Labour’s ‘Get Britain Working’ strategy will only make things worse. Here's why | Iain Porter

1 month ago 7

If you’re someone with a disability or a long-term health condition who loses their job, the system designed to help you find and stay in work isn’t working. Disabled people’s experience of the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) is often characterised by distrust, fear and negativity. Those who have tried to move into work have spoken of structural and cultural barriers built into the system. These can include stressful and demeaning assessments, the gnawing fear of being sanctioned, and a lack of positive engagement from the DWP, which offers a poorly tailored employment support.

The Labour government has promised to take a fundamentally different approach with its Get Britain Working white paper that was published earlier this week. Speaking about the paper, Keir Starmer said it was time to end the culture of “blaming and shaming” people who haven’t been getting the support they need. Then, in the same breath, he pledged to “slash” the country’s “spiralling” benefits bill as part of his government’s efforts to get more people into work. This harmful rhetoric threatens to sabotage the government’s attempts to reset its relationship with people who are sick or disabled. While the white paper signalled the government’s ambitions, the cuts to benefits it has pencilled in for next year undermine them.

It’s clear that a new approach to people suffering from ill-health is urgently needed. A record 2.8 million people are currently out of work due to long-term sickness. Crises in our NHS and social care services along with inflexible jobs are making people sicker, which is part of the reason so many are currently unable to work. So the white paper was right to emphasise tackling the root causes of this crisis, including health interventions such as expanding access to mental health support and extra capacity to reduce NHS waiting lists in targeted areas, and supporting employers to recruit and retain disabled people.

But the government doesn’t seem to understand that Britain’s eroded social safety net is becoming an obstacle to those finding work. So long as benefits remain paltry, people will continue to struggle – and this will impede their ability to get back into work. Without an adequate safety net, a setback such as losing your job can be hard to overcome. Looking and applying for jobs is nigh on impossible if all your time and energy is being spent trying to make your meagre budget go far enough to afford the essentials. The stress of not knowing whether you’ll be able to afford your next meal, or the health implications of living in a cold home with no heating, makes taking up suitable job opportunities that do arise all the more difficult.

Currently, the basic rate of support for people who are out of work, including those with health conditions or a disability, is woefully inadequate. Almost nine out of 10 low-income families where someone receives health-related universal credit are going without essentials. Compared to all working-age adults, they are three times more likely to be unable to afford to keep their house warm.

Rather than bolster support for those who are out of work, the government looks set to erode it further. At the budget, Rachel Reeves committed to delivering £3bn-worth of savings from health and disability benefits, as had been planned by the Conservative government. Labour has said this will be done in a different way to that proposed by the previous government, but has not specified how. Disabled people will now have to wait until the spring to find out where these savings will be made.

Instead of more tough language on benefits, we need to recognise the role our social security system plays in a fair and compassionate society that rightly helps people when they fall on hard times. A more fundamental reset of our employment support system would acknowledge that the basic rate of income support for people out of work, whether they have a disability or a health condition or not, is now so low that it is a barrier to work in itself.

The bigger problem is this: the only sustainable way we can reduce spending on out-of-work benefits is by reducing the need for them, by ensuring that people have access to good jobs, and the services that allow them to live healthy lives. Labour’s white paper goes some of the way to recognising this, but it misses the opportunity for an even greater reset. If a healthy nation and a healthy economy really are two sides of the same coin, then our social security system needs to support people’s health and wellbeing by giving them enough to live on.