Season 4, Episode 9: Jobcentre Plus and welfare policy

Transcript

Stella Tsantekidou 

Hello and welcome everyone to another episode of the Catch22 podcast. This is Stella Tsantekidou, I’m Head of Policy and Campaigns at Catch22, and today we’re talking about Jobcentre Plus, in particular, why does everyone hate Jobcentre Plus? And what do they say about the punitive approach that we have been seeing in the UK in terms of getting people back to work. And what does that say about our welfare system, what does it say about our politics, and how do we change or improve that.  

With me to discuss this, I have Tom O’Grady. Tom, would you like to introduce yourself? 

Tom O’Grady 

Hi, thank you very much for having me. So my name is Tom O’Grady, I’m an associate professor of politics at UCL, and I’m the author of a recent book which is kind of the history of welfare reforms in the UK called The Transformation of British Welfare Policy, which came out in 2022. 

Stella Tsantekidou 

Great. Amazing. Tom, can you tell me a bit about why you chose to focus on this area? Are there any particular elements of welfare policy that you focused on in your research? 

Tom O’Grady 

Sure. Well, the book is both a kind of history of what’s happened, but it’s more an attempt to understand why it’s happened and the reason why I think it’s important to understand why it’s happened is that – British welfare reform has, particularly since 2010 , have been incredibly far reaching and they’ve had very far reaching effects, particularly on the poorest and most vulnerable in society. And those changes have been very different to changes in other similar countries facing similar sets of challenges. And so part of the aim of the book is really to understand why these changes have taken place and to try to learn some of the lessons from the last decade for what might come next in welfare policy.  

So it’s as much an account of the politics of welfare reform as it is an account of what’s happened. And I guess the main thrust of the book is a history of the kind of moral language that we’ve used to talk about welfare and an account of the ways in which our language, particularly from politicians and the media, has really influenced the way that the public thinks about welfare and in turn, the way that welfare policy itself has been implemented.  

So it’s a kind of causal story, if you like, where the kind of discourse around welfare has affected the way we think about. And I use that causal story then to think later in the book about how politicians should approach welfare policy in future in such a way that I guess their language and their approach kind of generates public support rather than undermines it, which I think is what the book shows happened both over the 1990s, 2000s, and over the start of the 2010s. 

Stella Tsantekidou 

This is very interesting and I could ask you a million questions about this, about the language in particular that we use when we discuss welfare policy. It’s something that I have been observing a lot in politics, basically, politicians setting up their own trap. They adopt the language of people with different policies from them and from, you know, the media and newspapers, or even just voters who they want. They want these voters to vote for them and so they adopt language that they think will appeal to them. But this language then eventually means that they will have to… leads to policies that are ineffective. Or just that they don’t agree with their own politics, but they have basically locked themselves into doing that. And we see that with… I see that with criminal justice policy a lot, we saw that with austerity a lot, with the immigration system, we saw that a lot.  

But if we focus on welfare policy for a bit. Can you tell me where do Jobcentre Plus come in? What has been the journey of Jobcentre Plus in the last couple of decades, and how does the way that we speak about Jobcentre Plus, I guess, influence help politicians have tried to change them or the way that they function in our welfare system? 

Tom O’Grady 

Yeah, I think the main journey the Jobcentre Plus have been on is 1) where they’ve increasingly been given over the last two decades, and it’s not just in the last decade, it also happened a bit under New Labour as well, they’ve been given an increasingly dual, and in some sense contradictory mandate where job centres are required to do two things.  

They’re first of all required to help get people back into work, and so they have a kind of positive goal, but they also have a kind of policing and punishment goal – that is a goal of enforcing compliance with benefit conditions and of meeting out sanctions when those conditions are not met. And those two goals, of course, can be in tension with each other, and I’m sure we’ll come on to this later in the conversation. But the more that you act like a policeman to people, the more that people are perhaps afraid of you. They’re worried about what will happen if they fail to engage with you properly. The harder it actually is to give them real and meaningful help and and long-term assistance. So there’s been this dual and contradictory role that they’ve been given, which I think makes their own jobs harder.  

