l'Art Social

‘Is this even a word?’ asked the copy-editor for a report I was working on in 2002. She had a point. The word was ‘worklessness’, and despite years of experience in editing, she’d never seen it before. Up to a few years earlier I had probably never used the word myself, but at this stage I was so immersed in the world of labour market and poverty analysis that its oddness had ceased to register.

[Description: An unpublished article from 2010 dusted off in the light of today's coverage of housing benefit cuts in London (word document attached at foot of this post)]

"To live in Westminster is a privilege, not a right, because so many people want to live here," a Westminster council press officer explains in the Guardian. http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2012/feb/16/housing-benefit-cap-famili...

Only a few years ago the contrast between a dynamic, high-employment American labour market and stagnant, low-employment labour markets in Europe was a major theme in international political economy and labour market economics. While the low wages, inequality and precariousness associated with the American model were recognised and widely deplored, the U.S.’s low rates of unemployment and swift recovery from recessions during the 1980’s and 1990’s led even those on the left to query aspects of the European social model.

Readers of yesterday’s post http://lartsocial.org/benefitcap will have gathered that I don’t much like writing about the coalition’s ‘household benefit cap’, because it is difficult to say anything about this legislative proposal without getting dragged into a debate which has been set up on false premises.

Apart from one piece for Left Foot Forward last year http://www.leftfootforward.org/2011/05/lib-dem-opposition-to-george-osbo... I’ve generally refrained from writing about the coalition’s proposal for a ‘household benefit cap’. That’s partly because the issue has received a disproportionate share of media attention compared to other aspects of the Welfare Reform Bill which will have wider and deeper impacts, such as the abolition of Disability Living Allowance.

The Lords will be debating crucial measures affecting disabled people in the government’s Welfare Reform Bill this afternoon (17 January 2012). Government is aiming to reduce the working age DLA caseload by an extraordinary half a million by 2015/16, in accordance with a target hastily set within weeks of the coalition coming to power in the June 2010 budget. After last week’s hat-trick of defeats for the government on the bill, we can expect intense media interest- and a lot of strong-arming by Conservative and Liberal Democrat whips.

Imagine a 24-hour carpark which serves two mutually exclusive categories of customer, both of whom have obsessively regular patterns of usage. Those in the first category always stay for exactly one hour, while those in the second category always stay for exactly four hours. Each of the two groups account for exactly half the demand for parking spaces throughout the day: whenever a new car enters the carpark there’s a 50:50 chance of it falling into either category. To simplify things, lets assume that cars arrive at and leave the carpark on the hour.

This article was written last year, in response to the coalition's cuts to Housing Benefit. Given recent comments by Liam Byrne to the effect that Housing Benefit spending is 'simply too high' I thought it might still be of interest. It shows the role of different sectors in driving housing benefit increases, and thus how the routing of housing subsidy to social landlords accounts for a lot of the change.

The Excel file shows numbers of DLA recipients for each parliamentary constituency in Great Britain from Nomis. (Data for Northern Ireland constituencies is not available from Nomis.) DLA receipt is broken down by age, and in the context of current proposals for DLA in the Welfare Reform Bill, the most important figure is the number of working age DLA claims.

The attached article appeared in the Winter 2011 issue of the journal Soundings http://www.lwbooks.co.uk/journals/soundings/current.html It develops some of the material from the Compass conference presentation on this site http://lartsocial.org/node/2#overlay-context=node/2 in more detail. Thanks to Jonathan Rutherford for commissioning it, and to Sue Marsh and Kaliya Franklin for assuring me there was an audience for it.