The flaw in the plan

Greer and Daniel slept for months in an electricity cupboard. That’s right, an electricity cupboard. It was a three foot by six foot space outside a block of flats. To fit inside they had to lie diagonally, but it was better than sleeping on the pavement without cover. Eventually they were helped into a hostel by a street outreach team. Both were heavily addicted to crack cocaine and heroin but are now ‘clean’.

As a result, they are the busiest of busy bees. Both are frantically active in the way that former drug users often are; only too aware that having time on your hands can be the most dangerous of commodities.

They’ve seen it all over the years. Greer started using heroin at the age of 17. Daniel spent time in prison and has a prominent scar over his left eye after someone stuck a knife in his forehead during a dispute. These things happen.

Back on track

Greer and Daniel are doing everything right. Having decided that the drugs don’t work, and with enormous determination and by supporting each other, they kicked the habit. Now they are eager to return to work and have been on courses to improve their employability, learning about working as a team, the importance of reliability, the delights of health and safety - that kind of thing.

They have also decided to take up volunteer placements with Thames Reach, to give something back and at the same time strengthen their CVs. One can’t help but be impressed. Self-motivated and resolute, they are just the kind of people that secretary of state for work and pensions Iain Duncan Smith intends to reward by re-calibrating the benefit system so that ‘work pays’.

But Daniel is a worried man. He and Greer are living in a small flat above a shop in west London. With two small rooms and a bathroom it is a humble abode, but it has provided them with a base and stability. The flat costs £350 a week to rent all of which, at present, is covered by housing benefit. But a letter has arrived explaining that due to changes in housing benefit regulations, in a few months time they will receive only £250. There is absolutely no way they can make up the lost £100 so Greer and Daniel are preparing to move, though quite where they do not know.

Daniel believes the coalition government’s welfare reforms are justified. He reflects the view of the majority of the public, which in poll after poll has indicated that welfare payments should be the government’s first target for cuts.

‘No one in their right mind would pay £350 a week for that flat’ he says. He is almost certainly wrong. I suspect the landlord will have little difficulty finding an employed person prepared to fork out this sum of money for a flat in a good location, despite its size and quality.

Worse to come

But it’s not just the new housing benefit ceiling being introduced by the coalition that could stymie the likes of Greer and Daniel. Despite the fact that they have worked in the past, it has taken many months for them to get to a point when they can genuinely hope to find work in a competitive labour market.

From April 2013 further benefit reform means that anyone on jobseekers’ allowance for more than a year will lose 10 per cent from their housing benefit. At this point it will be a case of: ‘Greer and Daniel - welcome to Sh*t Creek. Despite undertaking training, filling in numerous job applications and attending unsuccessful interviews you receive a cut in exactly the same way as Joe Lazy-Bastard, who hasn’t left the sofa. And Greer and Daniel, it’s not your jobseekers’ allowance being cut but your housing benefit, just to make sure you build up arrears, get evicted and face the prospect of a return to that cupboard.’

This isn’t the intention. I have no doubt that Mr Duncan Smith, a decent, committed man determined to reshape our failing welfare system wants it to work for Greer and Daniel. But something is amiss. Isn’t this particular proposal administratively impossible to implement?

Faulty system

How can it operate within a new system of universal credit which has been laudably designed so that ‘support is withdrawn slowly and rationally as people return to work and increase their working hours’?

What happens if long-term unemployed Greer were to get a part-time job for three months on a short-term contract and then, unavoidably, return to JSA? Can she start receiving the full amount of housing benefit again? Tracking this will be a bureaucratic nightmare and I have the sneaking suspicion that civil servants trying to find a way of making this specific reform work are regularly referring to that well-thumbed manual entitled ‘How to make it up as you go along’.

So that’s the story of Greer and Daniel. Daniel now has his driver’s licence and starts an NVQ course in April. On a good day I think these two will soon be in work and never look back. On a bad day I glumly survey the impending changes to the welfare system and fear they will be caught in a perfect storm and, having discovered that the drugs don’t work, are about to be shattered by the realisation that neither do the coalition’s welfare reforms.

Jeremy Swain is chief executive of homelessness charity Thames Reach