It’s a feast for the eyes walking into GalGael’s workshop, everywhere you look there’s a product of the handiwork being done by participants: a polished wooden chair; a boat-shaped bookshelf; a full-size model of a golden eagle swooping down from the ceiling; a huge knotted wooden photo frame protecting a painting of their late founder, Colin Macleod; and if you peer into the workshop at the back, a couple of huge boats that will soon be sailing down the River Clyde.  But what strikes most walking into the Govan-based charity is the bustling, friendly family atmosphere.  Greeting our apologies for being late came the response: “it’s ok, we’re on clan time.”

GalGael was founded in 1995 after a motorway protest spurred the community into further positive action, using the newfound community voice to create something great in an area hounded by a plethora of social problems.  In years gone by, Govan was known the world over for its shipbuilding, but since the decline in traditional industry the area has struggled and these skills have been undervalued, with residents finding themselves out of work struggling to compete in the new knowledge economy.  An area suffering from poverty and social exclusion, compared with the Scottish average twice as many 25-49 year olds are out of work and more than double are income deprived.

 ‘Navigate Life’ is a programme providing 12-week placements for individuals in the local community to learn about woodwork, carving, and even some welding and pottery skills, receiving a certificate from the local college.  People may apply to the course themselves or are referred by the prison and criminal justice services, or from mental health, drug and alcohol addiction and homelessness services.  They first undertake a personal carving project, which can be used as gifts to rekindle damaged family relationships, or simply to demonstrate to their loved ones their skills and achievement.  They then join in working on some of the wider projects being undertaken at GalGael.  Even when a course comes to an end, the door remains open and GalGael continues to act as a community hub, keeping in touch with their ‘alumni’ of participants, some of whom continue their involvement as volunteers in the workshop. 

Their services to the community don’t stop there.  GalGael are currently hosting a joint project between local Catholic and Protestant schools to build a boat, encouraging them to construct strong relationships whilst learning more about Scotland’s shipbuilding and clan history.  They encourage the community to rebuild their relationship with Scotland’s ancestral heritage, regaining their familiarity with Scotland’s water by building and sailing traditional Gaelic boats.  Talk about hitting a few seagulls with one stone!

GalGael helps provide a sense of pride and achievement to individuals and communities.  Groups like GalGael must be recognised for the contribution they make to our society and the money they inevitably help save on other social services, it must be ensured they are protected in the coming cuts.  The government needs to make sure it doesn’t miss the boat on this opportunity.

So far, so typical. A new government scores cheap and easy points with sections of the media and the public by talking tough on benefit claimants, selectively quoting statistics to further that aim. Public attitudes having been softened up over time by successive governments so that this kind of talk ceases to shock. The Need Not Greed campaign, of which Oxfam is a member, is clear that it is the outmoded benefits system, which has failed to develop with the modern labour market, that forces people into working informally (“cash in hand” and “off the books”), just to get by. We’re not talking about massive defrauding of the system, but people who want to work, but are held back by the system.

But perhaps it’s better to let the government – in the form of the recent consultation paper on welfare reform, championed by Iain Duncan Smith – speak for itself: ‘fraud is always wrong, but we must recognise that the benefits system is making matters worse by pushing valuable work, and the aspiration that this can engender, underground’. If Cameron is serious about tackling fraud – and not just chasing headlines – then it is this systemic failure that he needs to devote his energies to.

Oxfam argues that, by raising the amount of money people can earn before their benefits are affected, and lowering the rate at which they are withdrawn thereafter, work that is now informal will be brought into the light. People who can only do small amounts of work – because that’s all that’s available, because that’s all that they can manage right now, or because that’s what fits with their caring or other responsibilities – will be empowered to do so.

Policymakers also need to engage seriously with the vulnerability of people living on benefits and seeking to get back into work – putting security back into social security. Forced to subsist on tiny incomes, and with few assets to draw upon, such people are understandably risk averse. Benefits should help them manage that risk, stepping into the breach whenever work dries up, or if a new job doesn’t work out. At the moment, it can take weeks to process claims for various benefits, and taking those difficult first steps into work can become a debt crisis from which it can take years to recover.

Happily, the government’s consultation paper on welfare reform engages with this, and some of the solutions it proposes would genuinely make a difference. I’d suggest the Prime Minister joins his Work and Pensions Secretary in engaging with the substantive, structural problems in the welfare system – of which benefit fraud is but a symptom – and leave the sensationalism to the tabloids.

The first thing?  Really?  Of course fraud anywhere should be stamped out – there is no question about that.  But of all the evasion, waste, self-indulgence of MPs, is targeting some of the poorest people in our society really the first thing that needs to be done?  I find it hard not to be astounded by the way that Cameron is picking on such an easy target. 

