God help you if you're unemployed.

[RenewableCandy]

Work Programme fails to, erm, work

The government's flagship welfare-to-work programme has failed to hit its main target, official figures show.

But only 3.53% of people found a job for six months or more - missing the coalition's 5.5% target.

[kenneal - lagger]

If there aren't any jobs out there you can't just find them no matter how hard you try.

[RenewableCandy]

Yes, that's the silly thing. It could, possibly, have worked in a boom with a labour shortage, as indeed could the awful back-to-work thing for the disabled in a few cases, but in these economic times it's just a waste of everybody's time and money.

The government, in a way, created the unemployed. It should simply get used to their, well, our, presence.

[extractorfan]

Weird that I'm finding it hard to recruit when there's apparently loads of good unemployed people looking for work. The standard of applicant is really quite poor, no cover letter, no real enthusiasm. Yes it's not a great well paid job but its well above nmw and could lead to other things.

I only want to find clever people, perhaps that's why they're not applying

[Little John]

Weird that I'm finding it hard to recruit when there's apparently loads of good unemployed people looking for work. The standard of applicant is really quite poor, no cover letter, no real enthusiasm. Yes it's not a great well paid job but its well above nmw and could lead to other things.

I only want to find clever people, perhaps that's why they're not applying

Given the large number of people looking for work at the moment, a possible explanation is that you are not paying enough in return for the skill set you are requiring such that anyone with that skill set is able to get work elsewhere for more money. In other words, although there may be a shortage of work, there is not a sufficient shortage in your line of work for the salary you are offering. It would be a bit like offering a burger-flipping job for 50 pence per hour when people can get one for 6 quid per hour. You only solution is to either:

1. offer more money.
2. lower the skills required for the job.
3. Wait for the government to do away with all social security nets such that people will become desperate enough to work for you.
4. Wait for the government to allow highly skilled workers from 3rd world countries where the cost of training them has already been born by their native country, thus allowing you to avoid having to invest any of your own money into training them and where they are unable to claim any social security in this country such that they are desperate enough to work for you.

I realise there may be other reasons I have not considered. I can't think of any offhand though. It must come down to supply and demand, like anything else. In other words, given there is shortage of work at the moment, there has to be some kind of demand destruction going on with regards to the lack of suitable applicants you are getting. I also realise that you may not be able to afford to offer more than the salary you have offered. This, then, leads to a wider problem with our economy. Salaries cannot rise. Indeed they could do with falling. However, unless workers outgoings on items such as food, fuel and housing drop, they cannot afford to work for lower wages. Something has to give.

This government's solution seems to be to drive social security to such poverty levels that it eventually becomes viable to work for shit money that doesn't cover the bills on the basis that social security would cover those bills even less. You may have heard in the news, over the last few days, of the pilot scheme that has been run by this government for the last few months whereby they implemented Duncan Smith's new social security reforms with a group of claimants. It turns out there was a 60% failure rate. That is to say, 60% of them ran into significant financial difficulty such that they were at risk of losing the roof over their heads. If this is rolled out to the country as a whole, as it may well be, then we should simply expect to see a shift of burden on the state from one type of social security (adequate housing benefit and job seekers allowance) to another (emergency housing costs which are typically a few hundred quid per week for an average sized family).

The single biggest thing that could be done to alleviate the largest cost burden on the working poor would be to place a rent cap on what landlords could charge. This would have several effects. Firstly it would, overnight, massively reduce the largest social security drain on the taxpayer. Secondly, it would drive down house prices on the lower end of the market. This, in turn would mean that the working poor could afford to pay for a mortgages. All of which would taker the pressure off wages. The downside, of course, is that it would hurt the landlord class.

Which is why it is not on the table.

[kenneal - lagger]

There is another downside that you missed Steve and that is that it would put a large number of hard working young people into negative equity.

If you agree to pay unlimited amounts of Housing Benefit you will end up paying unlimited rents, which has happened. The government are trying to limit the rent costs by only paying a limited amount of benefit and varying it across the country to suit local rental conditions and house prices.

There is also another possible explanation to Extractorfan's problem: the education system may not be providing suitably educated young people. It's a problem when more people pass exams every year because the exams are getting easier. If E'fan's job is in Ricky it might be that people can't afford to rent of buy in the area on the salary that he can pay. We have that problem in the Newbury area, especially with planning officers for some reason.

[extractorfan]

hmmm, interesting points. We already pay slightly above market rate for all our positions, not because we're nice but that its a small company with not much in the way of other benefits. Having said that, we did increase what we were paying for this sort of position, albeit officially unskilled about 2 months ago.

Education system or poor education by parents is a constant struggle, always has been. I find many young people lack the ability to be polite and respectful, often seeing these things as weaknesses. It was easier to recruit good people 5 years ago. Our premises are difficult to get to by public transport [plans are to change this] with the only staff not having cars as eastern europeans who don't mind walking. We have one person who lives 20 miles away but they started before the price of fuel started rising. I think location (in todays world) is very unattractive but they don't necessarily know this until they apply or get an interview.

