In response to the feedback received regarding the consultation on The Social Fund: A new approach published at the end of last year, NL has come up with these proposals:
We will also change the way that Community Care Grants are awarded so that some individuals will receive goods or services instead of money. This will ensure hard pressed families receive good value and good quality products in these difficult times.
We will also be able to negotiate with the suppliers to get a better deal for the taxpayer so that we can make our budgets go further. We hope for constructive dialogue with stakeholders throughout the passage of the bill, as we develop the detail of these proposals further.
The question that comes to my mind is why? People at the moment receive money to buy necessities and usually from shops like Argos. And it also gives control to the individual. Surely this new proposal will create more bureaucracy? Someone somewhere will be pricing necessities, probably contracted out as well. And what do they exactly mean when they say better deal for the taxpayer?
And furthermore:
But we want to go further. We want to ensure that the support we offer is active and enabling – a means of promoting financial inclusion for people on low incomes and to help individuals access mainstream financial services.
As a first step in this direction we will take the power to work through outside organisations that are better placed to offer financial advice than we are. However, should we in the future ever decide to offer loans through external stakeholders such as credit unions, to replace the current Social Fund provision we will not charge interest on these loans.
In other words poverty is viewed mainly as being a manifestation of people’s own financial ignorance and irresponsibility: the idea that what people really need is not money but a good dose of patronising and lecturing.
That first step, the goods instead of money, seems horribly paternalistic to me. In Australia, we have a similar system for Australian Aborigines where they’re not seen as trust with their welfare money so get grocerie vouchers instead. They want to branch it out to the rest of welfare recipients because people on welfare are said to be irresponsibile and don’t know how to spend their money. You know, coz the rich are real smart spenders, right?
Indeed Benjamin. Once you reduced people to this appalling level you demote them, they become second class citizens. Everyone else is considered ‘responsible’ with their money ‘cept people on welfare benefits.
It’s a nice way of dividing the working-class between those with jobs and those without because those without jobs don’t really have any power, except if they’re allied with those with jobs so if the ruling class can make it appear that those with jobs are above the unemployed, and that the unemployed deserve it, then it’s hard to argue that these people deserve our support.
I grew up in an area with a lot of unemployed state-housing ghettos near by and the disdain some people hold for the unemployed as lazy no-hoped who “don’t want to work” is quite disheartening.