At the same time, I think the staff working within job centres have been given their own actually quite stressful regime of kind of targets, sufficiency drives, the staff themselves, I think are increasingly not necessarily well trained and well supported and particularly not adequately resourced. And over the last decade in particular, there’s been an increasing focus on what we might think of as managerialism box ticking, a culture of targets rather than the culture of fully supporting the people that they’re working with. So the staff at job centres themselves are under workload pressure and what that I think has led to is a culture of kind of standardisation, of dehumanisation, of auditing, of checklists, of box ticking, and that has, I think, made it increasingly harder over time, to develop the kind of trusting therapeutic relationship with clients that would actually help them. 

It’s also worth saying that since the early 2010s, some of what job centres used to have done has been taken away from job centres so there was this thing called the work programme that was set up by the coalition government in the early 2010s for the long-term unemployed, which actually outsourced support for the long-term and employed from job centres to basically payments by results providers in the private sector. And many of those have struggled to deal well with the long-term and chronic unemployed because they’re paid by results. Many of those organisations have some evidence that they’ve ended up focusing on the easier cases, those are the cases that will get them the results that get them their payments. And the really long-term unemployed who need, you know, long-term, sustained help are falling through the cracks of that kind of outsourced system and which has become increasingly kind of low cost, poor quality, standardised.  

So job centres have been partly on a journey of decreased resources and more managerialism of policing alongside doling out help, at the same time as they’ve actually lost some of their responsibility for the long-term unemployed as well. 

Stella Tsantekidou 

Do you think that Jobcentre Plus not functioning in the way that that we want them to- because politicians have been trying to reform Jobcentre Plus for a very long time, right, every time there is elections, there is always – political parties are always want to reform Jobcentre Plus. They always want to renew them. They always want them to have a different role and it can go one way or another.  

Do you think that there is – there is something about the welfare system in the UK that needs more, broader, deeper reform. And basically tweaking Jobcentre Plus can be a bit of a convenient distraction for politicians because it can be easier, for example to say oh, you know what we need is to have Jobcentre Plus staff just acting as policemen more, being stricter on people who are asking for benefit, rather than looking at deeper problems with the welfare system. Like for example, why is it that so many people feel increasingly unable to find meaningful work, sustainable work? Why is it that people are becoming more and more sick, things like that? 

Tom O’Grady 

I mean, that’s a fantastic question and I could talk for like an hour about it. So I will try to keep myself under control and give a shorter answer. I think there’s a couple of things to say. I mean, one is that it’s not really that difficult I think to implement some of the changes that would make job centres better, but it would probably require increased resources and in an era of austerity, unfortunately, benefits claimants are often at the back of the queue for increased resources. And why do we know that? Well, if we look cross-nationally at the amount of money that’s given for things like retraining or supporting those in long-term unemployment or with long-term sickness and other conditions, the UK is very far behind most of its comparative countries and the amount that it spends per capita. And so there’s a simple resources question which would undoubtedly make job centres, I think function more effectively.  

But I think there’s a second and broader point, which is that you know there’s a limit to the extent to which the sort of user interface of the benefits system can deal with all the problems that politicians want it to deal with. So why, for instance, is there – and there undoubtedly is a problem of people on long-term sickness benefits in the UK that has gone up – now, why is that happening? Is it because Jobcentre Plus are not doing enough to push them into work? Or is it because the NHS itself has partly collapsed and it’s particularly collapsed in some of the kind of, if you like, quality of life conditions, chronic conditions, the type of conditions that don’t necessarily attract massive political resources but actually make it much, much harder to get to work and to stay in work.  

And so, there’s an extent to which actually dealing with the problem requires dealing with some of the other effects of austerity, like the effects on the NHS, but also the effects on things like homelessness services, drug and alcohol treatment services and other parts of government that themselves are not working well. So, I think yes, we certainly can improve Jobcentre Plus, but we should also recognise that the problem is wider and it’s not just a question of the end product of often, you know, years of ill health. That balance isn’t being dealt with by the wider system that we need to address as well. 

Stella Tsantekidou 

So is there any problem with the… I guess the most recent model of Jobcentre Plus where you know you have hard targets and there is an element of punishment if someone doesn’t do the work to show that they’re looking for a job. Isn’t the alternative – isn’t endangering the alternative becoming an excuse for people to not work at all and to just stay on benefits, basically. 

Tom O’Grady 

So that’s another great question. Look, there is undoubtedly a small minority of people who could work but don’t engage with the system. I’m not going to pretend that there are none of those people. But what we do have now is very, very good evidence on how well the system of sanctioning and monitoring and conditionality has worked in the UK. And that’s very good academic evidence, evidence from independent organisations and all of that evidence paints an overwhelmingly negative picture of what’s happened. And let me just talk about that a little bit.  