And renting in Ricky is out of the question for most low to average paid people, unless you are in council accomodation.

In fact, 5 years ago we got a higher volume of applicants to each advert than we do today!

[Bandidoz]

The whole premise of "spending 35 hours per week looking for work" is just completely ludicrous, counter-productive and ultimately soul-destroying.

[extractorfan]

The whole premise of "spending 35 hours per week looking for work" is just completely ludicrous, counter-productive and ultimately soul-destroying.

Absolutely, I was unemployed for 6 months in 2005, and they were the good times. You couldn't spend 35 hours, there wasn't enough out there even then.

[biffvernon]

If you agree to pay unlimited amounts of Housing Benefit you will end up paying unlimited rents, which has happened.

Indeed. Housing benefit in its current form was introduced by Maggie Thatcher when the council houses were sold off. It was sneaked in as a palliative to the sell-off. I believe it is one of the biggest scams ever, transferring public money into the hands of landlords and resulting in the bidding up of house prices from which an avalanche of bad stuff followed.

Housing Benefit should be scrapped just as soon as an equable way of ending it can be devised.

[featherstick]

My wife is looking for work, so on a whim I popped into the local job centre the other day. I selected the widest parameters I could on their jobsearch terminals - basically all the jobs at any hours in all of Britain. It returned iirc 135,763 vacancies. Many of these were of the sales assistant/security guard/self-employed membership recruiter type. I know this isn't all the vacancies in the country, but it's not a lot.

The rental market is a massive transfer of funds from taxpayers to landlords via housing benefit. Its effects on the country are toxic. It keeps unskilled people stuck on benefits, living in shite accommodation, destroys community feeling, and has created a rentier class with a vested interest in high levels of benefit claimants. It keeps house prices artificially inflated. Streets with high levels of HB renting turn into shitholes. We've just moved out of one such street. 90% of the people who viewed our house were buy-to-let merchants. The house next to us was sold to a rich person's fund management company and just deteriorated to the extent that HB wouldn't pay for claimants to live there any longer. A nice house was ruined in 6 years, and last I heard it was being squatted by a chaotic alky drug user who was at war with the rest of the street but especially with the rest of her family who lived on HB in th ehouse opposite. I feel sorry for the young couple that bought our house. Slum landlords have returned to Britain. Buy-to-let should be banned.

[biffvernon]

And the extraordinary thing is that this toxic scheme was invented by the Tories and swallowed, hook, line and sinker, by Labour, who continue to defend it.

[Little John]

An alternative solution to either the lowering of housing benefit or of placing a rent cap on properties would be to embark on a massive national social housing-building program. I don't mean one where it would be outsourced to the private sector with some juicy and no doubt expensive sweeteners from the state. I mean one where the house-building and ownership of the properties was entirely by the state itself on much the same lines as what happened following the 2nd world war. This would simultaneously cause prices and rents to fall organically without the need for any legislation limiting benefits or rents.

Again, not on the table and the reason this and other logically obvious solutions are not on the table is because they all inevitably involve large amounts of debt being defaulted on as a consequence of them. Given that our entire economy is built on debt, this is the real reason why the very poor are going to be forced to live even shittier lives in order that everyone else above the very poor don't have to suffer. The problem with this, though, is that the "very poor", as a category of citizens, is growing by the day.

Just think about this for a minute;

We have a growing army of unemployed/underemployed. The above growing army of people are sucking ever larger amounts of money from the public finances. The major proportion of which does not even go to them, but passes straight through their hands and into the hands of private commercial landlords.

All of this money could be diverted to employing people to build their own homes. The cost of which would undoubtedly be higher than the current housing benefit bill. But would, in time, prove to be massively cheaper due to the rent being charged on the social housing only needing to be high enough to cover costs (thus enabling the working poor to be able to pay for their rent out of their earnings without needing to call on the state for assistance) plus the government would own all of the houses as an asset that they could receive income from in the form of rent in perpetuity.

* Housing benefit bill reduced

* House prices fall

* Upwards pressure on wages reduced

* Extractor fan manages to attract suitable applicants for the job he is offering.

What's not to like?

Instead, we are driving people to destitution in order to keep afloat a corrupt and broken monetary system. Just take a look at Greece to see where this madness leads.

[frank_begbie]

All of this money could be diverted to employing people to build their own homes. The cost of which would undoubtedly be higher than the current housing benefit bill. But would, in time, prove to be massively cheaper due to the rent being charged on the social housing only needing to be high enough to cover costs (thus enabling the working poor to be able to pay for their rent out of their earnings without needing to call on the state for assistance) plus the government would own all of the houses as an asset that they could receive income from in the form of rent in perpetuity.

Which is the way it used to be, until the big sell off.

[biffvernon]

embark on a massive national social housing-building program.

But....we currently have the largest area of house space (and of higher quality) per person than at any time since just after the Black Death in 1347 (and the quality was questionable then).

A massive house building programme is addressing a non-existent problem.

(There may be a housing distribution issues such as a mismatch between houses in Chelsea and number of people wanting to live in Chelsea, but that's a different problem.)