No one written off: Welfare reform Green Paper

On Monday the long-awaited new DWP Green Paper on Welfare Reform, No one written off: reforming welfare to reward responsibility, was published.

The Green Paper called for benefit claimants to make a "fair contribution" for support, emphasising increased support but also increased conditionality. For example:

• JSA claimants after claiming for 2 years and being with a contracted out provider for a year on Flexible New Deal would move into full-time community-based work experience in order to improve their employability skills and build up their work habits.
• There would be new measures on skills, including piloting mandating jobseekers, lone parents and people on incapacity benefits, to train.
• Lone parents will be required to have a skills health check when their youngest child reaches 5.
• There would be pilots for lone parents with younger children to undertake agreed skills-related activity to support their path into work, in return for increased benefit payments.
• Partners, as well as lone parents, will be required to look for work when their youngest child is seven.
• For Employment Support Allowance there will be a skills screen and mandatory skills health check, and ESA claimants will be required to attend training.
• Carers would be moved on to Jobseeker’s Allowance.
• Drug users will be required to to stabilise their drug habit and to take steps towards employment, in return for receiving benefits.

There are plans to abolish Income Support in order to create a more streamlined system based on two working-age benefits, with a possible move to a single working-age benefit in the future. The system in the meantime would be based on Jobseeker’s Allowance and Employment Support Allowance (ESA).

The Secretary of State also announced measures of offering greater assistance to people on benefits. These include:

• Doubling the funding of Access to Work, which provides assistance to disabled workers and their employers. This already helps 24,000 people a year gain employment or stay in their job.
• A “full disregard” for child maintenance, so that payments will not be taken into account when calculating how much out-of-work benefits a parent should get.

Key proposals in the Green Paper are:

• Requiring jobseekers to do more the longer they claim, including working full-time in return for their benefits at any stage where it would be effective;
• Giving private and voluntary providers the right to bid for any back-to-work service;
• Building on Work Skills by taking legislative powers to require those with skills barriers to undertake training to help them back into work;
• Giving disabled people a ‘right to control’ over the range of public funding to which they are entitled, by taking it as an individual budget;
• Strengthening parental responsibility by letting parents keep all of their maintenance payments;
• Simplifying the benefit system to remove perverse incentives and reduce fraud and error.

The publication of the green paper will be followed by three months of public consultation on its proposals. The consultation period begins on 21 July 2008 and runs until 22 October 2008.