1. In your backside. Prison trousers are specially designed to be strong and small to try and prevent people discreetly slipping drugs into…and through their pocket at visiting time.
2. In a birthday card. Cut horizontally through a thick birthday card and lay your drugs as flat as possible inside the card before resealing the corner.
3. Swallowed – enough said.
4. In your shoe. Cut out a square inside your trainers before placing your packet inside and gluing it down again. Wear insoles for extra cover.
When someone is desperate and determined enough to get their heroine, cocaine or cannabis into prison it’s almost impossible to stop them. You can search prisoners, but you can’t check every piece of mail and you certainly can’t search every visitor. Even if the prison service had more resources it wouldn’t be worth spending them on tightening regimes to try and cut out drugs in prison completely.
Any resources would be far better spent on helping prisoners who want to ‘do their rattle’ and come off heroine whilst they are inside. Prison is lonely and can be a time of reflection. In the space that prison can provide we should be offering more people courses to help them understand when and why they use in preparation for when they get out.
Many prisoners come out with good intentions which are very quickly dashed, because either they:
- Don’t know how to cope with the uncertainties of freedom and so turn back to the only way they do know to regulate their fears.
- Have nowhere to live on leaving prison - the problems mount up and using is the obvious escape.
Prison is necessary to protect the public from a relatively small number of individuals who are a danger to the public. But for many a ‘short, sharp, shock’ simply disrupts any progress that is being made on the outside and leaves prisoners back at square one when they get out: without a secure or any home, in a cycle of drug use, theft and user-on-user violence.
Things are improving slowly. For instance, there is greater communication between the probation and prison service than there used to be and there is some preparation for outside life when you’re inside, but there is still a long, long way to go. There is frequent worried headshaking in the media that drugs are readily available in prison. They’d do better to be concerned that the help and preparation needed for successful living in mainstream society is not.
Showing posts with label social inclusion. Show all posts
Showing posts with label social inclusion. Show all posts
Tuesday, September 19, 2006
Wednesday, July 12, 2006
Welfare Reform - For the many, discussed by few.
Last week the government published a bill that will directly affect three million people in the UK, indirectly touch millions more. Its success or otherwise will have a major impact on the long term health of our economy. It received some newspaper and radio coverage, but virtually no analysis or comment. Amongst other things, the Welfare Reform Bill aims to restructure benefits for people unable to work because of ill health or incapacity.
At the moment there are two benefits for people unable to work: Incapacity Benefit is based on previous National Insurance contributions. This is worth c.£58 for the first 26 weeks rising in two stages to c.£75 per week for a single person. Income Support, is income based and worth about £57 a week for a single person. The two benefits interact in convoluted ways and the government is rightly combining the two to create one ‘Employment and Support Allowance’ (ESA). It’s also abolishing the crazy system that means that the longer you stay on Incapacity Benefit the more money you get.
However, the real problem with the system at the moment is that it draws a false distinction between fit and healthy job seekers who get assistance and support in finding work and those on IS or IB who get put on benefits and forgotten. In fact, most people who go onto IS or IB want to get back working as soon as possible. So the government is planning to implement its ‘Pathways to Work’ programme, already piloted, which gives support to people with their health and employment to get back into work. This will be compulsory for those people deemed to have a non-permanent disability and failure to cooperate will mean a cut in benefit down to Job Seekers Allowance level of around £57 per week. Those who are deemed permanently incapacity with no chance of work will be given a higher rate of benefit and not be forced to engage in support programmes.
The cost of the Pathways to Work programme is estimated at a tiny £147 million per year. My back-of-the-envelope estimate suggests that only 30 000 claimants per annum need to come off benefit for the scheme to break even. The pilot areas have almost reached that target by themselves over three years.
Compulsory attendance at interviews with the threat of benefit cuts can be both helpful and fair, as long as this ‘stick’ is wielded justly, as a last resort and as discipline not retribution. Ultimately claimants need to be aware that they are being supported by the wider public and need to take responsibility for their actions and progress. Knowing that their actions matter could be beneficial for some claimants. If no-one cares what you do and how you progress towards work you are more likely to experience apathy and low self esteem. The lost benefit could be reinstated after a period of six months if the person was ready to reengage with training.
