IDS' welfare reforms - good, but will need WSS in order to work.

"Iain Duncan Smith and George Osborne reach historic agreement to deliver a ten year programme of welfare reform", tweets @TimMontgomerie. 

Read Tim's nice clear description of the reforms here.

OK. Good. Good for IDS. Not good if it means that some poor people get even less, without any chance of getting more, but the 21st Century Welfare document says that is not going to happen. Let's hope they're right.

But credit where it's due, IDS has got two good ideas: the Unified Credit, and trying to make it so you always get more money by going to work. Two very good ideas, all credit to IDS for getting that far.

There's just one thing.

It is pointless to train and motivate claimants to seek work, and to  facilitate their passage into said employment if there is no bleeding work out there for  them to take up.

I hope I have expressed that sufficiently clearly, because it is vital to my argument.
Please use the Comment slot below if you have any difficulty in understanding the above line, because it is vital to the development of my argument. By pointless, I do not mean blunt. 

I mean futile. Fruitless. Ineffectual. In vain. Doomed. 

I mean, like, der.

This is the weakness of Ian's otherwise excellent scheme. The trouble is, that his friend and ours, George Osborne, is about to throw hundreds of thousands of people out of work, as a mass human sacrifice to the Gods of the Market. George is in all probability going to exacerbate the next recession. 

This means that far from reducing the enormous Social Security outlay, George is going to balloon the SS budget like a minor starlet's lips after visiting an inebriated plastic surgeon who got muddled up between 10 ml of collagen and 100 ml of collagen.

SS spending is going to go up, not down, thanks to George's policies of cutting spending. 

Yes, bit daft.

For IDS' plan to work it needs, well, work.

I have a cunning plan that supplies the vital third ingredient that could make this work thing work. In my submission to the consultation, I called it the WSS - Work Stimulus Scheme.

Essentially it takes Ian's idea a step further, and allows people to keep all their benefit when they go into work in the green sector of the economy.  All of it. Without a time limit*.

This enables enterprises in the green sector of the economy to increase productivity while providing work. The benefit is transformed from being a dead dole to a living stimulus to the green economy. 


Read an intro to it about it here.

Confirmation from a DWP report:
– Subsidised (‘transitional’) job schemes that pay a wage can be more effective in raising employment levels than ‘work for benefit’ programmes. (.pdf)
*So it works like a Citizen's Income. Except it's not a full 100% perfect Citizen's income. Which is why the Hand Brake Tendency threw it out when I proposed it at  Conference. It's like refusing to get on a bus because it is not yet at the place you want to be.