Labour: if you want a council house, find a job

There are times when I despair at New Labour attempts to outdo the Tories in their desire to prove to Daily Mail readers that they are harder on the unemployed than their rivals, and this is such a time.

The new housing minister, Caroline Flint, has proposed that Council House tenants should be expected to actively seek work as a condition of their tenancy. At first this will apply only to new applicants for Council Housing but it could eventually be applied to all Council House tenants.

Of the 4 million people living in social housing across the UK, figures show that 2.6 million are of working age, with about 1.4 million out of work.

Nearly half of all social housing is in the most deprived fifth of neighbourhoods.

Obtaining a Council House in 21st Century Britain is something that is largely restricted to existing tenants, so making this precondition strikes me - not only as a pointless gesture - but as a blatant play for the Daily Mail reader who imagines that the country is awash with people refusing to work and living off benefits.

I am all for a Labour government attempting to get people back to work, indeed, after Thatcher and the eighties this was one of the main reasons that we yearned for a Labour government; however, threatening people with homelessness - which is the underlying threat in what Flint is saying - strikes me as crass in the extreme.

It is thought to be the first time the government has proposed making a traditional social housing tenancy conditional on seeking work.

So here we have a Labour government outdoing the Tories in their desire to show how tough they can be on some of the poorest and most vulnerable members of our society.

This latest outrage falls hard on the heels of New Labour's announcement that they are planning to "reform" Incapacity Benefit, by which they mean slash the amounts paid to people claiming such a benefit.

The average amount paid is £85 per week. As a proportion of average earnings, IB paid to a single person fell from 17.4% in April 1995 to 15.2% in April 2003.

This amount is to get even more miserly. At first, people will be put on a holding benefit paid at the jobseekers' allowance rate of £55 a week until they face a proper medical assessment, probably within 12 weeks. The majority will receive a rehabilitation support allowance set at just above the current long-term IB rate of £74 a week. But this allowance will be cut back to jobseeker levels - about £20 a week less - if they do not take steps, including regular work-focused interviews, to get them back to work.

Many of our poorest Council Estates, where most people are claiming Incapacity Benefit, are in former industrial areas, areas where the populace are trained for jobs that no longer exist. It would appear to me to be much more useful to offer to retrain the populace for jobs that would pay a decent wage rather than to issue threats concerning people's housing and incapacity benefits.

And the figures from the National Statistics Office undermine New Labour's claim of any urgent need to tackle this "problem".

The trend in the employment rate is increasing but the trends in the unemployment and inactivity rates are falling. There has been a further fall in the number of people claiming Jobseeker's Allowance benefit. The number of job vacancies has increased. Growth in average earnings, both excluding and including bonuses, is unchanged.

The employment rate for people of working age was 74.7 per cent for the three months to November 2007, up 0.3 from the previous quarter and up 0.1 over the year. The number of people in employment for the three months to November 2007 was 29.36 million. This is the highest figure since comparable records began in 1971 and is up 175,000 over the quarter and up 263,000 over the year. This is the largest quarterly increase in the number of people in employment since 1997.

The truth is that more people are working than ever before and that unemployment rates are falling in this country. So the need for a Labour government to announce such threats to potential Council House tenants and the disabled strikes me as highly draconian.

But, as always, New Labour - when under threat from the Tories - always seems to think that the way to win public support is to prove that they can be harder on the vulnerable than even the Tories would dare to be.

It's enough to make you despair.

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Tags: New Labour, Tories, Housing minister, incapacity benefit, Caroline Flint, Gordon Brown, unemployed, unemployment, council housing, social housing