Just a mo’: Blair launched a campaign to reduce the numbers eligible for Incapacity Benefit back in 2005. According to this news report, he claimed that more than 1 million of the c. 2.4 million on incapacity benefit at that time wanted to work:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/4224721.stm

Heh heh -

Labour Government in 1997 appointed Frank Field to Transform Social Welfare system in Britain.

He was trying to do a good job – guess who stopped it.

The wonderful Rt. Hon. Gordon Brown and his special adviser team comprised of the two Eds – both of whom were directly involved in plotting to remove an elected Labour Leader and Prime Minister.

David – I wondered whether you also like to take a swipe at Will Hutton and David Cameron. The Prime Minister is appointing someone to ensure in the public sector people have living wages and the pay difference between the lowest and the highest paid is no more 2O times.

Ed Miliband – the bloggers favourite to succeed Mr. Brown has called for a living wage campaign NOW. He has been in the Treasury as Special Adviser to Gordon (but he was too busy trying to remove Blair) and then he was in Government and in the Cabinet – what happened to living wages then. Oh he needed it to run his leadership campaign.

Him and Balls are tainted goods and guess what Gordon`s Bully boys cannot deliver power and without power Labour is nothing. Hope it gets through labour party members.

IDS recently criticized the working definition of relative poverty as 60% of median income because it oscillates as, he states, top incomes go up. By definition the median income, unlike the mean, remains unchanged when only top incomes go up (any change in the top 49-odd% of incomes will leave the median unaffected). The man doesn’t understand basic statistics, and he’s in charge? Jesus!

Shamit, not really sure what your point is. Sure I’d take swipes at Will Hutton and David Cameron, whose interest is not at all in securing the wages of the bottom wage earners – but exactly what the Tories have said time after time; in cutting state expenditure. I imagine their preference in public sector work will be for flexible contracts – which usually involves slashing regular terms and conditions but employing highly paid consultants.

As for Miliband and Balls, well I’m not a fan of either. John McDonnell for Leader.

Look, Dave is right on many of these points, they are just rehashes of Labour ideas, apart from the private education idea but does that fit in with Gove’s idea. Also you have the feel it will just be very brightest, who would be OK anyway but what about the acaemicaly average child or the poor kid with SEN (who is the most likely to be unemployed).
Frank Field was called a cross between a monk and a Tory.
He is the hero, along with Hoey, of the right wing press and blogosphere. Why he stays in the Labour party is beyond me. If anybody would enlighten me on the issue I would like to know why he is Frank Field in the Labour party.

“There are specific measures for low-earners which the Labour government instituted, to ease the transition from welfare to work, and to ensure that in all cases, working would pay more”

It is nevertheless still the case that the implicit marginal tax rates (ie. the change in income when benefit withdrawal is taken into account) are often prohibitively high for the poorest and that this produces a disincentive to work. The CSJ did a report called “Dynamic Benefits” and on page 18 there is a graph showing that many those earning under £15,000 face implicit marginal tax rates of over 90%. In other words, for every pound increase in earned income, final income will increase by less than 10p. It’s not hard to see why people don’t want to start working for a mere 10p (note that only 25% of claimants polled in the report thought that they would be better off if they started working).

If you cut welfare benefits or tighten up rules around claiming them, you can significantly increase employment. Even during a recession.

http://super-economy.blogspot.com/2010/04/swedish-labor-market-performed.html

@7

I do like how Sweden is the current darling of the Right-whingers, except when it comes to tax…

This is not Sweden. The comparison is meaningless. The Conservatives are keen to abolish or substantially alter the definition of poverty (60% of median income). Removal or restriction of benefits without availability of jobs can have only a limited number of outcomes: working in crime or the black economy – both of which have the desired short term effect of reducing unemployment figures but the former is obviously undesirable and the latter contributes nothing to the country’s tax base and undermines legitimate employees and businesses. There is also the option of death which will at least reduce the country’s surplus population. The regime at Job Centres is already devoted to the simple task of removing people from benefits by any means legal or otherwise and private companies are creaming off fortunes for programmes which do not help the unemployed at all. Serco are now recruiting management to bid for new contracts so the unemployed will soon experience the quality of management that has made Yarl’s Wood a household name

Given that when the Tories where last in power, they invoked a programme to systematically remove millions from the workforce and weaken the terms and conditions of millions still in employment, is it any wonder that we have ‘welfare dependency?

Here is what cause welfare dependency :-

A huge surplus of labour.

Here is a longer list of what causes poverty for working people.

Really crap wages.
Really crap Terms and Conditions.

If Frank Field wants to tackle these issues he needs to tackle the causes, not simply find a greater height to shit on the weak.

This bastard was already kicked out of the Tory Party, now that he regrown a nasty streak, they want him back. Figures.

“People basically get parked on [incapacity] benefit and forgotten about.”

Ian Duncan-Who? is talking balls. For one, Incapacity Benefit was replaced by Employment and Support Allowance for all new claimaints in 2008.

