Jenrick’s work gang plan: an insult to unemployed people and to workers

Council workers in Scotland filling potholes (Pic: Jennifer Petrie)

Robert Jenrick wants a new dawn that he calls “alarm clock Britain”.

The Reform UK treasury spokesperson is planning to compel people on unemployment benefits to work for 20 hours a week in the community.

Jenrick’s “welfare to work” scheme is not just an attack on the unemployed—it is an attack on all council workers.

Anyone out of work for more than a year will have to accept a job or face sanctions.

Jenrick wants them to work for nothing, cleaning up streets and parks, working with children and staffing libraries and community centres.

“If claimants refuse to participate or fail to show up, they will face penalties,” he added. “Let me speak plainly, if people who are capable of working refuse to, they’ll get nothing. That’s fair”, he threatened.

“My message today to those taking everyone else for mugs—under a Reform UK government it’s going to stop,” the far right MP said on Monday.

Reform UK reckons this scheme could involve up to 300,000 people who have claimed Universal Credit for more than 12 months.

Jenrick makes his work gangs sound like a walk in the park, tidying up a bit as you go, or “beautifying neglected places”.

But his plan should send a chill down the spines of millions of council workers, educators and librarians. He wants their jobs to be done by benefit claimants with no choice and no wages.

The plan demands that cash-strapped local councils provide necessary training and DBS checks. And that they supervise workers from an allocation of £3,200 a year per claimant.

Jenrick claims previous attempts to make claimants work for their benefits were abandoned because of lefty lawyers and cowardly politicians. He is determined that his will succeed.

But his plan will be a disaster. He implies that claimants will got little or no choice about the work they must do. And he has zero respect for, or understanding of, what he considers to be low-paid, unskilled work.

Jenrick’s plan is an insult to unemployed people.

He thinks unemployment is a lifestyle choice. His plan states, “Requiring claimants to work will make long-term welfare dependence less attractive as a lifestyle option.”

And it is an insult to the skilled public sector workers whose jobs he wants done for free.

One suggestion from Jenrick’s plan is joining a “Pothole and patching gang”. But that will require a CITB Health, Safety and Environment test and a CSCS Labourer card and a hot materials briefing.

Or, Jenrick suggests, claimants could be forced to work in breakfast and after school clubs, requiring food hygiene and safeguarding training and a paediatric first aid awareness certificate.

You could be told to give “activity and companionship support in sheltered and extra-care schemes”, requiring a Safeguarding Level 1 qualification, dementia awareness and an Enhanced DBS.

The list goes on. Jenrick wants to force people to undergo training they might never use again, for jobs they have no experience of or interest in and that they might find impossible to do.

There are thousands of people who would like to work. But they are shut out of the workplace due to inaccessible workplaces, unpaid caring responsibilities, expensive childcare and transport costs and because their local employers don’t want the skills they have.