25 june 2012, hot potato

When public money is increasingly tight, welfare payments inevitably come under scrutiny; as now in the uk. Work on the main political parties' manifestos for the next general election, which will take place on 7 may 2015, is underway, and with the conservatives convinced that welfare reform, as well as reducing immediate costs, is a vote winner, the prime minister has floated a wide variety of ideas. My experience of unemployment includes my father, in manchester 25 years ago, and my other half, in frankfurt about 5. While one got a very small amount and was basically left alone, for many years, the other got real training she needed to get work (german lessons) and also two thirds of her (very good) salary, but only for a year or so, after which it would have gone down in stages - a real motivator. There's also salutary experience from scandinavia (generous) and the us (not), where bill clinton's major "workfare" reforms of the 1990s led to cases of the vulnerable slipping through the net, but in vastly greater numbers also shrank the massed ranks of the unemployed. Their strong economy and a transparent wage subsidies scheme (like tax credits) helped, but the drop in unemployment was so large that workfare clearly played a major and positive role. All of which goes to show that floating ideas is good, and debate is positive, but few things are as illuminating as facts and comparators, in this case of other countries' systems, successes and failures. I look forward to reading much more on this in the coming months to help understand what has the highest chances of working, and what less so.