I’m so glad that you have a definative answer. It’s just as well that no one has ever gamed any system anywhere in existence or it might complicate your argument.

Ah, I see what you’ve done there.

For rhetorical effect you’ve taken an obviously political statement (“people are making a lifestyle choice to live on benefits”), treated it as if it’s a summary of legal provisions (“…claimants shall be entitled to benefits in the following circumstances: (iii) they make a lifestyle choice to claim benefits…”), then put in a FoI request to a government department asking for statistics relating to those non-existent legislative provisions.

Excellent, very, er, persuasive. Whatever point it is you’re trying to make, it’s clearly of great import.

I think the point is making, although clearly the hard of thinking may have trouble grasping it, is that the existing regulations are already just fine for ensuring that only genuine claimants receive benefits, an assertion given considerable support by the official figures for fraud (and if you want to dispute them, you’d better be bringing objectively more reliable ones to the table); and that whilst any people who are currently gaming the system will continue to do so with nary an interruption, a lot of genuine claimants are going to be screwed to the wall by onerously overtightened new regulations and arbitrary benefit cuts.

Oh, but I forget – as far as said hard of thinking are concerned, there’s no such thing as a genuine benefit claimant, is there?

it’s not in the rules that you’re allowed to claim benefits just because you fancy the work free lifestyle? who knew?

gwenhwyfaer – exactly.

MTPT/falco – are you saying that this is a “political statement” and hence Osborne never really intended to do anything to sort this problem out? I understood him to mean that there were people who had chosen to get benefits rather than look for a job, and that his government were going to stop this.

If they are going to do this, clearly they need to have a rough definition of what it means to “receive benefits as a lifestyle choice”, how many people are currently receiving benefits as a lifestyle choice and then milestones and targets about how they are going to get whatever that number is down to zero, and over what timeframe.

If no one can define what is meant by “living on benefits as a lifestyle choice”, or measure how many people are doing so, how could we ever know whether or not Osborne’s efforts have been successful?

An FoI request costs up to £600 to process (if it’s more than that they won’t process it).

Excellent, well done, you’ve just increased the deficit, raised taxes in the future for everyone in order to make a puerile political point.

This is the “new politics” is it?

The DWP are wrong, I know of 3 who choose to live on benefits and they all reside within one road.

What the DWP have cleverly done in their answer is use an example that has clearly defined criteria for qualification. A whole myriad of benefits do not have such exacting criteria and depend heavily on the judgement of individuals in different agencies.

This of course allows those inclined to a benefit lifestyle plenty of room to manoeuvre.

What must not happen is that those who genuinely can’t work get roped in with the minority who will not work. Indeed, I believe those who can’t work should receive more in benefit as they are the genuine and needy poor.

“…the hard of thinking…”. I suppose there’s at least an honesty in putting the ad hominem attack up front.

Arguing that low figures for fraud show that current regulations are effective at ensuring only “genuine claimants” (scare marks intended) works by defining a “genuine claimant” by the property of “not being categorised as being fraudulent” (compare defining “is evil” by the property of “not being categoried as being good”). Internally consistent(ish), but hardly helpful.

You then proceed to hole yourself below the waterline by introducing a third category of ‘…people who are currently gaming the system…’, which is expressly outside the category of “genuine claimants”, and necessarily outside those in the figures official fraud.

Perhaps we could take a step back. In the tax system, we accept that there are people who pay tax, people who avoid tax (legal), and people who evade tax (illegal).

As things stand, there are in the benefit system “true-genuine claimants”, ‘…people who are currently gaming the system…’, and people who fraudulently claim benefits.

Everything turns on where we draw the boundaries between the three categories – especially between the first and second categories. If someone is consistently avoiding taking work, is that gaming? Does the answer change if they’ve skills/experience suiting them for better paid work than is immediately on offer? Does the answer change if they’ve no skills or experience?

What’s being suggested is that the benefits system should include incentives to get people back into work – and, yes, the equivalent of anti-avoidance rules in the tax system – to reduce the gaming we are not prepared to accept.

Don – workfare would be one option (used to apparent success in Denmark). After a few months of unemployment, give people on job seekers allowance relatively tough (but unskilled) work as a condition of continuing to receive benefits. That ought to shift a few people into gainful employment if it was actually the “non-working” lifestyle they were aiming for.

