There will be screaming and anguish about this

Friday, 18th July 2008

Benefit claimants will have to take part in a new "work for dole" plan as part of a package of welfare reforms to be unveiled next week that will aim to get millions back to work.

Aren't we horrible people? Insisting that people don't simply sit on benefits but get up and do something in return for society's support of them?

Must be some horrible right wing idea, yes?

The "work for dole" programme is an idea borrowed from America.

Ooooh, yes, and it's American. My how the Guardianistas will curse it all.

There's only one problem with this. The idea is thoroughly home grown. Indeed, the prime mover of the intellectual theory behind it is a certain Richard Layard, that gloriously social democratic peer (and also one of those who tried to teach me economics so he's got a lot to answer for, don't you think?).

All through the 80s he was arguing that having people on long term unemployment benefits could and should be solved by insisting that they do something in return. Doesn't really matter what either, training, workfare, just as long as they didn't slip out of the potential labour force altogether. We should, in short, hold their feet to the fire of needing to at least compete to get a job. In the absence of that, let's create jobs for them to do. Along with similar ideas being developed in the US this is what led to the US welfare reforms and part of that process was the so called "Wisconsin" reforms (run by Tommy Thompson when he was Governor there) and it is from there that we are taking the justifications for the latest round of reforms here.

A quote from a more recent paper of Layard's:
The rationale for welfare-to-work is simple. If you pay people to be inactive, there will be more inactivity. So you should pay them instead for being active – for either working or training to improve their employability. The evidence for the first proposition is everywhere around us. For example, Europe has a notorious unemployment problem. But if you break down unemployment into short-term (under a year) and long-term, you find that short-term unemployment is almost the same in Europe as in the U.S. – around 4% of the workforce. But in Europe there are another 4% who have been out of work for over a year, compared with almost none in the United States. The most obvious explanation for this is that in the U.S. unemployment benefits run out after 6 months, while in most of Europe they continue for many years or indefinitely.

This isn't, whatever anyone might try to tell you, the invention of some ghastly right wingers (like, say, myself). This is entirely liberal left in justification and source. It's also a damn good idea: something I don't often say about things that come from such a source.