‘Tough love’ for jobseekers played down after Miller’s ‘mistake’

The first half of April saw the government ramp up pressure on the unemployed with Gideon (yes that is his real name) Osborne’s ‘tough love’ coming into effect on 1st April and Iain (no that’s not his real name) Duncan Smith foretelling a week of announcements from the DWP on strict new measures for benefit claimants in a blog for the Sunday Telegraph.

Favoured newspapers promised further announcements last week from tough-talking DWP sidekicks Esther McVey on a harsh new approach to immigrant jobseekers, and Mike Penning on forcing benefit cheats to sell their homes to pay new higher fines.  None seemed troubled by the crass inappropriateness of Penning, the minister for disabled people, making announcements about benefit claimants being made homeless.

Anyway, no need to worry because none of those announcements were made. Yet another promise reneged on by IDS, I hear you cry. Hush your cynical mouth – perhaps we misunderstood what ‘this week’ means and it meant that other week sometime next year – just like when IDS told the work and pensions committee that he hadn’t missed the deadline for universal credit and personal independence payments, they just didn’t understand that the new later deadline was always the original deadline.  Maybe the DWP has a different temporal reality to the rest of us?

Except of course the new measures are happening, the DWP is just not shouting about them from the rooftops because a Tory has been caught with her hand in the till and she hasn’t been forced to sell the house that she’s just bought with the £1.2m profit from her ‘second’ home to pay back the money she shouldn’t have claimed because really it was her first home. Confusing isn’t it? No wonder Miller, with her degree in economics, made mistakes with her accounting.

Miller’s ‘mistake’ has made it terribly embarrassing to go bragging about how you’re going to force benefit cheats to sell their homes, hence Penning’s moment in the limelight has seen him slunk back into the shadows.  Another announcement to get quietly shoved down the back of the sofa was that pensioners would face sanctions for giving false information.  Bit awkward to be taking money off the elderly while you allow ministers to give false information and let them off with a 32-second ‘apology’.

So, what was heralded by IDS as a week of pummelling the unemployed with a thrusting water cannon of new punishments turned into an dribble of largely ignored finger wagging on the DWP website.  All mention of immigrants, pensioners and house snatching airbrushed away.  All because a problem called Maria pissed on his parade.  If it was an episode of the Thick of It we’d be laughing.

While parliament benignly treats its lawbreakers like forgetful elderly aunts, Osborne’s ‘tough love’ for jobseekers treats them worse than criminals.   Those who have spent two years unsuccessfully on the Work Programme (the scheme proven by the DWP’s own statistics to impede against getting a job) will have to work for their benefits by doing six months community service at 30 hours a week – a total of 780 hours.  Courts imposing community service can only sentence to a maximum of 300 hours.  So being long-term unemployed now incurs a sentence more than double that of a convicted criminal.

The probation service is quite rightly protesting against the plans to privatise probation services under the ‘transforming rehabilitation’ programme currently being progressed by the Ministry of Justice, pointing out that to put community service into private hands is in breach of international laws on forced labour. Sadly it would seem that laws to protect citizens from slavery do not stretch to the unemployed.  Who will go on strike to protect the human rights of the jobless?

And it could go further.  A little known scheme for unemployed disabled people, called residential training, has been reviewed with some worrying recommendations to the DWP.  The advisory panel set up by the aforementioned Miller, who was then minister for disabled people, acknowledges the failure of the Work Programme both for disabled and non-disabled people and recommends that the DWP should: ‘extend the provision (of residential training) to some long term unemployed non-disabled people who would specifically benefit from the intensity of provision and holistic approach that residential training can provide.’

Residential training can last for up to a year and consists of living in a specialist centre with unpaid work placements alongside courses on overcoming barriers to employment and learning to ‘think new thoughts’. In effect the re-establishment of the Victorian workhouse. Not even Iain Duncan Smith would want that to happen. Would he?