Following the introduction of Britain’s first labour exchanges in the early 20th century, debates soon took place that might sound familiar to modern ears. Those tasked with helping unemployed people back to work would do a better job, wrote one Ministry of Labour official in 1929, “If they were told to cease bothering about ‘where you were last Tuesday’ and to devote themselves to finding out what they could do to help the claimant in his quest for work”.
This pithy observation is cited in a report published this week by the Institute for Employment Studies (IES) and the Financial Fairness Trust (FFT), which comes to a similar conclusion. After extensive consultation with business groups, work coaches, jobseekers and policy wonks, the reports’ authors found a consensus that if modern jobcentres are to be fit for purpose, an emphasis on “empowering people rather than monitoring them; enabling rather than threatening them” is required.
