Wanted: domestic servants for the political classes

Are Government ministers, top-ranking civil servants and quangocrats on the look-out for pliant, underpaid and cowed domestic servants? Do they pine to put young single mothers to work in their kitchens or, better yet, use their underemployed hands to scour out their lavatory pans?  Apparently so, for there can be no other explanation for the petty, pointless and ultimately vicious welfare 'reforms' announced late last year.

The overall goal of these measures is a simple one: to push single parents and disabled people off benefits and into the labour market. And those single parents are overwhelmingly women, almost invariably of little education and limited skills.

The new policy means that once their children turn 12 they will have their benefits reduced if they do not participate in 'work search activities', notably attending job centre advice sessions and going for job interviews.

Jobseekers' allowance is now about £60 a week -  just over £3,000 a year -  so the effect of a cut on the children in such a family is very, very harsh. Such likely consequences as truancy, disruptive pupils and a strong incentive to resort to theft have been arrogantly brushed aside. But more important are the defects in what is on offer for those who take the idea of bettering themselves seriously.

Many, if not most, of those affected lack basic skills like literacy, numeracy and IT, let alone job-specific skills. It is therefore somewhat pointless to equip them with presentational skills for interviews for jobs they cannot hope to be offered.

This is especially true right now, for whatever the circumstances were when this scheme was devised (by a banker, recruited presumably as a diversion from helping bring about the current financial catastrophe), the financial incentives offered to those who fulfil the job search requirements are simply window dressing.

In the real world of 2009 - with unemployment predicted to rise to 3m and thousands of young people graduating straight on to the dole ­- the idea of pushing low-skilled, relatively demoralised people into intensified competition is not just pointless, it is positively cruel.

Most notable is what is not on offer. There is no skills training for any recognisable employment. And there is no programme of job creation which would give those currently on benefits reasonable hope of earning a living wage. Yet more remarkably, benefits will be cut even for those who decide to go back to finish their schooling (a good proportion of lone parents have had their educations interrupted by the birth of their child) or otherwise get on courses that might equip them with skills for recognisable employment.

What remains for them is low-skill service work - such as cleaning and household service.  Many of the courses in the former Sure Start programme included things like caring for other people's children. It makes you wonder whether the effect, or even the subconscious aim, was to produce domestic servants for the wealthy, which these days is more likely to include the double income-earning political classes who can still graze in Westminster-Whitehall-media-quango-local government pastures than even those still gorging on taxpayers' billions in the unapologetic financial sector.

There is nothing wrong in principle in encouraging and assisting people whose children are in school to get back to work, provided it isn't to some low-skill dead-end drudgery.  Indeed an ideal 'welfare' system would be one which pays those who are physically and mentally capable generous levels of benefit, provided they apply themselves on training courses or do genuine socially valuable jobs. (Take one example: the lack of adequate care for old and ill people in this country is a disgrace; why aren't thousands of unemployed people trained and incentivised to take up this work?)

Current policy, though, simply leads the poor up a cul-de-sac. The really interesting question concerns its purpose. Is it simply an exercise in New Labour moralism? An effort by the Government to cover its back against accusations of 'mollycoddling work-shy spongers'.  Or a half-baked attempt at addressing the genuine problem of people who become demoralised through living wholly outside the world of employment and lack the confidence to re-enter?

I'd guess it is an attempt to combine all three, and however successful it proves with respect to the first two, it will be of very little use with the last and most important. It is also likely to produce a great deal of unnecessary stress and hardship. But it might, of course, also be the answer to the perennial servant problem. ·