Last week Keir Starmer’s government announced that, to keep down the disability benefit bill next year, it would look to send job coaches into psychiatric wards to ready patients for work.
I spent a lot of time recently around psychiatric wards as a family member was in one for an extended period. These are places for people with complex needs. Indeed, many of those in the hospitals have jobs and careers – they just need help finding their way back to them. And that help must come from medical staff, the remarkable nurses and doctors who put so much of themselves into some of the most challenging environments.
The idea that there is a huge amount to be saved – or any benefit in this for people who, in their distressed reality, will see a stranger come in and tell them they need to think about work – is ludicrous. “I know you’re going through a major psychotic episode, and a long period of treatment and convalescence involving heavy-duty medication is needed, but really a good talking to and a career pathway will sort things out, by jiminy!”
It’s so disappointingly small-scale and puny. It’s the opposite of ambitious, and it echoes the last lot who were in charge.
Rather than nipping round the edges, the government should declare an end to the dance. In order to create work, to drive people from benefits, invest in essential infrastructure programmes. Not a few pieces, but projects on a monumental scale. Announce substantial borrowing to invest. The wellbeing of the nation will benefit. Then, they can use job coaches who have specialism in helping the excluded (Big Issue Recruit, for example) to help people into sustainable work. Growth, that great economists’ shibboleth, will follow.
Paul McNamee
UK editor, The Big Issue
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