We’re now right in the thick of the election campaign. Before last week’s leaders' debate, it was fast becoming a boring exchange of who-has-got-the-biggest-efficiency-saving and what are they going to do with it. But then the Clegg-olution happened and it’s anyone’s guess what comes next. The oldest election cliché is that campaigns focus too much on personality rather than issues. However, with 2.5 million people unemployed and a large budget deficit, it is surprising that there has been so little focus on welfare policy.
To help fill the gap, the Open Left project at Demos is publishing a new collection of papers confronting some of the big challenges facing the welfare system in the years ahead – whoever forms the next government. The central argument we set out is that the ‘rights and responsibilities’ paradigm has run its course. It’s not just that the phrase now sounds horribly tired and dated; the philosophy it encapsulates needs recasting too. In its place, we argue for an ethos of Liberation Welfare – where people are the primary agents of change in their lives, but in the conditions shaped for them by society.
The idea of ‘rights and responsibilities’ started off as a good instinct. It rejected both the old Tory indifference to unemployment and the old Labour deification of a life on benefits. Making benefits more conditional and investing more in back-to-work support were good reforms that contributed to record employment prior to the recession. However, in truth, ‘rights and responsibilities’ covers up a kind of cosy collusion. For all the tough talk, the welfare system offers relatively little to people and asks relatively little of them in return. Welfare also remains a centralised, process driven system, with little power or control for individuals (or frontline employment advisers).
So how would Liberation Welfare be different? The animating ideas would be power, security and reciprocity – raising expectations on both state and citizen. It would put greater power in the hands of citizens – rather than a passive and paternalistic approach. It would provide stronger security against risks and better incentives for self-protection – rather than accepting market outcomes and regressive incentives. And it would strengthen the reciprocal relationships between citizens and practitioners at the frontline, based around individual needs – rather than a highly prescriptive, rules-based system of support. In short, the welfare state should be more empowering and more demanding. It should offer more and ask more. Rather than a mutual stand off; mutual engagement and expectations.
Our collection sets out a wide range of ideas to illustrate how Liberation Welfare could work in practice. Here are four big ideas that speak to this new philosophy. First, anyone at risk of long-term unemployment should be guaranteed decent paid work, and be expected to take it up. Second, the incentive to self-protect against income shocks should be transformed, by shifting state support for savings to people on low incomes and reducing the penalty for doing so in the benefits system. Third, we should ensure that no one who works hard ends up in poverty, through a combination of the minimum wage, a living wage in the public sector and campaigns for one in the private sector, and wage supplements (such as through the Working Tax Credit). Fourth, the package of support and conditions for people looking for, or preparing for, work should be more tailored to their personal circumstances.
So what of the election pledges? Labour has been at its best when it has championed radical reform of both the market and the state – and at its worst when it’s tried to split the difference. Its manifesto commitments to a job guarantee for anyone unemployed for two years and to a living wage for all Whitehall staff are shining examples of the former. Significantly, the Tories back neither. Welfare is rarely a hot button election issue. But given the linked challenges of unemployment and the deficit, it absolutely should be.
Graeme Cooke is head of the Open Left project at Demos and co-author of Liberation Welfare, published today
