Emma’s response to Willow on facebook.
Dear Willow,
I really feel your question has a number of elements to it which I will try to answer separately.
Firstly in relation to your point about disability. In the UK we had a long period of time in which Government wrote off over 3 million people as being too ill to work. What happened was that rather than look at the skills and capabilities of people a culture emerged where the Government sentenced millions of people to low aspiration and little hope. It does not matter whether someone has a disability of not – we should maximise everyone’s potential.
The second point you mentioned was in relation to the value of working in Tesco or Asda. I know that both of the organisations you named have developed extremely good employee development programmes for their employees – and indeed there are thousands of people that enjoy working for them. Everyone has different aspirations – and that is really important. We should not be judgmental about such employment opportunities, rather we should think about how we get the most out of the jobs we are doing. All employment provides really positive opportunities to develop.
Finally you mention Workfare – this was a programme launched by Bill Clinton in the United States that created a rigorous “Work First” approach to unemployment. This came about due to the very high levels of unemployment and the rocketing costs of social security. What the programme found was that it was very successful at introducing a cultural change in the benefits system – the fact that benefit recipients had the right to demand employment and reversed what was seen as a something for nothing culture. However the Workfare programme gave very little opportunity for those unemployed to address the real barriers to sustained employment – issues such as childcare, drug abuse, mental health issues, skill gaps, high personal debt – all issues that we know stop people getting into work and staying in work. While the Workfare programme was seen as successful in the States insofar as it reduced the benefit bill and got more people into work, it has been shown that many people stopped claiming benefits and child poverty rates increased. I believe that A4e’s approach – understanding the real issues that affect a person’s unemployment, and working with them to address those issues – results in much better and sustained outcomes.
On your second point. It is quite clear that there are issues with the current WCA process and I would urge you to speak to your JCP advisor about any treatment that you feel has been unfair in this process. As I mentioned in response to your earlier question, I strongly believe that we have a duty to capture the potential of everyone and I am strongly opposed to writing people off due to what they cannot do due to a health issue.
Clearly the current process is not adequate and at A4e we working with the DWP to see if there is a better way of designing this process that allows the individual to have more of a role in identifying the work that they would like to undertake. We need to fundamentally change the culture of this process – towards empowerment and away from what is perceived as punishment.
I hope that answers your questions
Kind regards
EH
