Workfare increases child poverty

Lone parents with children as young as seven will be subjected to the “Welfare to Work” regime.

By Eamonn McCann

Poverty levels in the North are set to get worse as the Executive imposes curbs on workers' rights demanded by New Labour. Work and Pensions Secretary James Purnell is steering his “workfare” bill through Westminster ---and all of the main Northern parties are following suit.

Purnell’s scheme will see £360 million a year handed to private companies to deliver a “personalised service” to encourage the unemployed to find work. The “encouragement” will involve the withdrawal of Jobseeker’s Allowance---£60.50 a week---if they can’t show they are actively seeking work or refuse to take whatever job the personal adviser finds for them.

Lone parents with children as young as seven will be subjected to the “Welfare to Work” regime. In the Commons, Purnell was asked whether benefits would be withdrawn from a lone parent who, for example, refused an offer of child-care to free him or her to take whatever job was available because the creche was too far away or not up to standard. He responded: “In the end it will be the personal adviser’s decision with the possibility of appeal, because if we did it the other way round, that would clearly have the potential to drive a cart and horses through the conditionality regime.”

To allow the claimant any say in the matter would undermine the very purpose of the scheme.

People on incapacity benefit are to face the same pressures.

New Labour claims that “Welfare to Work” will reduce child poverty. Hound the adults in households living in poverty into work, and the children will benefit. It soundly vaguely plausible. But it leaves out of account the fact that, over the period 2004/05 to 2006/07, half of the 110,000 children in poverty-level households in the North were living in families with an adult in full-time or part-time paid work. Of the 60,000 children in poverty with two parents, more than half were in families with at least one of the parents working.

Tens of thousands of children in the North, then, and their parent or parents, will be in poverty whether an adult works or not. This figure will rise as unemployment climbs.

From a conservative point of view, the scheme may have made some sense when there were jobs to be had. It makes no sort of sense now---except to ensure that the poor pay the price of the recession.

Control of social security has been devolved to Stormont. Different aspects come under Sir Reg Empey’s (Ulster Unionist) Department of Employment and Learning and Margaret Ritchie’s (SDLP) Department of Social Development.

Empey is a fan of Welfare to Work. In May 2007 he visited the Wildcat Service Corporation in Harlem and professed himself “amazed” at its "achievements". It provides “work habits training” to the unemployed, who are “incentivised” to take part through the denial of welfare benefits if they refuse.

At Stormont on February 2nd, Ritchie was asked “to what extent do decisions on social security policy that are taken at Westminster have an impact on social security policy in Northern Ireland?” She replied that funding of social security in the North “is predicated on the maintenance of parity...We have little option but to implement them.”

In other words, the Executive has no intention of even trying to ease the impact of a neo-liberal measure which will drive down the living standards of some of the most vulnerable sections of the working class. The DUP, Sinn Fein, the Ulster Unionists and the SDLP are all behind the measure.

We need working class resistance to the Stormont consensus. We might start with the sort of upsurge which brought 120,000 people onto the streets of Dublin.

This story appears in the print edition of Socialist Worker posted 6th march 2009