Personalisation can’t be a tool to cut welfare costs
Monday’s Work Health and Disability Green Paper is one of a dwindling breed – all papers come out White these days. Green Papers were always supposed to float vague policy ideas for input before a White version was produced, but successive governments have increasingly opted to skip this step and produce fait accompli documents with detailed plans, and what increasingly feels like limited consultation on the detail. To be fair, the Green Paper actually started out White at the beginning of the year – then one Brexit vote and wholesale change of personnel later, and the relevant departments clearly felt it was sensible to roll back the plans that would have been the thrust of the previous Secretaries of State.
Laying out some basic directions and then throwing the document open to significant levels of expert input over a lengthy consultation period allows for a fresh start of sorts. And what are those basic principles? Key among them is that employment support needs to be more personalised, and that it should take to heart the fact that (good) work promotes physical and mental health. These are indesputable, impossible to oppose ideas, proven by the fact that criticism of the Paper has thus far focused on the Cameron government’s past acts – cuts to employment support and benefits since 2010 – and the future ESA reduction mentioned above. How will you deliver personalised support when you’ve cut budgets so drastically? critics ask. Good question.
Let’s hope the Green Paper’s vision of personalisation for employment support involves greater partnership with unemployed disabled people, an opportunity for them to help plan and take real ownership of their journey to work, and to generate more targeted and effective support packages – and that it’s not based on the misplaced belief that personalised support is yet another driver for reducing welfare spending.