@6

Shorter Tim W: It is in the national interest not to ask questions. Citizens! Do your duty, and keep quiet.

@DonPaskini: Not sure how it follows, from my view this is a political statement, that nothing is going to be done. In any event, you’re still using the same rhetorical device of literalist interpretation.

I agree with you that we (as a country, not “they”) “…need to have a rough definition of what it means to “receive benefits as a lifestyle choice””. From that it can be determined “…how many people are currently receiving benefits as a lifestyle choice…”. Only then, however, could we fix “…milestones and targets about how they are going to get whatever that number is down to zero, and over what timeframe.”

(Although the idea you can ever reduce it to zero is just plain silly – any complex system will have unintended consequences. Just look at the criminal justice system…)

Unfortunately, you actually underline why your piece is pointless – if you’d asked Osborne what the definition was (and, more importantly, gotten an answer – it’s a political question, after all) you might at least have something to bother writing about. As it is, you took a statement about the price of apples, obtained an FoI response about the value of pears, and then decided this means the statement about apples was wrong.

“Excellent, well done, you’ve just increased the deficit, raised taxes in the future for everyone in order to make a puerile political point.”

Cos you are so v clever and brainy, could you express in percentage terms how much each individual FoI request adds to the deficit, just so we can see how Very Seriously to take your important criticism?

My handy 6-point guide to get people off benefits:

1) Give them jobs…
2) …that pay well…
3) …and have reasonable security.
4) Stop playing silly buggers with the economy.
5) Er…
6) That’s it.

Don, the answer you received was that “There is no condition in regulations that allows someone to receive benefit as a lifestyle choice”. Are you really suggesting that this was what Osborne was talking about? If it had been then all Osborne would have needed to do was to remove that option for receiving benefits.

If this was the information that you were after then why, (assuming from the context that you did), did you submit a FOI rather than just looking up the regs?

“So according to George Osborne, the key aim of welfare policy in future will be to stop people taking the lifestyle choice to live on benefits.

According to the Department responsible it is already the case that no one can receive benefits as a lifestyle choice.”

Utter logic fail. There being no official option “to receive benefits as a lifestyle choice” does not preclude people from doing so. You must be aware of that so one can only assume that you are deliberately misrepresenting the facts.

The main point here is George Osborne’s toxic ignorance which can never be overemphasised.

Vince Cable has madly suggested the young unemployed should be sent to India to do apprenticeships, the current issue of Private Eye trashes the privatisation of welfare to A4E etc and those who advocate workfare should look at New York for the disastrous effect it has in those in low paying jobs. Until there are more real, paid job vacancies, shifting the unemployed from one scheme to another to massage the figures is just rearranging the deckchairs on the Titanic.

Its not like this country is short of things that need doing, I’m soon going to need a bloody tank to negotiate all the potholes in the roads, the country’s housing is inefficient and decaying and every house in the country could be wired up to fibre optic for the cost of a couple of bank bailouts. There just isn’t the will to raise money to spend on the country’s infrastructure for its long term benefit when the only thing the rich are after is short term profits. It might finally dawn on the middle classes that the poor have been bled dry and abandonded and they are the next target for the rich who this government truly represents as it tries to wind the clock back a couple of centuries

“Unfortunately, you actually underline why your piece is pointless – if you’d asked Osborne what the definition was (and, more importantly, gotten an answer – it’s a political question, after all) you might at least have something to bother writing about.”

It won’t be George Osborne who is responsible for ensuring that no one makes the lifestyle choice to live on benefits, it will be the people who work for the Department of Work and Pensions. It is therefore entirely relevant to ask the DWP how they interpret Osborne’s words, because they will be the ones who have to make it work in reality.

I’m sure you understand the difference between a politician announcing a policy and it actually getting implemented. You actually agree with me that we need a definition of “people who receive benefits as a lifestyle choice”, so why all the whining?

If no one can define what is meant by “living on benefits as a lifestyle choice”, or measure how many people are doing so, how could we ever know whether or not Osborne’s efforts have been successful?

This is the million dollar question. If we had some idea of what percentage of people are choosing not to work and to live on benefits, we’d stop having these stupid debates in which one side argues for the proposition “benefits claimants are scroungers” and the other side against it. It would be very useful information in all sorts of policy debates, which tend to take place void of data.

Official data will never give us the answer, because if you are officially choosing not to work, you are not eligible for benefits. So we have to obtain data on people mis-using the system who by definition are defeating the system’s efforts to identify them.