The success of the scheme will depend on two main factors. The first is the level and type of support. Is the DWP going to be able to provide individually tailored support, built on a relationship with a personal adviser that deals with mental health and stress, through to industrial injuries and lost limbs as well as retraining? It’s a huge ask and there is little evidence to suggest that the benefits bureaucracy can change its ways. Therefore the government’s plans to contract out some of the support services to the voluntary sector, whose ethos on relationship and developing individuals skills and gifts would be well suited, is to be welcomed. If the DWP succeeds in this area it will be a monumental turnaround and worthy of the epitaph ‘A welfare system for the 21st Century’. It would mean that claimants would be able to believe that the system is there to enable and support them rather than demean and dismiss them and treat them as an unwelcome statistic.
The second success factor is far wider ranging. Can the government lead the remodeling of the economy to promote more highly skilled part time work, anti-ageist practices and government-business partnerships to retrain people? Many people on IB can’t go back to working full time immediately or sometimes ever and need to gradually build up their hours over a period of years. By not modifying business practice to encourage more part time working the private sector are missing out on good people entering their organisations. If the government is going to retrain people they will need the cooperation of businesses on a significant scale. Central government needs to equip local authorities and Job Centre Plus’ to engage in partnerships that can produce win-win solutions and offer a package of incentives to businesses to engage. These changes are partly out of the government’s hands and will rely on the vision and expertise of political and business leaders and local and national level. As the population ages this remodeling is crucial for the long term stability of our economy.
The Welfare Reform Bill may not be much talked about, but it has the potential to transform Incapacity Benefits for the good of millions of claimants, the tax payer and the economy as a whole. Whether the government and the DWP can successfully legislate for and implement the changes remain to be seen: if they do manage, we should be talking about their achievement for many years to come.
At the moment there are two benefits for people unable to work: Incapacity Benefit is based on previous National Insurance contributions. This is worth c.£58 for the first 26 weeks rising in two stages to c.£75 per week for a single person. Income Support, is income based and worth about £57 a week for a single person. The two benefits interact in convoluted ways and the government is rightly combining the two to create one ‘Employment and Support Allowance’ (ESA). It’s also abolishing the crazy system that means that the longer you stay on Incapacity Benefit the more money you get.
However, the real problem with the system at the moment is that it draws a false distinction between fit and healthy job seekers who get assistance and support in finding work and those on IS or IB who get put on benefits and forgotten. In fact, most people who go onto IS or IB want to get back working as soon as possible. So the government is planning to implement its ‘Pathways to Work’ programme, already piloted, which gives support to people with their health and employment to get back into work. This will be compulsory for those people deemed to have a non-permanent disability and failure to cooperate will mean a cut in benefit down to Job Seekers Allowance level of around £57 per week. Those who are deemed permanently incapacity with no chance of work will be given a higher rate of benefit and not be forced to engage in support programmes.
The cost of the Pathways to Work programme is estimated at a tiny £147 million per year. My back-of-the-envelope estimate suggests that only 30 000 claimants per annum need to come off benefit for the scheme to break even. The pilot areas have almost reached that target by themselves over three years.
Compulsory attendance at interviews with the threat of benefit cuts can be both helpful and fair, as long as this ‘stick’ is wielded justly, as a last resort and as discipline not retribution. Ultimately claimants need to be aware that they are being supported by the wider public and need to take responsibility for their actions and progress. Knowing that their actions matter could be beneficial for some claimants. If no-one cares what you do and how you progress towards work you are more likely to experience apathy and low self esteem. The lost benefit could be reinstated after a period of six months if the person was ready to reengage with training.
The success of the scheme will depend on two main factors. The first is the level and type of support. Is the DWP going to be able to provide individually tailored support, built on a relationship with a personal adviser that deals with mental health and stress, through to industrial injuries and lost limbs as well as retraining? It’s a huge ask and there is little evidence to suggest that the benefits bureaucracy can change its ways. Therefore the government’s plans to contract out some of the support services to the voluntary sector, whose ethos on relationship and developing individuals skills and gifts would be well suited, is to be welcomed. If the DWP succeeds in this area it will be a monumental turnaround and worthy of the epitaph ‘A welfare system for the 21st Century’. It would mean that claimants would be able to believe that the system is there to enable and support them rather than demean and dismiss them and treat them as an unwelcome statistic.
