conditionality under their welfare “reforms”, increasing the severity and frequency of sanctions as a punishment for “non-compliance”, sanctions and conditionality may also be regarded as mutually exclusive criteria, since state punishment need not be included in “encouraging” people to look for work.

Disabled people and lone parents already face additional barriers to finding work that are out of their control, and so to punish people in protected social groups potentially on the basis of their characteristics is discriminatory.

Another issue that was discussed is that those on welfare-to-work schemes spend all day having to repeatedly cold-call frustrated companies who do not have any work to offer, MSPs were told.

One witness, “Donna,” who had been made redundant after working all of her life gave evidence to the Committee, she said that Jobcentre advisers had bullied her, making her ill and stressed. She was a former Church of Scotland development worker from Glasgow.

She said of her first interview with the Jobcentre: “He made me feel like I was imagining my problems and I didn’t have any problems,”

“I would have been in a mental institution if I had stayed with that first adviser.”

“He was saying to me: ‘It’s not like you’ve got a leg missing.’ Each time he made me cry.

“I would have been in a mental institution if I had stayed with that first adviser – or I would have shot him.”

Another claimant called “Jake”, also from Glasgow, said: “Sometimes you sit on the phone from nine to five each day making calls for jobs but you know you’re not going to get anything. It’s depressing.

“The booklet I got was all of the cleaning companies, the laundry companies, you were just to phone up and say you’re looking for work. Most of them would say: ‘Don’t phone here again.'”

SNP MSP Christina McKelvie said the system amounts to “class warfare” with “propaganda” against the unemployed.

“A report from the DWP suggested only 24% of people going through the work programme were successful and only 9% of them were in a job after a year,” she said.

“The DWP had paid the providers £1.8bn since the scheme had started for that kind of outcome. Is all of that money worth it?”

Labour MSP Neil Findlay said: “If it is as described, this is in effect state-sanctioned cold-calling. This has really disturbed and upset me. In fact it has disgusted me.

“The system that we have created and the atmosphere in this system is so wrong, I find it incredible the more evidence that people present to us.

“It also disgusts me what they have done to public services on the frontline having to deal with people going through this bloody system, because I don’t think for one second 99.9% of them want to treat people like this.”

Alistair Kerr, head of quality and contract compliance at Work Choice contractor Momentum Scotland, said: “Any performance contracts have to have elements of conditionality to them, but if that is to the detriment of the most vulnerable across the UK then surely that should not be a model that should be adopted by the Scottish Government.”

Whilst the devolution of some aspects of Social Security continue to be debated during the passage of the Scotland Bill, the Welfare Reform Committee has focused on the practical implementation of the social security schemes outlined in the Smith Agreement.

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This post was written for Welfare Weekly, which is a socially responsible and ethical news provider, specialising in social welfare related news and opinion.