What’s the solution? Some form of anonymous survey? What questions should a survey ask? It’s not obvious, because plenty of people choose to stay on benefits whilst they search for a job suited to their experience and skills – a software engineer does not take a job as a cleaner the day they are made redundant. What is the information we are really trying to get at? People who are not making a genuine effort to find and sustain employment, whose efforts solely consist with the minimum needed to notionally comply with welfare system’s requirements.

I would be very interested if anybody knows of any attempts to get data on the above. I also think it would be useful in these debates if people stated their approximate estimates of this data, so people can see what their positions are based upon. For example, I’d guess the percentage of unemployment benefit claimants who have been out of work for longer than 6-months who fall into the category is between 10 and 25 per cent.

Falco – I asked 4 questions, which are the four basic questions which the DWP would need to consider in order to implement Osborne’s speech.

“1. What definition does the Department of Work and Pensions use to
determine whether someone has “made the lifestyle choice” to “sit
on out-of-work benefits”?

2. Who is responsible for deciding whether or not someone has made
the lifestyle choice to sit on out-of-work benefits?

3. How many people are currently “making the lifestyle choice to
sit on out-of-work benefits”?

4. How long does the Department estimate it will take to ensure
that the money will not be there to fund this “lifestyle choice”?”

If you are worried about public money being wasted, I would suggest that the cost of Freedom of Information is dwarfed by the gargantuan waste that comes when politicians make announcements which their civil servants then don’t have a clue how to make happen.

schmidt – exactly.

Nick – if people are doing tough, but unskilled work, then they should be paid for it. I support the idea of a guaranteed offer of work for all people who are long term unemployed (with sanctions if they refuse it without good reason), but disagree on principle with workfare.

@DonPaskini: The “whining” (scare marks…you get the idea) is because you wasted a chuck of government time and money – probably at least a week’s JSA! – for rhetorical purposes, without making any positive contribution to the issue.

If you’d used the FoI response as a spring board to then advance your own views as to where the boundaries lie between the three categories I outlined in 8 above that would be a different issue, but this piece was just a (flawed) attempt to make a cheap, partisan, negative point.

You do, presumably, accept there is gaming going on? If so, perhaps you’d care to now give us some idea of where you see the boundaries of that (between, on the one hand, “genuine claimants”, and, on the other, fraud).

I don’t think the question is answerable. Too many components of the question are subjective, and would involve staring into people’s souls. Do claimants ‘intend’ to find a job? I imagine some aren’t even consciously decided on whether they are looking for work or not (I know one longtime claimant who is a friend of mine who doesn’t seem sure what he’s doing – although he could certainly get some sort of work if he tried a bit more). They might not be trying, or they might just be really bad at looking.

So you can’t base a policy on people’s intentions. You just have to do what you can to increase employment. That means supply-side reforms (making it easier to hire new workers), and tightening elibility for benefits.

There is no FA rule that “you can cheat and get a goal” so obviously this never happens. There is no rule that says you can cheat in an exam so this never happens either.

Brilliant, you’re wasted on a simple blog like this.

This appears FOI Act cost business is getting bogged down in the “you can only have a freedom if you are responsible enough to use it in ways I see fit.”

Which is a pretty funny attitude for two self styled liberals to take. In fact, I’d say it was a pretty stupid position to take, in fact.

What Don has found out is that there is currently no legal way to choose benefits as a lifestyle choice. This is important as it means no further legislation is necessarily necessary, just enforcing the legislation already in existence.

As I’ve seen Tim make the same point with regard to alcohol (that we already have laws to deal with anti-social drunkenness, so we don’t nee more), I’m a little confused that he seems be taking the opposite view on this subject.

I doubt that it actually costs them an additional 600 quid. They are just monetising a figure from the costs that they are already spending. Think about a copper out on the beat and he spends an hour getting an old dears cat out of a tree. They could monetise that intervention and say it cost X amount. However, there was no additional cost because the costs had already been incurred even without the intervention.

“You do, presumably, accept there is gaming going on? If so, perhaps you’d care to now give us some idea of where you see the boundaries of that (between, on the one hand, “genuine claimants”, and, on the other, fraud).”

The cheap and nasty partisan point was the one made by the Chancellor in making claims about people making “lifestyle choices” and claiming to take action which his government won’t and can’t deliver on.

