PLANS TO force the long-term unemployed in the United Kingdom to work for 30 hours a week four weeks in every year, due to be announced this week, will damage low-paid workers’ chances of staying in employment, trades unions and church leaders have warned.
Work and pensions secretary Iain Duncan Smith will unveil his plans on Thursday for four-week programmes of compulsory community work, doing jobs such as picking up litter or gardening, for unemployed people who are deemed to have lost the work ethic – matched by the withdrawal of benefits for those who refuse to do so.
In Scotland, the Scottish Campaign for Welfare Reform – an umbrella group representing more than 40 organisations, including Oxfam, Barnardos, Children First, the Scottish Council for Voluntary Organisations, Unison, the Scottish Trades Union Congress and Scottish church groups – said Mr Duncan-Smith’s measures would make it harder for those brought into the scheme to find real jobs.
Describing the plans as “punitive”, John Dickie of the Child Poverty Action Group said: “This proposal fails on all counts. These punitive proposals are a distraction from the real barriers people face trying to get back into work – lack of jobs, lack of childcare and discrimination in the labour market. People need real jobs that pay real wages.
“Expecting people to work for 30 hours for no extra money is insulting. If the government wants to provide employment for the unemployed to help them back into work, it should do so with genuine jobs that comply with minimum-wage legislation,” he declared.
Trades Union Congress official Richard Exell said: “The reason we have got such high unemployment isn’t because of a problem with the work ethic, it is because there aren’t enough jobs for people to do. We have got 2.5 million unemployed people and fewer than half a million job vacancies. It is unfair to workers who find themselves competing against people paid much less than themselves and to any businesses in competition with the organisations that have got this subsidised workforce.”
Meanwhile, Shelter, a leading housing charity, has warned that 780,000 people living outside London will face housing benefit cuts of up to £50 per month that will come into force next year, including many pensioners living on £98 a week, or those on the minimum wage of £218 a week: “These losses represent a significant proportion of their income,” said a Shelter official.
Meanwhile, the National Housing Federation has warned that the two-thirds cut to the UK’s affordable housing budget will mean that over 300,000 people will be denied a local authority home in the future, while those who do manage to get one will be faced with near-market rents: “The average rent for a three-bedroom social rented home is currently £85 a week. But under the plans to allow increases in rents of up to 80 per cent of the market rate, that figure could triple to a staggering £250 a week,” it warned.
The rent increases will make it harder for many people to get work, it went on: “Most tenants who will be charged the higher rent rates will have the costs part or fully paid for through housing benefit. But the sums charged will be so high that if they do get a job much of their earnings will be eaten up through rent repayments, because every pound that claimants earn will be largely cancelled out by the amount of housing benefit being withdrawn.”