The Government's Welfare to Work proposals throw up several contradictions in Labour's policy objectives. The priorities appear to include: removing obstacles to moving people from the benefit system to work, encouraging flexibility within the labour market, fundamentally changing the benefit system, encouraging individual contributions to their welfare packages and targeting benefits more effectively towards the worst off. In fact these objectives are fundamentally incompatible.
The biggest barrier between welfare and work is the means-tested benefit system, which has become labyrinthine and demoralising. The interface between the benefits' system and the tax system is punitive. In today's Britain no-one is taxed more heavily than the working poor. Lowering the tax rate is senseless unless we remove means-testing. A large rise in the tax-exempt floor would be a coherent starting point in removing welfare-to-work disincentives.
Moving frequently between benefits and work continues the nightmare. Each change requires a recalculation of entitlement and a wait for payment (often leading to rent arrears in the case of Housing Benefit). There's also a case for housing subsidies being linked to property rather than people. A "low rents" strategy has obvious counter-inflation attractions and mitigates against house price rises in the private sector. We can also impose minimum housing standards here.
But the biggest question is, simply, "where's the work?" We have a lot to say about training and skills, but little about actual jobs. Indeed, we are running with a cap on social expenditure tighter than the Tories would have stuck to. The Tories used forced training schemes to massage unemployment figures and take people off long-term benefit rates, returning them to lower ones when the Mickey Mouse scheme ended. Labour will not be allowed to get away with this.
A shift from Housing Benefit back to housing subsidies could be tied to a serious programme raising housing and energy efficiency standards, with huge job implications. A skill training programme linked to this could have immediate short-term relevance. We would need an interventionist strategy beginning and ending with the question of real jobs.
The Government talks about "flexibility" in the labour market, but being multi-skilled and adaptive to change is very different from having semi-itinerant status. Disposable labour is generally untrained, as firms will simply not train those who have no future there.
Job insecurity locks the state into three very long-term costs: long-term "premium" payments for social insurance, an impossible remit for training the permanently-disposable, and growing numbers who are uninsurable and for whom the state will pick up the bulk of benefit/pension costs. Traditionally viewed as a working-class/unskilled issue, labour market changes may make this more complex. Most data-processing and computer-programming for the 1991 census was done in India, at the rate of one dollar an hour. If deregulated competitiveness policies take accountancy and IT work downmarket (in wage and job security terms), it leaves the training programme with problems. Will raising skills in itself generate employment? Last year Boeing announced that over 20,000 of the US's most highly-skilled workers would be made redundant because of an agreement to build the 777 in China. Therefore, does it make sense to have skill training programmes which are not reinforced by fiscal measures promoting "site here to sell here" measures?
Privatisation led to huge profits and dividends but the social costs of unemployment and poor health have never been calculated, nor has the shift from company spending on training from front-line workers to senior management.
Our current lack of a training levy on employers encourages them to poach rather than train.
I have had a lot of involvement in social and community programme training. What became clear was that for those without formal qualifications this was not just a way back into normal routines of work - it was a career pathway. In the 1970s, recognition and worth in the wider jobs' market followed. Today's equivalent would have to recognise the higher percentage of single parents, and the impossibility of separating access to childcare from access to long-term job prospects.
For most young people, the word "training" is a sad joke. It is not redeemable unless a real job exists at the end. Many jobs being created are benefit-dependent, low-paid, part-time and irregular. We need to remove disincentives to full-time secure employment, restoring "platform" benefits in place of means-tested ones. Moving from welfare to work must not make you poorer. The poor should not have to pay higher marginal tax rates than the rich. We should strengthen separate provision for the financial needs of children. Labour should take advantage of the "feel good" factor, one which feels good about ethics rather than low taxation. If we tap into this, we can avoid the language of compulsion or forced labour.
Thousands of people, young and old, long to be eco-warriors, stopping the elderly dying of hypothermia, installing more sustainable methods of water management, cutting the health care bill by working on proactive health care and pollution reduction. There is so much more to this than tunnels under Manchester airport.