HUNDREDS OF thousands of long-term unemployed in the United Kingdom are to be ordered to do 30 hours of unpaid community work, such as litter cleaning and gardening, for four weeks each year – or else lose welfare benefits for three months.
The full details of the changes are to be announced later this week by the work and pensions secretary, Iain Duncan-Smith, who is to produce a wide-ranging welfare reform White Paper on Thursday.
“One thing we can do is pull people in to do one or two weeks’ manual work – turn up at 9am and leave at 5pm, to give people a sense of work, but also when we think they’re doing other work. The message will go across: play ball or it’s going to be difficult,” he said.
People who refuse to take part in the programme – which is designed also to discover people with permanent jobs in the black economy, will lose their £65-a-week unemployment benefits, according to Mr Duncan-Smith.
The UK has five million people on out-of-work benefits and one of the highest rates of workless households in Europe, with 1.9 million children living in homes in which no one has a job. Some 1.4 million people have been unemployed for nine out of the last 10 years.
More than a third of homes in Liverpool, Nottingham and Glasgow housing adults aged between 16 and 64 have nobody in work, according to figures produced last week by the Office of National Statistics. By contrast, one in ten homes in Bedfordshire and Surrey have homes with unemployed adults.
“The message will go across: play ball, or it’s going to be difficult,” said Mr Duncan-Smith, who already has to find £17 billion (€19.6 million) worth of cuts in his budget following diktats from chancellor of the exchequer George Osborne.
The Liberal Democrat chief secretary to the treasury, Danny Alexander, said the four-week programme would show employers that the long-term jobless could get back into the work habit and get up in the morning.
The proposal was included in the Conservative Party’s election manifesto, which made clear that long-term benefit claimants will be required to work for the dole on community work programmes, or lose the right to claim out-of-work benefits until they do – though it was not included in the pact with the Liberal Democrats.
However, the move was criticised by opposition parties and Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams, who said: “I’ve got a lot of worries about that. I don’t immediately think it’s fair. People who are struggling to find work and struggling to find a secure future are, I think, driven further into a downwards spiral of uncertainty, even despair, when the pressure is on in that way. It can make people who start feeling vulnerable, feel more vulnerable.
“People are often in this starting place not because they are wicked or stupid or lazy but because circumstances have been against them. To drive that spiral deeper does seem a great problem,” he said.
Labour’s shadow work and pensions secretary, Douglas Alexander, said it would reduce people’s chances of finding work: “The Tories have just abolished the future jobs fund, which offered real work and real hope to young people. What they don’t seem to get about their welfare agenda is that without work it won’t work.”
However, since last year, the long-term unemployed have been required to take part in work schemes because of changes brought in by Labour before it left office. The “Flexible New Deal” orders claimants to undergo four weeks’ work experience.