What the Labour and Conservative conferences promised on welfare reform

This year's conferences posed both parties with an interesting problem. Both of them are heading in essentially the same direction on welfare reform. How could they paint themselves as different to the opposition?

Labour proposals

Labour's platform has been fairly well defined by the Welfare Reform Green Paper. The proposals are open to response and discussion by stakeholders pending the white paper later this year. One intriguing wrinkle is Purnell's recent enthusiasm for the Danish model, which gives far higher levels of benefit, guaranteed childcare and front-line staff with the power to create individualised programmes for each customer and penalise them for any failures to follow it.

Conservative proposals

The Conservatives have made clear that they would continue with flexible New Deal roll-out, with a few additional tweaks. Key policy differences discussed at the conference include:

• Complete exclusion from the benefits system for three years after three 'reasonable' job offers. It's unclear what provision would be made for children of claimants at this point.
• A year of community work after two years on JSA. The Labour proposal may end up the same, but is still under discussion. The impact on paid council and community organisation employees of having their jobs taken over by unpaid workers, and the mixed results from workfare programmes in Australia and the US, are presumably going to be discussed at a later point.
• Measures to prevent parking of customers. The current proposal appears to be the Social Market Foundation's one of paying higher fees for higher outcome rates. This is the opposite of recent contracting practice.
• Replacement of the tax credits system with something less bureaucratic, with changes to benefits and taxes designed to remove the 'couples penalty'.

Further proposals from their own green paper (pdf) earlier this year include:

• Profiling of all claimants at the point of initial claim, with potential to refer customers straight onto provision. It's unclear how this would fit with the FND framework.
• Exclusion from out of work benefits only when customers refuse a reasonable job offer. This is closer to the existing system of sanctions.