So as you probably know, one of the main things that’s happened since 2010 is a big increase in the use of sanctioning and sanctioning happens if somebody doesn’t comply with one of the conditions for getting what was a range of benefits, it’s now Universal Credit, and they’ll have their benefits removed for some period of time which can be up to three years in the most severe cases. The call for evidence that we have is that sanctioning has very little impact on employment rates, where it does have an impact, it usually pushes people into short term and often insecure work, which is often interspersed with further periods of unemployment.  

So, the evidence that its use pushes people into sustained and long-term employment, it’s just not there. It doesn’t appear to increase people’s motivation to seek work and what it does do is in some cases drives people out of the benefits system altogether and into things like crime, homelessness, drug use or drug selling, or prostitution. And it also has very, very well documented and very clear effects on financial well-being, debts, homelessness, survival, crime and other forms of low-level crime, food bank use, mental, physical health and all other kind of ancillary things that can go along with unemployment, like addiction.  

And that’s been greatly exacerbated by the removal of other schemes that used to support people who had been sanctioned. So, there was something called the Social Fund, which used to give kind of emergency money to people who had no other source of funds. That’s been removed now. And that means that people who have been sanctioned for really the first time in British history, actually, literally have nothing to live on for often quite sustained periods of time. And the evidence that this helps to push people into work is just not there. Politicians will talk about it. They will use language like sanctions as designed for people who quote, unquote, refuse to comply with the system. Now, if you actually go and talk to people who are in the system, as many researchers have done, you actually find very clear desire to work and you actually, interestingly, often find very clear support for the principle that there are rights and responsibilities and that people should have to fulfil some kind of contract in return for getting benefits, even benefit users themselves will say that.  

Now, why people are being sanctioned, and we have very good evidence on the reason for this, it’s not usually because people are actively failing to seek work. It’s usually things like they don’t have enough money to attend job interviews, and if they fail to attend interviews or appointments, they’ll be sanctioned. They have clashes of appointments for things like health or addiction. They don’t have enough access to the Internet. And perhaps because they’re sleeping rough, they don’t have secure long-term accommodation, they may be living quite chaotic lives characterised by anxiety and very poor mental health. And the idea that kind of those types of people are going to rationally respond to punitive incentives just isn’t there at all. And indeed, quite the opposite, that people’s engagement, people’s motivation, people’s desire for self-improvement, people’s self-confidence can all be greatly harmed by a system that basically appears designed to catch them out and to find fault rather than to deal with long-term help. 

And the final thing to say is that the kind of very meagre level of benefits themselves actually exacerbates the problem altogether. So, there’s very good evidence from psychology that people so-called mental bandwidth is going to be constrained by the experience of living in insecurity and poverty. So, think about a time in your life and you’ve been very stressed by something, maybe bereavement, anxiety, something like that. Were you making great decisions at that time? Were you finding it easy to focus on the things you needed to focus on? Probably not. Now imagine that you’re having to live on the British level of benefits, which evidence shows is not adequate to meet every day needs such as shelter, food, and clothing. And then imagine that at the same time you’re being asked to attend 15 job interviews a week, and if you don’t apply them, you’ll be sanctioned and you could lose your home, or you could lose access to food. And to expect people to make great decisions under those conditions is frankly crazy, and the evidence, unsurprisingly, shows that it doesn’t lead to that at all. You know, people with mental health conditions are kind of meeting an uncaring bureaucracy, they’re often finding it very hard to buy things like clothes for job interviews to attend job interviews, etcetera, etcetera. So, kind of starving people of the essentials that they need for everyday life is just not a stable platform. For those people to find long-term employment. 

Stella Tsantekidou 

This is such an important point that by making people more stressed out you are harming their mental health. You are making them less able to be economically active and contribute. You sent me a very interesting study about the benefit cap and the impact that the benefit cap has on employment levels and economic activity. And it was saying that while some people will, it will have a positive effect on employment, for a lot more of them, it will actually – the benefit cap made them economically inactive because it did mean that the people who have caring responsibilities, people who have kids more often than not, they would not be able to take up more work for the very basic – simply because of the way their life is structured and you know the kind of life that you live when you have to take care of children and other dependents. 