I’ve written a lot about ways of improving the welfare system, but just briefly, I think that Osborne’s entire approach here is wrong, that there aren’t three distinct categories of fraudster/gamer/genuine, and that any attempts to impose a bureaucratic definition from central government won’t catch the people who don’t want to work, because they will always be able to exploit loopholes in the regulations, but will hurt people who are in genuine need (like the people who are undergoing chemotherapy and who are told that they are fit to work). The FoI request highlights how dysfunctional this approach is.

I support the work that Community Links has been doing and their ideas for reforms to the system to get people who work cash in hand while claiming into the formal economy – http://www.community-links.org/our-national-work/need-not-greed-campaign/

I also think that the best people to decide whether someone is actually looking for a job or is just going through the motions is usually their Employment Adviser. With appropriate safeguards, I’d adapt Ed Balls’ idea that everyone who is unemployed for 18 months should be guaranteed a job offer, and give advisers the powers to require someone who they think could work but isn’t doing so to take up this job, and I’d make sure that advisers were well qualified and had more time to work with each individual claimant.

That’s just the start, there is masses more that could and should be done, but as well as setting out alternatives, part of the battle is to show that Osborne’s approach is fundamentally flawed.

@DonPaskini: As far as I can make out, you’re saying that you accept there are people gaming the system, but that you don’t believe we should try to stop this because (a) you don’t believe we can; and (b) it will affect people you consider to be in genuine need.

I’m not seeing any evidence to support (a) – I accept you can never hit zero, but I believe you can reduce it significantly – and (b) falls back to the same definitional problem gwenhwyfaer suffered from earlier – what does “genuine” mean. All you’ve done is try and import some concept of need, while ducking the challenge of actually explaining what seperates

(Applying CANCER as a magical tag which wins the day makes no more sense here than it does over the daft NICE-circumventing drugs fund, or – in the interests of political balance – those idiotic referral guarantees. There are plenty of chornic and long term illnesses which affect people’s ability to work, but this is not the same as saying that simply suffering from one such prevents the sufferer working at all. I assume you’d be clearer if you were actually saying that we should not bother challenging blanket assertions of illness based inability.)

I’m also struggling to understand how you can say in the same sentence that Osborne is wrong to look at those three categories, that there are people exploiting loopholes in (presumably, read: gaming) the system, and then proceed to contrast them with people in genuine need (presumably, read: “genuine claimants”).

Presumably you take the consistent approach of also opposing the introduction of general anti-avoidance rules in the tax system, lest they have unintended effects?

The FoI request doesn’t show any disfunction; as I’ve already pointed out, it only shows the fallacy of trying to compare the price of apples and the value of pears.

As to Employment Advisors, I wish I’d your faith in their skills and abilities. Personal experience suggests they are not, as a class, up to the job they currently do – and that job could in many cases be better delivered by a well designed website – while the salaries available do not compete with corporate HR. Getting rid of lots of them, and massively upskilling the rest would be an interesting and promising approach, but I suspect the PCS would provide it’s usual service to the status quo.

Ahem: “…while ducking the challenge of actually explaining what seperates”

Should be: “while ducking the challenge of actually explaining what seperates” those in genuine need from those merely gaming the system.

24

I think it’s a good point that in the provision of many of these types of benefits, (and indeed many public services in general) there is chronic under-resourcing of the professional staff required not only to provide the basic services in the first place, but also those who might make a difference in (as in this example)preventing fraudulent claims.

It’s the the same in so many areas when you speak to people both in local government, and in central government, whether it’s Environmental Health officers, housing benefits… they are often over-worked, under-resourced, and given impossible targets.

If the government were really serious about tackling the issues, they need to address these kind of issues. As Don notes in his example, if the people best placed to give the advice don’t have the resources, time and training to provide the best outcome, then any policy is going to fail.

“As far as I can make out, you’re saying that you accept there are people gaming the system, but that you don’t believe we should try to stop this because (a) you don’t believe we can; and (b) it will affect people you consider to be in genuine need.”

No, I’m saying that you can’t write a set of regulations at a national level which define who is gaming the system and who is in genuine need of benefits. If you don’t agree, then I’d invite you to have a go and send your ideas to George Osborne, because neither he, nor his government’s officials, nor any of the people who claim it is widespread, have been able to do this.