Maybe I shouldn’t be so surprised.  People on benefits have long been positioned as ‘undeserving’ and labelled as ‘scroungers’. 

Yet people on benefits are some of the most vulnerable people in our communities who need our support, not further stigmatisation.  They need real opportunities – this should be the first priority of any government, not putting people on benefits in the front of the firing line as the state seeks to recoup money deployed saving the banks and our consumption-obsessed economy from deeper recession.

Prioritising young people in particular is an urgent task if we are to give them cause for optimism.  I am not talking about simply ‘hug a hoodie’ rhetoric, but proper, even brave, leadership that doesn’t perpetuate the worst instincts of those who will hang onto scapegoats put before them.

What I mean is truly giving people on benefits a chance – a chance to shine if you’ll excuse the pop-idol language.

And the need for this shift is underscored by recent evidence that suggests young people from workless families are more optimistic for themselves than we are: the Prince’s Trust released research this week showing that nearly one in five (18%) young people from workless homes expect to end up on benefits because other people around them have done so.   That means that four in five don’t expect to end up on benefits!

To me, this is an incredible triumph of optimism in the face of all the evidence that there are few jobs out there for young people.  The STUC has just warned of a ‘bleak’ outlook for young people in the labour market, and policy makers frequently refer to the risk of a ‘lost generation’. 

We know that young people make decisions and frame their expectations on the basis of information they have available to them.  This includes the experiences they have had in school, training, the labour market and their views of the experiences of those around them.  For those who did not excel in school or other education, there are few jobs left that offer cause for aspiration (at least aspiration as the policy makers see it).

If decent work is not realistically available, if their experiences of work have proved to be that it is low paid, short-lived and without prospects of progression, then can we blame young people from workless families for not dreaming of becoming chartered accountants, dentists, tax lawyers or even Members of Parliament?

As geographers at the University of Glasgow Cumbers, Helms and Straus warn: existing training schemes do fall short of the provision of opportunities that might enhance individuals choice and life chances…this clearly implies that it is not a ‘lack of aspiration’ at play here…[What is at play is that] expectations of a decent, quality apprenticeship and training are not being either met, or pursued, by policy…the real issue is the provision of diverse options for young people that might enable them to assess and make their own decisions…

Anything less than provision of such diverse options in a tangible realistic way is simply selling our vulnerable young people short.

Therese at an international GenderWorks conference with Oxfam in Brussels earlier this year

As David Cameron’s idea for the Big Society meets more discussion we look to see the public sector gaps already filled by community groups.  I went to visit one such group, an Oxfam Scotland partner organisation, Karibu. 

Karibu, meaning ‘welcome’ in Swahili, started as a refugee women’s centre for African women and other migrants, run by African women in 2004 in Glasgow.  Starting off as simply a community group, it is now registered as an official charity with centrally located offices which welcomes women as far out as Largs and Motherwell.  Charlotte, the Development Officer and Therese, a volunteer, are just two of the very motivated women involved with Karibu.

With ‘women together facilitating integration’ as their slogan, they want to help women be independent, to help them to integrate and adjust to the changes in language, culture, and even cooking they have experienced in their migration to Scotland. They run Basic English classes teaching daily use language to ensure women are able to do simple things such as their shopping themselves, and provide assistance with official phone calls and form-filling.  In collaboration with ‘The Hidden Gardens’ they run a gardening and cooking class where they cook the vegetables they have grown in recipes they’ve developed, with a vision of one day serving this in their very own African café run by their members.  This also would be an outlet to sell products from their sewing group, including bags and aprons. 

They are able to reach those who need support most by tackling the issues that often make access to these kinds of services more difficult.  For example, Karibu pays the expenses for the women who come to any of their sessions, and are in the process of organising a crèche in their offices so women are not deterred by a lack of childcare, a dilemma affecting families all over the UK not just Karibu members.  Of the women they have contact with, Charlotte and Therese tell us about three quarters do not have a husband with them, but that most have children, exacerbating the difficulties associated with Scotland’s lack of affordable childcare.

The most serious and debilitating issue said to face women contacting Karibu is sorting out their immigration status. This complicated process can take years and can make an individual feel like a criminal, and many of Karibu’s members live every day in fear of deportation. Karibu helps to provide support during this time, signposting to volunteering opportunities allowing an opportunity to show commitment and a desire and ability to work that may help their application and just genuinely being there for these individuals, providing a welcome distraction for even a few hours a week.

