Merseyside’s jobless crisis ‘set to get worse’, health chief warns at Tory conference

Oct 1 2008 Liverpool Daily Post

MERSEYSIDE’S jobless crisis, which has left more than 100,000 people on the long-term sick, is set to worsen as the economic crisis deepens, the Tory conference heard.

Sue Woodward, who heads the groundbreaking Health is Wealth Commission, told the Birmingham audience its work to cut the numbers on incapacity benefit (IB) was about to get tougher.

The invitation to join the debate on ‘Britain’s broken society’ followed July’s study by the Conservatives, which found the gap between the richest and poorest in Liver-pool is at its widest since Victorian times.

Among the solutions put forward by Chris Grayling, the Tory work and pensions spokesman, is for private firms to run a network of ‘back to work’ centres to target the long-term jobless.

The stick in the ‘Work for Welfare’ crackdown is a threat to force those on the dole for two years to do vol-untary work and strip them of benefits if they refuse.

Ms Woodward said that it was common to find families in Liverpool and across Merseyside where no-one had worked for more than 20 years.

TheStep Closer 2 Work programme offered help finding work to 211 people over a six-month period last year to people who, collectively, had been on IB for a staggering 692 years.

Ms Woodward said: “It is hard to ask of people ‘Get off your bottom, get a job’ if they have no experience of work, are unskilled and over 50.

“These are people who have been written off by society and who have no self-value and no self-worth. It is extremely difficult to be motivated.

“And, in these changing economic circumstances, jobs will be fewer and further between and will need much higher skill levels. The people at the back of the queue are now likely to be pushed further back.”

Mr Grayling, who is also the “shadow minister for Liverpool”, praised Ms Woodward’s team for their work in “transforming the lives of individuals”.

And he said: “What underlines the need for radical reform to our welfare state is the huge social divide in many of our cities. In many ways, the gulf is as wide as it has been since Victorian times.You find it in London, Liverpool, Manchester, Glasgow, and here in Birmingham. There could be no clearer indicator of a society that is getting things wrong – where fairness is being missed out.”

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