UPDATE: Portes highlights
http://notthetreasuryview.blogspot.co.uk/2012/06/dwp-analysis-shows-mandatory-work.html as his evidence for his quote in Grice's article, and he has also left a comment at the bottom.
Still worth noting that people are only switched to ESA if a doctor agrees and if they pass a medical.
My initial reading of the quote was that it was saying people could just switch from JSA to ESA - it seems I misinterpreted it.
Sorry. I still stand by my criticism of Grice's comments though.
I was astonished by the
one-sided nature of this article by Andrew Grice in the Independent.
Privately, however, some ministers wonder whether there is another reason: that more people are working in the black economy because it has become harder to draw state benefits without being “hassled” by Jobcentres and having to make more effort to find work.
So people don't want to work but do want to work in the "black economy"? How does that work? Has Grice looked into this claim by ministers?
Another factor could be the stigma attached to claiming, as ministers, led by the Chancellor George Osborne, contrast strivers who work hard for their families with scroungers who stay in bed and choose “a life on benefits”.
This is the kind of claim the government make - that people are being shamed off benefits and into work. The quote above implies that many people on benefits could find work and are only coming off them now because of the stigma. The unemployment figures show how laughable this claim is.
Grice has ignored that people who are sanctioned or who are made to do workfare do not count as being unemployed. These reasons are just as likely, if not more likely, to have caused the unemployment figures to stay as they are.
People should look for work if they are able to work and should take a job if they are offered one, but the recession is making it difficult for many to find jobs.
Andrew Grice's article implies that many unemployed people can't be bothered to work. It is the kind of nonsense the Daily Mail would publish.
1 comment:
You are quite right, of course, that people have to pass a WCA to claim ESA. My interpretation of the MWA data is that among those who are on JSA for a very long time are a number of people who have some form of disability. On some of these people, the impact of the extra "hassle factor" of MWA was not to drive them off benefit entirely, but to induce them to claim ESA. My point was not that this was in any way fraudulent, but that it was a bad thing in public policy terms and in no way could be claimed as a "success" for MWA - quite the opposite.
More broadly, if anything, the MWA evidence rather goes against the main argument in Grice's piece (although frankly I thought it was mostly just rather confused - more a compilation of different quotes, some like mine out of context - than a coherent argument). The fact that benefit receipt rates did not drop significantly as a result of the programme suggests that the number of people working and signing, or just "malingering", was rather small. As I said in the blog, this actually rather surprised me. My expectation was that - although I don't think a large proportion of benefit claims are fraudulent - that MWA would lead to at least some clean-out of such claims. But I was wrong:
"Ex ante, I would have said this:
lots of those referred wouldn't show up for the programme
there would be a substantial drop in benefit receipt - some of this would be only temporary, but some would be permanent..
And what happened? Well, drop out was indeed very high; only about 55% of those referred to MWA actually started the programme. But the impacts on benefit receipt were disappointing. Among those who did actually start the progamme, there was essentially no impact. "
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