What would the outlook be like for the thousands of refugees in Glasgow without the support and signposting services Karibu offers, filling the void left by the public sector in assistance to migrants to the UK?  Luckily, we are left to wonder.

Benefit cheats are held up as scroungers – with BBC even running a story about a man in a jive-dancing competition who was claiming disability benefits for an arthritic hip.

But for each of these very public cases of benefit fraud  (reported with great vitriol), there are many, many more of fraud and evasion by companies, business owners and wealthy individuals against the tax system.  We just don’t hear about it – it seems to be ‘don’t know, don’t care’.

But we should care about corporate welfare cheats, and they should be treated with the same public humiliation we reserve for benefit cheats.  We should care because it is estimated that the total tax gap is about £120 billion. Admittedly, maybe predictably, the government’s figure is closer to £40 billion.  Just think where that could be spent in these straightened times. This £120 billion would be a nice chunk out of the public debt wouldn’t it?

In contrast, benefit fraud and official error combined cost £3.1 billion last year.  That is, not benefit fraud alone, but also official error – the presence of which demonstrates the complexity of the system that keeps many from claiming their entitlements.

Yet, the government hardly pursues this £120 billion, while it harangues, stigmatises and condemns so-called benefit cheats.  A recent answer to a Parliamentary Question (from Katy Clark MP) revealed that:

‘HM Revenue and Customs spent £633,284 (excluding VAT) on advertising for the purposes of preventing tax evasion last year.  There was no expenditure in the previous two years’.

In the same period,  £17.5 million was devoted to tackling benefit fraud.  That’s more than a thousand times as much spent for every pound we stand to gain.

To me, this skewed government effort in enforcing the two different types of cheating, despite their seriously different magnitudes, is made worse because it comes at a time of public sector cuts. It angers me that the media chastise individuals caught committing benefit fraud, while portraying those who escape paying their full tax obligations as either efficient businesses or akin to a naughty younger brother who got caught raiding Dad’s drinks cabinet…Surely it is time we re-think who we are chasing and calling names?

Incidently, Schweppes have a lovely take on the hypocrisy of the state’s disproportionate efforts in catching benefit cheats:

However, no one thought to draw attention to the sexual offences figures, and it’s no wonder why. 54,509 sexual offences were recorded by the police over the past 12 months, a 6% increase compared to the previous year. Of course there are also male victims of sexual offences, but in reality they are predominantly targeted at women and children, those who are the most vulnerable to attackers.

Moreover, the Home Office’s chief statistician David Blunt acknowledged in a statement to the Guardian newspaper that the survey did not cover some of the more serious violent crimes – such as rape and sexual assault. He said that the gaps in coverage did not affect the overall trend. That figures showing levels of violence against women were seen as superfluous by some is depressing in itself.

Violence against women is in fact still on the rise, as other national and international figures show:

• Amnesty International reports that 167 women are raped everyday in the UK, but only one in five attacks is reported to the police.
• One woman in four will experience domestic violence at some point in her life and two are murdered every week by a partner or ex-partner.
• One incident of domestic violence is reported to the police every minute.

The cruel list goes on: more than 20,000 girls could be at risk of female genital mutilation (FGM) in the UK and according to the Foreign & Commonwealth Office, 7,250 cases of forced marriage are reported each year.

Cases of trafficking of women and children can be added to this record. All in all, the UK taxpayer has to bear the cost of £23 billion of domestic violence per year.

Tackling violence against women should be part of the daily agenda of the government and police. The Million Women Rise coalition believes that male violence against women and children is a global pandemic and that it includes a serious violation of human rights on a more or less constant basis. That is precisely why Million Women Rise organise a march each year, to call for an end to violence against women and to give the survivors of that violence a voice. Eight thousand women and children marched this year through central London whistling, shouting and singing “One woman, One song, One body, One love”. Even without the statistics proving our point, this alone is a clear sign that violence against women is a problem that needs to be dealt now.

For more information on Million Women Rise, including details of next years’ march, please see www.millionwomenrise.com

Nor does the solution proposed by the DWP deal with this alleged ‘cultural’ aversion to work.  What IDS is describing is rational decisions by people who will be worse off if they work. When income rises, so do taxes, and benefits are lost.  This decision has absolutely nothing to do with people being part of a work-shy culture.  It is about rationality, and an understandable risk aversion – many of the jobs available to people who are unemployed are short term.  Many decide it’s not worth giving up benefits for a few weeks when they know it can take twice that to get their payments back when the job comes to an end.

