The government’s Way to Work plan is a nightmare for employers and claimants alike

Trying to fit square pegs into round holes is the sort of policymaking you get when you put Boris Johnson, the biggest square peg in the land, into the round hole of the biggest job in the land, writes James Moore

Work and pensions secretary Therese Coffey (PA Wire)

The problem with sanctioning benefits claimants has long been known: it doesn’t work.

Charities with expertise in the sector will tell you that it doesn’t help them find work. It just leads to hardship. Academics have conducted studies which have come to much the same conclusions.

It’s a sad truth, however, that narrative regularly trumps facts, research, and indeed common sense in modern Britain. In this case, it’s the destructive narrative holding that the jobless are all lazy ne’er-do-wells who should get on their bikes and look for work and need kicking up the backside to do that.

It has been around for years. Decades, in fact. That “get on your bike” quote paraphrases a former Tory employment minister and dates from the 1980s. It should be said that it exists in the Labour Party too. In the last year of the last Labour government there were, for example, more than 700,000 sanctions imposed on those claiming the old jobseekers allowance.

The latest Tory plan – which looks very much like yet another slab of rotting red meat designed to help big dog Boris Johnson to cling on to his job – comes from the same deluded thinking. It’s a particularly nasty piece of work from the Department for Work and Pensions under Therese Coffey. I don’t imagine you’ll be terribly surprised about that.

The policy bears the name “Way to Work” – and yes, bleuurggh – and it gives claimants just four weeks to find work in their preferred sector. If they don’t get lucky in that very short timespan, they’ll be told to cast their nets wider; and if they’re deemed to have failed to make sufficient efforts to do that, the hammer will fall.

There are currently around 1. million job vacancies out there, which doesn’t quite match the claimant count but isn’t far off it. Give the claimants a kick, you solve the labour crisis, save Rishi and the Treasury some cash, give Bozza some sparkling numbers with which to fire at Sir Kier at PMQs, and get the (somewhat) truculent Tory press lining up to sing the dear leader’s praises once more. Back Boris! At least, that’s the theory.

Here’s a question: what’s going to happen if you try and force a PA in need of the flexible hours offered by their previous, now bankrupt, employer to work on the production line of a chicken factory where there’s a fixed shift pattern workers have to either like or lump?

The fact is, a first-year GSCE economics student would quickly be able to identify the problem with the policy: the government is bent upon trying to force more than a million square pegs into round holes. Like our PA. This is going to cause an awful lot of pain to claimants but also, and this is an important point, to employers.

Recruitment is difficult. It’s time-consuming and it’s expensive, and even if you hit on good candidates, it usually takes them several weeks, sometimes longer, to get up to productive speed.

Employers can hope to keep that time to a minimum by finding people who want, and are well suited to, the jobs they are offering and who will be prepared to stick at them rather than walking out the door at the first opportunity.

They do not want to be spending hours on end sorting through bus-loads of candidates who are only attending interviews to keep their job coaches sweet while they hunt for something appropriate to their skills sets.

Bosses could already be forgiven for turning to valium to help them deal with the junk heap of failed government wheezes already on the books – you can start with Brexit and move on from there – let alone this.

But that’s the sort of dismal policymaking you get when you put Boris Johnson, surely biggest square peg in the land, into the round hole of the biggest job in the land.