The second success factor is far wider ranging. Can the government lead the remodeling of the economy to promote more highly skilled part time work, anti-ageist practices and government-business partnerships to retrain people? Many people on IB can’t go back to working full time immediately or sometimes ever and need to gradually build up their hours over a period of years. By not modifying business practice to encourage more part time working the private sector are missing out on good people entering their organisations. If the government is going to retrain people they will need the cooperation of businesses on a significant scale. Central government needs to equip local authorities and Job Centre Plus’ to engage in partnerships that can produce win-win solutions and offer a package of incentives to businesses to engage. These changes are partly out of the government’s hands and will rely on the vision and expertise of political and business leaders and local and national level. As the population ages this remodeling is crucial for the long term stability of our economy.
The Welfare Reform Bill may not be much talked about, but it has the potential to transform Incapacity Benefits for the good of millions of claimants, the tax payer and the economy as a whole. Whether the government and the DWP can successfully legislate for and implement the changes remain to be seen: if they do manage, we should be talking about their achievement for many years to come.
Monday, June 19, 2006
What would you do?
Last week the Joseph Rowntree foundation published ‘need, not greed’, a report which analysed the reasons why people take informal cash in hand work. The findings make fascinating reading for those familiar with the one dimensional government approach of enforcement and cracking down on benefit fraud. Every week I meet people who want to find legitimate work, but are frustrated by the benefits and tax system.
Andrea (20) had been out of work for a few months after personal problems before she found herself a 16 hour a week job in a hairdressers, which earned £88 per week. She wants to get back into full time work, but doesn’t yet feel she has the confidence to do so. The government estimates that she needs £45.50 a week to live on and therefore stops paying her Job Seeker’s Allowance. In addition, two thirds of the money above £45.50 a week that she earns is deducted from her Housing Benefit claim. She is £14.36 a week better off. However, because her hours and her pay vary from week to week she has to inform the Job Centre and the Housing Benefit department every time she gets paid. Sometimes she is not paid on time by her employers and she has to trust that she will not get caught out by inefficient, impersonal, unhelpful benefits administration that might delay the payments she needs for rent and living expenses.
Is it any wonder that people take on cash in hand work, whilst staying on benefits? If Andrea had taken cash in hand she would be £88 a week better off without taking the risk of being without money for weeks if her job stopped and she struggled to ensure she got the right benefit payments. There are numerous non-financial advantages to working part time rather than staying on benefits. It raises self esteem, helps people to get back into the job market, makes it easier to access privately rented housing and crucially, averts boredom and a downward spiral into lethargy and depression. When people ask me about cash in hand work I advise them that legally they must declare their earnings, but I would much rather they worked cash in hand than not at all. There are extra problems to cash in hand work over legal work– you are more liable to be exploited, be paid less than the minimum wage or not get paid at all, but in the context of the immediate minute to minute financial needs of most people on benefits these risks are worth taking.
The government is right that you can survive on the Job Seeker’s rate of £57.50 a week for over 25s, with the help of Housing Benefit and Council Tax Benefit. But imagine not being able to afford birthday cards and presents for your family; not being able to treat yourself once in a while without knowing that it will put you into debt at the end of the month; not being able to travel to visit your grandma for want of what is often just a few pounds. People don’t just want to survive, they want to live.
This is not an argument for increasing benefit rates. We need to encourage, equip and support people back into work in as many ways as possible (education, training, preparing CVs, fare to job interviews etc etc) and a higher weekly allowance will not achieve that. Neither would it reduce the amount of work in the informal shadow economy. We need to make a bigger financial differentiation between benefits and work, through significantly increasing the minimum wage and allowing a greater ‘run-on’ of benefits for the first few months when someone finds work. We also need an efficient and accurately run benefits administration. The ‘faceless bureaucrats’ which Gordon Brown and Oliver Letwin fight to cull have an important job to do in ending Benefit dependency.
The informal cash in hand economy can be an insecure and difficult financial environment, but it can be a lifesaver for those on benefits and I rarely feel the need to reach for the phone number of the government’s Benefits Fraud Hotline.
Name and some of Andrea's details have been changed.