Those on IB or the new ESA have to complete regular, detailed questionnaires. These are usually followed by annual Work Capability Assessments. These are carried out by by employees of a private company, ATOS Healthcare an offshoot of a large American company. The contract with ATOS between 2005-2010 cost the UK taxpayer £500 million.

It is also thought that ATOS has benefited by the transfer of public assets to the company, but the DWP refuses to disclose these details of the contract because it “being commercially sensitive and release of the information would prejudice the interests of ATOS Origin and the Department’s future dealings with Atos Origin or other service providers”. For this reason, the DWP say, “it is not in the public interest to release the information.” under the Freedom of Information Act.

If you are lucky the ATOS employee you see will be doctor, if you are not it will be a ‘Health Care Assessor’, specially trained for the job. In either case the assessment will be mechanistic, concentrating on your abiltity to care out a number of simple tasks.

One of the place with the highest rates of Incapcity Benefits claimaints in Britian is the former mining town of Merthyr Tydfil, with 20.5% of the workforce on IB in 2005. There are very few employment opportunites in this area of south Wales and it has been pointed out that planned government so called “reforms to the benefits system” will have little impact in these areas unless more jobs are created.

Professor Steve Fothergill of Sheffield Hallam University has said In Merthyr Tydfil alone 3,000 jobs would need to be created, with south Wales as a whole needing 25,000 new jobs.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/7402810.stm

Who is going to create these jobs, with large scale public spending cuts in prospect along with rising unemployment?

In truth Cameron, Duncan-Smith & Field are just carrying on “workfare” and benefit cutting policies first put in place by New Labour’s Blair, Stephen Timms, John Hutton and the odious James Purnell.

And the fact is no matter how much bullshit they spout and how much they play to the tabloid gallery with talk of “spongers”, these reforms will not work.

“David Cameron + Incapacity Benefit + Basic Arithmetic = FAIL”

http://aethelreadtheunread.wordpress.com/2009/10/07/david-cameron-incapacity-benefit-basic-arithmetic-fail/

The only people who will “benefit” from these “reforms” will be large private companies with DWP contracts like ATOS and A4e.

‘This is not Sweden. The comparison is meaningless’

these aspects of political economy are pretty robust across countries though.
If you pay for worklessness, you tend to produce worklessness. Make it a little harder to claim and employmet goes up. There are jobs to be found for people have sufficient incentive to look for them. There are humane ways to achieve those incentives, such as keeping some unemployment benefits available as in work benefits, and without high marginal withdrawls.

Nick @ 12

There is a huge surplus of labour. Kicking the shit out of the poorest in society will not make work appear. It does not matter how much incentives to work there is if there is not enough work to go round.

Look at 1926 for example, 3 million unemployed. Who was paying for workless-ness then? Look around you, Nick there are plently of Countries where unemployment is endemic, yet there is no unemployment benefit. Care to explain who pays most of Africa and a fair chunk of South America and not a few North Americans not to work?

If you pay for worklessness, you tend to produce worklessness

Perhaps a more accurate homily would be

‘if your entire economic strategy is predicated around unemployment, you will have unemployment’

#11 that isn’t true. I have been on incapacity benefit for 15 years or so. Every three or four years they send me more or less the same forms, which I fill with more or less the same answers. I had an assessment about 10 years ago, which is the only time they’ve asked to see me. It was a long time ago, but iirc they had my paperwork and asked, is everything still the same? I said it was. I was there about twenty minutes, most of it in the waiting room.

This is the kind of argument that makes me despair of Labour’s chances of renewal.
It’s not enough to just say “whatever the Tories claim, its the Tories saying it so we can’t believe them and look we did it already” ie “it should be easy to read between the lines and see what the Tories are aiming at: cutting costs, plain and simple”

Labour have to counter and defeat the Tories’ aims taken at face value. Calling them names and saying they’ll never change their ways, back to the 80s etc didn’t win the election, and it won’t win the argument now.

How about radical new proposals to change the bureaucratic and intrusive benefits system so that they don’t have to be so expensively administered (often by private, profit making companies) and there weren’t glaring gaps – eg under 25s not getting working tax credits.

Sure Sweden has tight rules on unemployment benefit, but it also has very generous benefits – inconceivably high for IDS and his friends. Moreover, unlike the UK, where the old unemployment benefit was abolished leaving everyone unemployed on the same flat rate JSA, in Sweden there is unemployment compensation (usually a percentage of former income) and then after that expires a more basic income support (still far more generous than here).

If Tories really wanted to bring us the Swedish welfare state, I think we would be cheering!

The comparison of the UK with Sweden tells us something else. Britain’s welfare state is based on the idea that low benefits and low wages will clear the labour market. Basically, they don’t. You can have both a more generous benefits system and a functioning labour market, and Scandinavia shows us how. The left should be pushing for this, not trying just to protect our current regressive and disfunctional system.