Being fair to those who pay in

Yesterday the Chancellor announced that today he would be announcing plans for his colleague, the work and pensions secretary to announce a change to benefits provisions for the long-term unemployed.
I am not sure I am comfortable with the announcing of announcements about announcements, but I know I am very uncomfortable with the ever growing demonisation of the unemployed. Under the new programme, the long-term unemployed will be enrolled onto Work Programmes - which, as has been discussed at length by Commons Select Committees, don't work for the unemployed or the taxpayer, but do give large corporations free labour. There is also mention of the long-term unemployed also doing community work - picking up litter etc. We have street cleaners, do they lose their jobs? Are we taking a living wage away from some people to get others working for virtually nothing? Community work was brought in as a punishment for petty criminals. So are we also sanctioning treating the unemployed as petty criminals? Maybe we could give them different coloured visibility jackets emblazoned with a handy slogan, e.g. 'I'm not a petty criminal, I just can't get work. I'm down. Kick me'.

The ranks of the long-term unemployed are increasingly more likely to be swelled by older jobseekers - as DWP itself has highlighted (here). Older jobseekers are quite often also people who have spent several decades paying tax and national insurance. When the government repeatedly say that 'we need to be fair to those who pay in' are they suggesting that they and we forget the amount many have paid in? How is that at all fair?

The changes don't stop there. If any long-term unemployed have been through Work Programmes and yet still do not find work, together with those suspected of working whilst claiming, they will be required to attend their JobCentrePlus (JCP) daily to sign on, in an attempt to get them to either give up claiming benefits or give up their black economy work and attempt to find legitimate employment. The Daily Telegraph (here) suggests that the daily attendees will run into tens of thousands.

These tens of thousands of claimants will have to sign on every day - how many extra staff will DWP have to employ? My calculations are very basic - and very rough estimates, however I suspect the Chancellor's may be about as accurate. I have asked my MP for an estimate of the costs of setting up these programmes. Personally, I would much rather the money was spent on health, education or housing. However, I don't live in the Westminster bubble, what do I know? If there are 2.5 million unemployed and 800 JobCentrePlus branches for claimants to sign on, that is approximately 3120 claimants per JCP. Every claimant signs on once every 10 working days - so on any given day each JCP has an average of 312 claimants signing on. If 30,000 are signing on daily (which is half of the Telegraph's suggestion of 60,000), that is an extra 37 each day per JCP - an extra 12%. How will DWP meet this demand? If they hire extra staff to cope with the extra workload, that will require some 8,000 staff. A member of staff being paid £18,000 per annum costs the employer around £20,000 a year. The annual cost of this approach to combatting potential benefits fraud is £160 million a year in staff salaries alone - without taking into account further costs such as the pension burden of an extra 8,000 staff, recruiting and training costs, travel costs for many of the unemployed, the accompanying bureacracy, etc. This figure is just for those signing on daily and doesn't include the cost to the taxpayer for Work Programmes or of setting up and managing community services for the non-criminal. Nobody seems to have taken into account what happens to those community services if the unemployed person has an interview or gets a job. Under the current system, unemployed people don't have to give notice to sign-off. How can a viable community service be provided if the workforce can be dragged away to someone else's employment at no notice?

The annual cost of Benefit Fraud is around £1.2 billion per annum, so I am not arguing against the concept that something should be done. However the cost of DWP's own errors is over £2 billion a year (hardly surprising when they have constantly fluctuating 'customer base', ever changing policies and targets). Both benefits fraud and benefits errors together are less than a quarter of the total cost of tax fraud. Should we expect more from an organisation which is set up to collect money, and is owed some £14 billion before we further demonise the rule-abiding 97% of the 2.5 million unemployed? If the organisation which is set up to pay out money is currently more likely to lose money through errors than fraud, should we be adding to their administrative burden or easing it to reduce the errors? If we want to be fair to those who pay in, can we acknowledge everything they have ever paid in, rather than penalise them if they have not been fortunate enough to be earning income and 'paying in' for the last few years? Equally if we really want to be fair to those who pay in, why not get everyone paying their taxes, including the private equity bankers, ageing rockers, the premier league footballers and the multi-national corporations. The long-term unemployed are made up of an extremely diverse group of people. But I would take a guess that we have a few things in common, not least the demoralising, depressing and frustrating nature of being on the scrap heap. The government can't have a lower opinion of me than I do of myself, but I do wish they would stop trying to achieve that and to set the employed against me and the other long-term unemployed. We are so far from the root cause of this recession, how can any fair government justify constantly holding us to account for it?