Andrea (20) had been out of work for a few months after personal problems before she found herself a 16 hour a week job in a hairdressers, which earned £88 per week. She wants to get back into full time work, but doesn’t yet feel she has the confidence to do so. The government estimates that she needs £45.50 a week to live on and therefore stops paying her Job Seeker’s Allowance. In addition, two thirds of the money above £45.50 a week that she earns is deducted from her Housing Benefit claim. She is £14.36 a week better off. However, because her hours and her pay vary from week to week she has to inform the Job Centre and the Housing Benefit department every time she gets paid. Sometimes she is not paid on time by her employers and she has to trust that she will not get caught out by inefficient, impersonal, unhelpful benefits administration that might delay the payments she needs for rent and living expenses.
Is it any wonder that people take on cash in hand work, whilst staying on benefits? If Andrea had taken cash in hand she would be £88 a week better off without taking the risk of being without money for weeks if her job stopped and she struggled to ensure she got the right benefit payments. There are numerous non-financial advantages to working part time rather than staying on benefits. It raises self esteem, helps people to get back into the job market, makes it easier to access privately rented housing and crucially, averts boredom and a downward spiral into lethargy and depression. When people ask me about cash in hand work I advise them that legally they must declare their earnings, but I would much rather they worked cash in hand than not at all. There are extra problems to cash in hand work over legal work– you are more liable to be exploited, be paid less than the minimum wage or not get paid at all, but in the context of the immediate minute to minute financial needs of most people on benefits these risks are worth taking.
The government is right that you can survive on the Job Seeker’s rate of £57.50 a week for over 25s, with the help of Housing Benefit and Council Tax Benefit. But imagine not being able to afford birthday cards and presents for your family; not being able to treat yourself once in a while without knowing that it will put you into debt at the end of the month; not being able to travel to visit your grandma for want of what is often just a few pounds. People don’t just want to survive, they want to live.
This is not an argument for increasing benefit rates. We need to encourage, equip and support people back into work in as many ways as possible (education, training, preparing CVs, fare to job interviews etc etc) and a higher weekly allowance will not achieve that. Neither would it reduce the amount of work in the informal shadow economy. We need to make a bigger financial differentiation between benefits and work, through significantly increasing the minimum wage and allowing a greater ‘run-on’ of benefits for the first few months when someone finds work. We also need an efficient and accurately run benefits administration. The ‘faceless bureaucrats’ which Gordon Brown and Oliver Letwin fight to cull have an important job to do in ending Benefit dependency.
The informal cash in hand economy can be an insecure and difficult financial environment, but it can be a lifesaver for those on benefits and I rarely feel the need to reach for the phone number of the government’s Benefits Fraud Hotline.
Name and some of Andrea's details have been changed.
Tuesday, February 01, 2005
Does Michael Howard have a point?
Last week Michael Howard decided that his party was going to “tell the truth about immigration”. He quoted the government’s community cohesion panel in his speech on asylum:
"… inward immigration does create tensions … communities will perceive that newcomers are in competition for scarce resources and public services. The pressure on resources … is often intense and local services are often insufficient to meet the needs of the existing community, let alone newcomers"
For the vast majority of people in the UK the arguments and worries about asylum and immigration have no direct bearing on their daily lives. Their concerns and fears come through media coverage and a vague feeling that Britain isn’t ‘as it should be’. For instance, there were only625 people who described themselves as from an ethnic minority in Worthing, a town of 100 000 people, in the 1990s.
In contrast, almost seventy-five percent of all asylum seekers come to London. Asylum seekers, refugees, legal and illegal immigrants tend to end up in poorer parts of London where they can get support from their communities.
These are the areas that have the highest unemployment, lowest life expectancy and where it’s virtually impossible to register with a GP. The housing situation in the London Borough of Newham is appalling. Families of five or six people living in a one bedroom flat for years are not uncommon. The standard of accommodation is low – with damp and rotting windows being the most common complaints.
Since 2001 very few asylum seekers have been housed by Councils in London. They are ‘dispersed’ to other parts of the country where there are more houses. However, when they are granted refugee status they often return to London where they can get the support and help they need from their communities. When they have been living back in London for a period of time they are then eligible for housing support from London Borough Councils. The already desperate housing situation is exacerbated by a continual rise in the population and people seeking houses. People coming into the country are therefore effectively depriving the existing community of houses.
