Now I'm back off holiday I'm having a more detailed look at Reform's welfare policy. I'm just looking at the Welfare to Work section first (welfare chain gangs). For a document padded out to fifty pages, they don't actually provide much detail on this, and of what there is, I don't get the feeling they ran this past anyone with genuine field experience.
They say... "The local authority would receive a grant of £3,200 per claimant per year to cover the cost of administering the programme, supervision, and training the claimant for their task. If a local authority could not find adequate work for claimants in its area, it could assign them to a neighbouring area. In addition to the local council managing and supervising these tasks, registered charities could apply to manage scheme participants. This would allow good causes, whose importance has not hitherto been recognised in funding decisions, to benefit while expanding the list of possible functions”.
That to me sounds like a feeding frenzy for local "charities" and training providers - especially those entities whose main income is form local government grants. Moreover, I think they're wildly underestimating how much supervision this is going to require if they can even get it up and running without endless legal wrangling. It's going to cost a lot just in terms of insurances and public sector unions will also have their say. It might even be that councils can't afford to implement this policy.
Refrom then says "Reform takes implementing their will seriously. Accordingly, councils that refused to implement this policy, failed to find sufficient placements, or failed to monitor scheme participants’ performance effectively would be penalised with lower or no central Government funding. We will also legislate to make its implementation a legal duty for councils"
This not a serious proposition and actually, the one priority for any future right wing government is to remove statutory obligations on spending.
They go on to say "We estimate that the economic value of the work done by each claimant would be £9,000 per year, of which 50% might be expenditure that the council would otherwise have to incur. The remainder would deliver additional services to the community."
I don't buy that for a nanosecond. This is going to be an extremely expensive operation, more so in urban areas where many, if not most, participants will be reluctant and unwilling. Reform says "Failing to participate, absenteeism, poor performance, or on-the-job misconduct would result in immediate sanctions. This could include the full non-time-limited revocation of benefits. This would be a much harsher sanction than those in previous workfare programmes both in Britain and abroad".
That's the pivotal bit where this entire policy falls over. When hit with sanctions you will probably push misfits into destitution, while pushing miscreants further out of reach and into organised crime. Moreover, it speaks to the spirit of this entire policy as a punitive coercive measure rather than actually helping people into appropriate work.
Personally, I would write this entire scheme off as a bad job because it will not survive first contact with reality, but it could be made to work if it had a different ethos. If these work programmes amounted to apprenticeships then it would be a different matter. If they are viewed as chain gangs (which they will be), you will get more attempts to frustrate and subvert the system from all sides.
If you're dealing with perpetual shirkers with an attitude problem, then the work is closer to that of the probation service, in which case the task is to identify troublemakers and troubled individuals and get the the help they need and expose them to possible career pathways.
This, I think, could work in conjunction with a national service type programme where young people, particularly from deprived backgrounds can be put on boot camps, but with enriching activities such as rifle range shooting and route-marching. Give them a taste of a structured life with possible career avenues into the armed forces. It would not be a requirement for all. Just those who show no sign of constructively engaging.
In other circumstances, you might be dealing with addicts or people who simply do not have the right temperament for normal jobs. This is an opportunity for early intervention, treatment and life coaching. If this policy is set up with the welfare of claimants in mind, rather than just punishing them with menial punitive tasks then it stands a chance of working - but on that basis, you have to assume it is going to be much more expensive.
That, though, is not what Reform has in mind. It starts off on the populist premise that long term claimants are inherently lazy and workshy. In many cases, you're dealing with people who aren't temperamentally suited to the normal model of work, who perhaps have more creative instincts, who just can't find a channel for their skills. People who have largely been failed by the education system and slipped through the net.
As such, with a policy like this, you have to look at it from a more holistic perspective - as an adjunct of NEET policy, funnelling people into appropriate skills training, but also examining the ways in which the existing education system is failing.
What Reform have done here is just take one of their usual Slop Right talking points and bloated it to a few pages. As a piece of policy work it is ill-founded and poorly researched - designed to look macho for an equally clueless boomer audience. This is electioneering, not policy work. Crap, basically.
I have argued for some years now that the right needs detailed, structured policies but with both Restore Britain and Reform UK, that’s just not what we’re seeing. They’re going all out to create the illusion that they’re putting in the work, but everything they publish can still be boiled down to their usual array of tropes and soundbites. As such, they are engaged in a campaign of deception. None of this work withstands any scrutiny.
This does not bode well for Reform. As I understand it, Karl Williams and Sam Ashworth Hayes (both very capable policy people) are currently on board with Reform, but there is no evidence they’ve been able to influence policy output. This latest outing has Jenrick’s name on it (who usually utilises good research), but it reads like something Farage and Lee Anderson scribbled down over a boozy lunch. There is no sign of the professionalisation we’ve been promised.
Just skim reading this latest work raises a number of pretty basic questions. Good policy should anticipate and answer these questions - and the quality of a policy rests on how compelling those answers are. That is the measure by which they should be judged. That they operate on the presumption that nobody will look any deeper is extraordinary arrogance. They take us for fools. It’s enough to convince their own voter base, but serious people will remain unconvinced that Reform is capable of forming a functioning government.