Reinventing the wheel to encourage people back to work

Following on from Bill Carmichael’s column (“A step to end welfare culture”, Yorkshire Post, February 18) commenting on the Government’s announcement of a reform of the unemployment benefit system…it always amazes me how long it takes for one government or another to reinvent the wheel and how much damage to our society is inflicted until it happens.

I look back just over 40 years to my first experience of having to “sign the dole”. If I remember correctly (and 40 years can soften the memory a little!) people signed on weekly and the very fact that you had to show up in person at an appointed time to sign on meant you couldn’t be off skiving, sleeping in, or on holiday somewhere at the taxpayer’s expense.

If you wanted to receive your dole money you had to be there (proving, therefore, that you were available for work) to sign on the dotted line and to then receive your Giro cheque in the post a few days later.

Being on the dole was far from the career choice it seems to be these days. To begin with, there was something socially unacceptable and also slightly embarrassing about being seen in or around the dole office – like emerging from a dirty book store.

There were also regular and compulsory reviews of your situation and of how actively you were seeking work, and you were sent on job interviews equally regularly.

If you were ever unavailable for work, or if you didn’t take a job that was offered to you, your dole money would be cut – it was reduced anyway after a certain length of time as an added incentive to finding work at the earliest possible opportunity.

Admittedly there were plenty of jobs available back then, so there weren’t the same problems that there are now when jobs are as scarce as they are. But then why don’t we have the same policies and laws in place as they do in the United States to ensure that job vacancies are filled first and foremost by citizens, and that foreign workers can only obtain visas for jobs that nationals are unavailable (and that’s unavailable, not unwilling) to do?

The Government seems to have finally reinvented this particular wheel but it remains to be seen whether it is hot policy or just hot air.

From: Tim Mickleburgh, Boulevard Avenue, Grimsby.

MOST people would agree that those able to work should work rather than spend a lifetime on benefits.

The trouble is, there just isn’t the employment to go round, what with the jobless total at around 2.5m on official figures alone.

What’s more, there are towns and cities where lack of work was a problem even before this banking-induced recession.

I’m thinking of places like Grimsby which once had 5,000 deep-sea fishermen, and the mining towns whose main livelihood was destroyed in the 1980s.

It is all too easy to castigate the jobless as being workshy, but a lot harder to create the employment needed. Sadly, it seems that job creation doesn’t get a sufficient mention in the latest round of benefit reforms.