The perception is exacerbated by the fact that all Councils divide all their housing into two lists. The first is a waiting list for long-term accommodation where you and your family, when successful, become a Council tenant, basically for life (unless you exercise the right to buy or get evicted). The second is for temporary accommodation. All Councils have a statutory duty to house people that are homeless or severely overcrowded. This has to be done immediately and so they reserve property to this end. However, because of the severe shortage temporary accommodation can become quasi-permanent. If a refugee or immigrant is eligible for help in the borough they will get offered temporary accommodation immediately of the right size for the family, like anybody else. When an overcrowded family who has been waiting for a permanent home for years (the wait for a 3 bedrooom house is about a decade) sees an immigrant family move in next door to them it looks like they have jumped the queue. Explaining that it was a different queue is unlikely to be much comfort. Reacting by labelling these people ‘racist’ without acknowledging and addressing the issues under the surface is not going to improve race relations. It’s difficult to assess exactly how much additional strain immigration (legal and illegal) and asylum put on boroughs like Newham, Haringay and Tower Hamlets, but the perception that those coming into the country put strains on housing and health services has at least some truth.
Michael Howard is also right to say that the asylum system is in chaos. It’s virtually impossible to force someone to leave the country after their asylum claim has failed. Disappearing into the cash economy is easy, especially in London. It’s virtually impossible to track down illegal immigrants in the same situation – the government has no idea how many there are. Unscrupulous private landlords will accept illegal immigrants knowing that they can charge exorbitant rents for atrocious properties, because they can’t complain. The government has no idea how many illegal immigrants there are in the country. When in the country for more than a couple of years illegal immigrants will normally try and ‘go legal’ with varying degrees of success. Periodically the government offer amnesties to failed asylum seekers (the last one was issued by David Blunkett in 2004) that have ‘disappeared’ and eventually their position is regularised.
Michael Howard is right. Illegal immigrants, refugees and asylum seekers do put extra strains on demands for housing, health and education services in parts of the UK. However, it is also true that Britain can easily afford to allow all genuine asylum seekers into the country. We should be able to welcome asylum seekers and assume their stories of rape, torture and imprisonment are true. Why do the Home Office arbitrarily decide that people can’t stay because they ‘don’t have the evidence’? Why are we talking of imposing quotas on Asylum? Why do we leave a relatively small number of poorer areas to cope whilst the media and ‘middle England’ worry aimlessly from the sidelines about the threat to ‘Britishness’ or tut tut at growing racism?
The answer is that that it’s just too complicated and uncomfortable. We need to be pouring our time, effort, political will and money into resolving the problems of housing, health, the black market in our inner city areas. We need to find ways actively breaking down barriers between different races and religions. This doesn’t mean working only for tolerance but also the much more costly works of building relationships between people in different communities, whilst recognising the diversity or those different communities. We must demand that our hotel workers and cleaners are paid a just wage whatever part of the world they are from and be prepared to accept the rising cost of our own daily lives. We need to face up to our responsibilities in the developing world – to deal with debt, unfair trade and aids, to actively encourage good governance.
Until we as a nation start tackling the issues behind immigration and asylum rather than name calling, immigration and asylum policy will always be a fudge and a bodge job. Michael Howard’s reactionary, headline grabbing ‘solutions’ wouldn’t help the situation any more than the current governments. They wouldn’t prevent illegal immigrants entering the country and they wouldn’t relieve the acute problems in the boroughs most affected. Michael Howard may have a point, but he’s still not “telling the truth about immigration”.
"… inward immigration does create tensions … communities will perceive that newcomers are in competition for scarce resources and public services. The pressure on resources … is often intense and local services are often insufficient to meet the needs of the existing community, let alone newcomers"
For the vast majority of people in the UK the arguments and worries about asylum and immigration have no direct bearing on their daily lives. Their concerns and fears come through media coverage and a vague feeling that Britain isn’t ‘as it should be’. For instance, there were only625 people who described themselves as from an ethnic minority in Worthing, a town of 100 000 people, in the 1990s.
In contrast, almost seventy-five percent of all asylum seekers come to London. Asylum seekers, refugees, legal and illegal immigrants tend to end up in poorer parts of London where they can get support from their communities.