People want to work, often despite the lack of quality jobs that match other responsibilities and offer opportunities for training and progression. The experience of work needs to be part of any restructuring of the welfare system.  Guaranteeing that people will be better off in work is welcome in every respect – but this guarantee needs to take into account unavoidable in-work costs like childcare, travel and clothing. Being better off in work is about a fair wage that recognises these costs- not just pushing people who claim benefits deeper into poverty.

We also need to debate whose responsibility it is to ensure that work moves people out of poverty.  Is it up to us, as taxpayers, to subsidise those employers who exploit the low bargaining power of their lower-skilled staff to pay wages that keep people in poverty?  IDS talks of the role of the welfare system as to make sure that work pays, but is it really the responsibility of the welfare system?  Surely it is up to employers to bear the costs of running a business– including labour.

I have worked with many people who are long term unemployed.  The men and women I have met do not come from a ‘culture’ of not wanting to work. Most of them are desperate to get work.  What is striking is the way in which a lack of confidence and low self-esteem can undermine the willingness to repeatedly apply for poor quality jobs that, almost inevitably, will result in rejection after rejection.

Blaming a “culture of worklessness” serves to reinforce this lack of confidence. As the Fairy Jobmother shows us, the best solution is to work with people to raise their self-esteem, to have some faith in people, to offer encouragement and support.

We’d like to hear from women and men who’d be up for taking part in a blog to record your experiences, tips and ideas as the Government makes decisions that affect your lives. We also want people who are happy to talk to the media. We think it’s time that the public and politicians see what it’s really like to survive in Britain today. 

If you are struggling with the system, whether in work or on JSA, receiving housing benefit, incapacity benefits, have recently lost your job, or are a single parent finding it hard to get by and can commit to volunteering with us as a blogger for the next few months , please send an email to sdransfield@oxfam.org.uk.  You can blog by text, video or however you see fit.

As Nicola has reported, the Budget introduced a number of severe cuts in HB and each of these will increase the number of families unable to pay their rent. The Chartered Institute of Housing has taken up the issue of uprating Housing Benefit in line with the Consumer Price Index.

From 2013, instead of being increased in line with the actual level of rents locally, HB will be uprated by the increase in the CPI. Everyone commenting on the change was worried that the link to how much families actually have to pay was being broken, but even so it was hard to believe that uprating would be in line with the CPI, not the RPI. The main difference between the two is that CPI does not consider housing costs, so many people assumed that the government had made a mistake, and uprating would actually use the RPI.

As I reported on Budget Day, CPI is normally lower than RPI. CPI can be higher – when mortgage interest rates are coming down – but now that interest rates are at historically low levels, they can only go up, and the RPI has already overtaken the CPI again. The gap is at present 1.7 percentage points. Each year this gap will mean that the gap between rents and HB will probably grow. The Chartered Institute of Housing estimates that, by 2020, every tenant’s Housing Benefit will be too low to cover the whole of their rent.

An obvious consequence is likely to be an increase in homelessness. Another expert organisation, the Building and Social Housing Foundation, has published their response to the Emergency Budget; in it, they look at the effects of another change – benefit rates will be set in relation to the 30^th per centile of local rents (at present they are set at the 50^th). The BSHF point out that this policy will have short-term and long-term effects. In the short-term, it is inevitable that some people will be unable to find rents that will be covered by HB – in some areas more than 30 per cent of tenants claim HB, in those areas it will be impossible for everyone to get enough HB to pay their rent. In the longer-term they point to the risk of the “total exclusion of the poor from large areas”, with their concentration in “Parisian-style banlieues”.

A story in today’s Times (p. 11, not on their website) reveals that another of the Budget’s changes to HB will cut 600,000 families’ benefit by an average of £1,000 a year. From next year, HB will be ‘capped’ at £250 per week for a one bedroom property, £290 for 2 bedrooms, £340 for 3 bedrooms and £400 for 4 or more.

The Times reports an analysis – again by the CIH – showing that the biggest losses will be faced by the largest families, who tend to need more bedrooms. As the Joseph Rowntree Foundation has pointed out, large families are one of the groups most likely to face poverty – children in families with 4 or more children account for 19 per cent of all children in poverty.

According to CIH, the worst impact will be in London (where rents are highest) but other areas will lose out as well:

• Families with a 3 bedroom house will lose more than £1,000 a year in Ashford, Bath, Brighton, Cambridge, Canterbury, Exeter, Guildford, Winchester and Welwyn and Hatfield.
• Families with a 5 bedroom house will lose more than £3,000 a year in Bedford, Bournemouth, Chichester, East Cheshire, Exeter, Leeds, Solihull, Southern Greater Manchester and York.

Presumably, the Coalition wants to send a message to unemployed people in these areas: that they should move away to places where housing is cheaper.