Tom O’Grady 

I mean exactly and that’s a very good example of another area where the failings of the benefits system are not really failings to the benefit system, they’re failings of other parts of government that we have a very inadequate system of publicly provided childcare in the UK and of course, the people affected by the benefits cap often have large families. So of course, it’s going to be harder for them to get into paid work. And you know, a very reasonable alternative policy would be to make sure that their childcare needs are met, and they’re met for free.  

Stella Tsantekidou 

So, tell me, this is this is a very difficult area, right? Because it’s very difficult because the public very often, we have this perception in politics that everyone hates benefits scroungers and we should be really, really hard for people and that people are not working because they don’t want to work, which I don’t think is true, I think that human beings we want to be productive, we want to contribute meaningfully to society, and most people do not want to just survive on meagre welfare benefits. Most people want to thrive. Most people, given the choice, I believe would rather work than depend on benefits.  

How can politicians shape public opinion in this area rather than be slaves to what in their minds, are voters biases and the bad image of people who are coming in touch with the welfare system? 

Tom O’Grady 

Well, one thing to say is actually that that the public have become quite a bit more supportive of the benefits system in recent years, partly I think they’ve recognised what’s happened with poverty. They’ve recognised what’s happened with Universal Credit and other cuts and realise that people are struggling. So, it is an easier environment for politicians than it was in the past.  

But beyond that, you know, public opinion is not some monolithic entity that exists separately from the realm of politics. We know very clearly, and this is something that I that I share in the book and in my work, the way in which politicians talk about issues really affects the way the public thinks about them. And most people, if you talk to them, if you do qualitative work, think more than one thing at the same time. They’ll probably say something like yes, people who are on benefits, you know, probably should do something in return for it. And we should reasonably expect that people are trying to contribute, but at the same time, you know, anybody can become unemployed. And when they become employed, they should be helped.  

And so, the simplest thing that politicians can do is just to emphasise that those values, those ideas that they probably already have, that already exist. So, you can talk about welfare as a human right. You can talk about the idea that it’s something we may all depend on. We can talk about the idea that yes; people should fulfil some conditions in return, but we should also treat them with dignity and with respect and we should try to help them with the conditions that they need help with beyond just not having a job.  

But I also think beyond that, politicians should think about the ways in which policies themselves frame their users if you like, you know, the more that benefits are meagre and provided to a minority, the easier it is to frame that minority as deviant or as somehow outside the kind of moral universe of society which is also what’s happened in this country. So, in the book, you know, I call for a return to a more universal conception of what wealth there is. And actually, if you look over people’s lifetimes, of course, most of us, all of us in fact on average pretty much pay in what we get out from the welfare state. If you look what people use from the NHS, from the pension system and so on. Over our lifetimes, all of us are contributors and all of us are takers at some point. And that’s another thing, of course, that politicians can emphasise.  

So, while I’m not pretending that it’s easy, I don’t think it’s an impossible task for politicians to simply start talking about the kind of nascent ideas that citizens already have. 

Stella Tsantekidou 

One last question very quickly, why do you think it’s so hard to build a system to get people who can work to find meaningful work? 

Tom O’Grady 

I’m not sure that it is that hard. I just think it requires more resources. It requires an approach that aims to deal with the actual problems. And it requires a kind of long-term commitment to it.  

Look, we can spend more on chronic health conditions in the NHS, which will really help people with disabilities get back into work. If you ask people with disabilities, as you’ve already said, the overwhelming majority of them are desperate to work and to contribute, but they find things like access very, very difficult. We can deal with those problems. I don’t think it’s impossible.  

Sure, look, there are a minority of people who are going to find it very, very hard to get jobs and we’ll probably need to concentrate resources on them, but I don’t think we should pretend that this is some kind of impossible task that requires a Herculean effort. It probably just, in some ways, requires us to fund public service properly. And why do we know that? Well, if we go back to the mid 2000s prior to the financial crisis, Britain was seen as the world leader in getting people from welfare back into work and we were doing a very good job back then. We had adequately funded systems. Sure, there was some problems, but overall we were doing what we did very, very well in many ways, simply because it was well funded and so I just think it requires a commitment from politicians to get it right, rather than a commitment to kind of, what’s happening at the moment I think, which is using benefits policy to send a message about who’s in and who’s out in terms of society’s moral universe, which I think is the focus of what we’ve done over the last decade. 

Stella Tsantekidou 

Amazing. We are finishing this episode on a positive note then. Thank you very much, Tom. 

Tom O’Grady 

Thank you, Stella.