These are the areas that have the highest unemployment, lowest life expectancy and where it’s virtually impossible to register with a GP. The housing situation in the London Borough of Newham is appalling. Families of five or six people living in a one bedroom flat for years are not uncommon. The standard of accommodation is low – with damp and rotting windows being the most common complaints.
Since 2001 very few asylum seekers have been housed by Councils in London. They are ‘dispersed’ to other parts of the country where there are more houses. However, when they are granted refugee status they often return to London where they can get the support and help they need from their communities. When they have been living back in London for a period of time they are then eligible for housing support from London Borough Councils. The already desperate housing situation is exacerbated by a continual rise in the population and people seeking houses. People coming into the country are therefore effectively depriving the existing community of houses.
The perception is exacerbated by the fact that all Councils divide all their housing into two lists. The first is a waiting list for long-term accommodation where you and your family, when successful, become a Council tenant, basically for life (unless you exercise the right to buy or get evicted). The second is for temporary accommodation. All Councils have a statutory duty to house people that are homeless or severely overcrowded. This has to be done immediately and so they reserve property to this end. However, because of the severe shortage temporary accommodation can become quasi-permanent. If a refugee or immigrant is eligible for help in the borough they will get offered temporary accommodation immediately of the right size for the family, like anybody else. When an overcrowded family who has been waiting for a permanent home for years (the wait for a 3 bedrooom house is about a decade) sees an immigrant family move in next door to them it looks like they have jumped the queue. Explaining that it was a different queue is unlikely to be much comfort. Reacting by labelling these people ‘racist’ without acknowledging and addressing the issues under the surface is not going to improve race relations. It’s difficult to assess exactly how much additional strain immigration (legal and illegal) and asylum put on boroughs like Newham, Haringay and Tower Hamlets, but the perception that those coming into the country put strains on housing and health services has at least some truth.
Michael Howard is also right to say that the asylum system is in chaos. It’s virtually impossible to force someone to leave the country after their asylum claim has failed. Disappearing into the cash economy is easy, especially in London. It’s virtually impossible to track down illegal immigrants in the same situation – the government has no idea how many there are. Unscrupulous private landlords will accept illegal immigrants knowing that they can charge exorbitant rents for atrocious properties, because they can’t complain. The government has no idea how many illegal immigrants there are in the country. When in the country for more than a couple of years illegal immigrants will normally try and ‘go legal’ with varying degrees of success. Periodically the government offer amnesties to failed asylum seekers (the last one was issued by David Blunkett in 2004) that have ‘disappeared’ and eventually their position is regularised.
Michael Howard is right. Illegal immigrants, refugees and asylum seekers do put extra strains on demands for housing, health and education services in parts of the UK. However, it is also true that Britain can easily afford to allow all genuine asylum seekers into the country. We should be able to welcome asylum seekers and assume their stories of rape, torture and imprisonment are true. Why do the Home Office arbitrarily decide that people can’t stay because they ‘don’t have the evidence’? Why are we talking of imposing quotas on Asylum? Why do we leave a relatively small number of poorer areas to cope whilst the media and ‘middle England’ worry aimlessly from the sidelines about the threat to ‘Britishness’ or tut tut at growing racism?
The answer is that that it’s just too complicated and uncomfortable. We need to be pouring our time, effort, political will and money into resolving the problems of housing, health, the black market in our inner city areas. We need to find ways actively breaking down barriers between different races and religions. This doesn’t mean working only for tolerance but also the much more costly works of building relationships between people in different communities, whilst recognising the diversity or those different communities. We must demand that our hotel workers and cleaners are paid a just wage whatever part of the world they are from and be prepared to accept the rising cost of our own daily lives. We need to face up to our responsibilities in the developing world – to deal with debt, unfair trade and aids, to actively encourage good governance.
Until we as a nation start tackling the issues behind immigration and asylum rather than name calling, immigration and asylum policy will always be a fudge and a bodge job. Michael Howard’s reactionary, headline grabbing ‘solutions’ wouldn’t help the situation any more than the current governments. They wouldn’t prevent illegal immigrants entering the country and they wouldn’t relieve the acute problems in the boroughs most affected. Michael Howard may have a point, but he’s still not “telling the truth about immigration”.
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