However, if you look at individual people and have knowledge of their personal circumstances, it is easier to make a judgement:

For example, the decision to stop Heather Goodman’s benefits while she was undergoing chemotherapy is an example of the suffering that these kind of “crackdowns” on people who are supposedly gaming the system can cause. More details at http://www.thisisexeter.co.uk/news/fit-work-cancer-victim-told/article-1923757-detail/article.html

Therefore, instead of one size fits all regulations from the centre, you need a more personalised approach, where qualified, competent people help remove the barriers which prevent people from working, and are able to make an informed judgement about what to do if someone is capable of working and just can’t be bothered. I take the point that some Employment Advisers lack the skills to do the job, but also and probably more importantly, the current system means that they don’t get to spend enough time with each person. Even the best adviser is going to struggle if they have an enormous caseload and only five minutes per appointment. You could probably hire quite a lot more advisers, pay them better and require more skills, and still save public money from the extra people who they would be able to get into work.

The Goodman case doesn’t help you – she was not passed fit for work; rather, she was denied benefits because her forms weren’t submitted on time. It was not an example of any crackdown, and demonstrably nobody involved believed her to be gaming the system.

At best Heather Goodman’s situation demonstrates the inflexibility in the system (although not in a way that assists you – see below), but then I’m not sure what else should be done – if people fail to submit forms on time, should we continue to pay on the basis they might have a legitimate excuse, or stop benefits unless they can show one? If you do the former, you are then faced with cases of overpayment – and it’s likely to do more harm to try and recover overpayments from people in these situations.

As to the suggestion that we can replace “one size fits all regulations from the centre”, the benefit laws themselves are one size fits all regulations. Such one size fits all regulations are generally a hall mark of left of centre solutions (the usual Rawlsian veil of ignorance argument). You don’t explain where you make the horizontal division between the benefit laws and the exercise of discretion by those administering them, and even placing that discretion at a low level has significant and obvious dangers: get a sympathetic employment advisor, and you could game the system for years; get an employment advisor who doesn’t believe chronic fatigue syndrome exists, and you’re stripped of your income support.

Or, in Heather Goodman’s case, you get an employment advisor who “…knew someone who had chemo once, and it wasn’t that bad…”, and decides on the basis of this that her excuse for not submitting the forms on time is invalid. Exactly the same result, in other words, which the inflexible application of the rules achieved.

There’s a great deal of aspiration in what you’re arguing, but precious little substance. Idealistically ignoring the question of whether everyone that is receiving benefits should be isn’t a solution, anymore than shutting down the whole system.

(On a side note, compare the way Heather Goodman’s case is deployed against controls on the benefits system with the way other chronic illness cases are deployed against NICE or similar regimes. Hard cases, etc.)

The Goodman case isn’t an isolated example – http://www.citizensadvice.org.uk/press_20100323

There is already considerable adviser discretion in administration of the benefits laws – e.g. advisers can decide whether to suspend benefits if someone fails to attend an appointment. You are right to be concerned about potential abuses, and I think adviser discretion should be complemented with greater rights to appeal and a written claimants’ charter – http://www.labourlist.org/welfare_the_claimants_charter

“There’s a great deal of aspiration in what you’re arguing, but precious little substance”

I’ve set out general principles of an approach which would get more people into work, and some practical ideas of resolving the questions that you pose, including links to more detailed policy work which has been done by others. I’m not sure what more you would expect from comments on a blog? It’s certain more substantial and less aspirational than what George Osborne or Iain Duncan Smith have come up with in the past four months

(If you are really interested, you can come and hear me talk about this stuff in more detail at a welfare reform conference later this month.)

@20 ‘They might not be trying, or they might just be really bad at looking.’

Or in fact they may be victims of discrimination just for being unemployed. Having heard an employer recently make a slip of the tongue about people turning up for his interviews ‘who have been forced to attend by the jobcentre’ I don’t have much hope for fair treatment myself…

@24 -> “everyone who is unemployed for 18 months should be guaranteed a job offer”

Where would that job be?

What if nobody nearby is hiring? Since we accept the existence of genuine jobseekers, this must be the case sometimes or anyone who really wanted a job could get one.

Would the employer be compelled to accept any applicant?

Would the employer be barred from firing that person?

What if they don’t turn up for work? Or turn up but don’t work? Or cause disruption to the rest of the workplace (and there are plenty of ways of doing that that aren’t criminal, so don’t fall back on existing law)?

