The dreaded budget cuts: amid all the talk about their effects, we should consider what they will mean to homeless unemployed people.
Andrew is 38. He has been homeless since 2007, and spent six months sleeping rough. Recovering from alcohol dependency, he’s now living in a St Mungo’s hostel. He has NVQ certificates in IT at levels 1 and 2 - and he has anxiety. Moved from incapacity benefit to job seekers’ allowance, he says: ‘I’m scared they think I’ve not done enough job searching and will take me off benefits altogether.’
William, 49, can’t stand for more than 15 minutes because his toes were amputated due to frostbite three years ago, a result of being ‘on the road’ for a decade. He was an accounts officer, is appreciative of what Jobcentre Plus staff are trying to do for him, but knows that he is far from being an ideal ‘job-ready’ candidate for work.
These are the human faces of a systematic failure within government work programmes. The high-volume approaches which demand instant results, and view permanent paid employment as the only valid outcome, are directly responsible for the institutional neglect which has given us a two-tier society.
In 1983, 86 per cent of St Mungo’s residents were in some form of paid employment. This year, only 4 per cent are. More worryingly, two-thirds have been out of work for five years or more, and a shocking 15 per cent have never worked at all. These are not feckless people - they have been dealt a bad hand by public services: more than half do not have the basic literacy skills required to get a job.
During this, our annual Action Week, St Mungo’s launched a new report, Work matters. It paints a stark picture of inadequate support for long-term unemployed homeless people, with bewildering benefits to navigate, those most able to find work being ‘creamed’, the rest ‘parked’.
A work programme needs to be designed with intelligence and delivered with subtlety. We would like Jobcentre Plus to act as a gateway, with claimants given an initial assessment of their basic skills, and the impact of their health and housing status on their employability taken into account. Those who need support would be referred on to a specialist voluntary, community or private organisation. Not only would this mean they receive intensive support immediately, it would also generate greater realism about their journey back to work, with false starts and failures being recognised as the consequence of their circumstances, rather than character flaws.
The tragedy is that homeless people want to work. The idiocy is that it costs more to keep them unemployed than to support programmes which help them towards the labour market. Helping them is the only logical and cost-effective thing to do.
Charles Fraser is chief executive of homelessness charity St Mungo’s
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