That is one half of a two-faced policy. At the weekend we saw the other half – Iain Duncan Smith (same minister, same Department) telling unemployed people he wants them to be more mobile and move to the areas that have got jobs. And we have IDS cheer leaders telling us that “there is plenty of scope for committed people to find jobs”.

But the Coalition doesn’t seem to have noticed that the places with jobs tend to be the same places that have got high and rising rents.

What makes these proposals particularly dispiriting is the fact that, at the end of it all, the Housing Benefit cuts may not even achieve the savings the Coalition is aiming at. The Building and Social Housing Foundation hints that these changes lead to increases in other areas of spending, including discretionary housing payment (paid to help families at risk of homelessness) and knock on effects in health, education and criminal justice. The BSHF report cautiously recommends that these areas should be “closely monitored to ensure that the changes to housing benefit are not leading to increased expenditure in these areas.”

So we have: yet another instance of the Budget for fairness increasing poverty, cuts that lead to increased spending, a housing policy that will increase homelessness and a policy on mobility that is directly contradicted by another from the same Department just days later.

Not terribly impressive.

With thanks to Richard Exell for allowing us to repost his blog. To see the original please visit: http://www.touchstoneblog.org.uk/2010/07/housing-benefit-cuts-will-make-people-homeless-and-drive-them-away-from-jobs/

The VAT increase alone will cost the poorest tenth of families 2% of their income, compared to only 0.8% for the richest tenth. Then there are further bitter pills, also announced in Osborne’s speech, such as changes to benefit uprating (linking most to the historically-lower CPI rather than RPI), freezing of Child Benefit, and a new testing regime for Disability Living Allowance – all of which will hit the poor and vulnerable hardest.

These measures were presented as alternatives to benefit cuts. Yet, slipping under the radar, are a series of changes to Housing Benefit that give the lie to the claim of protecting the poorest. Announced in the speech itself was a reduction in the maximum rents payable to claimants (albeit the figures Osborne gave didn’t match those in the Budget report). In London especially, these are likely to create housing ghettoes – risking Parisian style banlieues on the outskirts of the city, while the centre becomes a wealthy ghetto.

Yet, in the small print of the Budget report, but unmentioned by Osborne, lie two further pernicious, and potentially far wider-reaching changes. First, there will be a reduction in the proportion of properties in any given area that can be paid for with Housing Benefit. At present, Local Housing Allowance (LHA) – the maximum figure that Housing Benefit will pay – is set at the median of local rents. In effect, this means that people on Housing Benefit can afford to rent half of properties of an appropriate size in their local area. That is now being cut to the 30th percentile – or, in other words, more than two-thirds of housing will now be out of reach of benefit claimants. For the true effect of this, it’s worth thinking about what Shelter have to say: ‘nearly half of claimants are already making up a shortfall of almost £100 a month to meet their rent’. This number can only go up as the pool of housing available to claimants is reduced still further – and the shortfall will need to be made up from their already very low incomes.

The second other major change is that there will be a 10% cut in Housing Benefit for anyone who has been unemployed for a year or more. The effect of this is unambiguous: unemployed people will have to move house, become homeless, or make up the difference from an already pitifully-low £65.45 a week (or £51.85 a week for under-25s). This is nothing less than a stealth cut in benefits.

The Housing Benefit budget has risen by 50% over the past decade, but this is in large part due to a house price ‘boom’, the benefits of which people living in poverty have not shared. Rather than tackle the problem at source – the National Housing Federation estimates that government action could see the number of new social homes built this year slump by 65% – the poorest and most vulnerable are being made to pay. The change in uprating of Local Housing Allowance from RPI (which includes rising housing costs) to CPI (which doesn’t) – also announced yesterday – is particularly cruel, as it ensures that any future house price growth will not be reflected in increases in Housing Benefit. In other words, further stealth cuts in benefits have been built in systematically, and will happen year in, year out.

In summary, these measures, taken as a whole, amount to a stealth cut in benefits – at a time when they are at already historically low levels. Likely effects include an increased ghettoisation of people living in poverty; greater levels of eviction, debt and homelessness; and severe poverty and hardship for millions of people who will be forced to go without essentials to pay for a roof over their heads

There is a limited window of time to fight these changes. Reduced caps on Housing Benefit are due to be enacted in April 2011; reduction in Local Housing Allowance in October 2011; the 10% cut in Housing Benefit to long-term unemployed people in April 2013; and the change in uprating of LHA in 2013-14. Decent housing is a basic human right, and it is under threat as never before in the post-War era. Civil society and fair-minded politicians must fight to ensure that these changes are not allowed to stand.