“…the hard of thinking…”. I suppose there’s at least an honesty in putting the ad hominem attack up front.

Sweetie, it’s not ad hominem if it can be argued from the evidence. You didn’t understand something that was painfully obvious to me, so it was a reasonable deduction.

Of course, you’re now proving that you’ve gone right out of your way and all around the houses to avoid understanding it, which puts you in a different category altogether.

Arguing that low figures for fraud show that current regulations are effective at ensuring only “genuine claimants” (scare marks intended) works by defining a “genuine claimant” by the property of “not being categorised as being fraudulent” (compare defining “is evil” by the property of “not being categoried as being good”).

I’m assuming that they don’t allow people who show up in the fraud figures to continue collecting benefits. You appear to be assuming… something else. Interesting.

You then proceed to hole yourself below the waterline by introducing a third category of ‘…people who are currently gaming the system…’, which is expressly outside the category of “genuine claimants”, and necessarily outside those in the figures official fraud.

1. I didn’t introduce the term. 2. It’s not a third category – it’s the “fraudulent claimants” category. By definition, if they made the claim successfully but the claim was revoked as fraudulent at a later date, they have “gamed the system” and then shown up in the fraud figures at that point. 3. I’m not even necessarily granting the existence of such people – I am merely pointing out that any system can be gamed by a skilful fraudster, so tightening the rules of that system will have much less effect on those who can already get themselves through a set of rules under false pretences than it will on genuine claimants. This is A-B-C stuff; if you’re not understanding it, it legitimises my “hard of thinking” assertion. It’s not an ad hominem, it’s fair comment.

I’m not going to bother responding to the rest of your comment, because it runs with the “three categories” strawman and thus has no relevance to what I wrote.

A dismal effort. You really need to try a little harder.

@Nick

If you think that anyone on benefits after a few months likes the lifestyle, you have no idea about how difficult it is to find a job these days. Perhaps if people were offered interview training and vocational courses by the Jobcentre from the day they signed on it might be easier to cut the numbers on JSA.

@gwenhwyfaer:

1. I didn’t introduce the term. 2. It’s not a third category – it’s the “fraudulent claimants” category. By definition, if they made the claim successfully but the claim was revoked as fraudulent at a later date, they have “gamed the system” and then shown up in the fraud figures at that point. 3. I’m not even necessarily granting the existence of such people – I am merely pointing out that any system can be gamed by a skilful fraudster, so tightening the rules of that system will have much less effect on those who can already get themselves through a set of rules under false pretences than it will on genuine claimants. This is A-B-C stuff; if you’re not understanding it, it legitimises my “hard of thinking” assertion. It’s not an ad hominem, it’s fair comment.

I’m not going to bother responding to the rest of your comment, because it runs with the “three categories” strawman and thus has no relevance to what I wrote.

A dismal effort. You really need to try a little harder.

Oh, “sweetie”, do stop trolling.

One of the beauties of A-B-C stuff is that if any of your premises fall, your conclusion falls. So:

1. You did – Don didn’t use it in his article, and neither Falco nor I did in our comments.

2. This is nothing but a definitional challenge, and it’s no better than your earlier attempt. It rests on your assertion that the detection rate for people “gaming the system” (again, your term) is 100%, such that anyone who is “gaming the system” appears in the official fraud levels.

(Or would your like to try and say that “It’s not a third category – it’s the “fraudulent claimants” category. By definition, if they made the claim successfully but the claim was revoked as fraudulent at a later date, they have “gamed the system” and then shown up in the fraud figures at that point.” meant something else?)

3. Trying to alter the premise (by including the condition that the person “gaming” must be a skilled fraudster) is as transparent attempt to save your argument as not deigning to grant the existence of undetected “gaming”. Obvious question – what category does someone fall into before the miraculous net of 100% detection you assert closes on them?

It may be convenient for your world view to argue that anyone who receives benefit is either fraudulent or genuine (such that there is no grey area), but it only underlines the superficial nature of that view.

@DonPaskini: I think we’ve established that I thought you should have done it in the article!

What’s the conference (link?)? I’m still waiting to see how much of the CSJ’s welfare reform package makes it through the CSR – especially whether they get the extra money Duncan Smith wanted. Two very different landscapes if they get their money (we might both get what we want in terms of upskilling employment advisors, although I’m not sure about the expansion you want) or don’t.