Social opportunity should take the place of social security 

How do you convert a handout into a hand up? With great difficulty. That £10 that you gave to a beggar may actually change their lives. But mostly it will go into the day-to-day expenditure of being poor and in immediate need. 

Likewise with social security offered by an increasingly challenged state – challenged by increases in need – it will not lift you anywhere new. It won’t transform you to a position that enables you to exit the dimensions of poverty. That doesn’t mean that social security cannot be curative. It can enable you to do things that can perfect skills that take you places. 

The actor Michael Caine reminds people on TV chat shows of the power of the ‘dole’. How at times he would see the future James Bond, Sean Connery, lining up ahead of him to receive his weekly dole money. 

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Dole was slightly different from social security in that you were taking back part of the money you had contributed in national insurance. Social security came into play after you had used up your dole. 

But still it fell into the sphere of social security because it was giving you something while you were in distress. Trying to secure your present circumstances so that you didn’t end up hungry and homeless. Actors often used this dole system as they fell into and out of work. It was like a saving scheme and many of the working-class actors of the ’50s and ’60s used it when needed. 

We know social security did wonders for JK Rowling when she was a single mother bringing up her baby, giving her time to write Harry Potter. In fact, at one stage I asked her through her agent to write the foreword for a Big Issue book called The Benefit Exit Handbook. 

It was 100 stories of people who had used social security to get out of grief so they could use the time to develop skills that led to an exit from benefit. 

I was inspired to try to create such a book because of a woman I met at a conference that she spoke at. Unable to hold back the tears, she described how she had a number of children who’d grown up and left her. She had been on social security for much of her adult life and was now in her mid-fifties. She was washed up, she said. 

One day she saw a young mother on her housing estate distressed about her new baby. She walked with her to a baby and mother drop-in centre. Gradually she visited the drop-in more and more and began helping new mothers. 

Then much to her surprise she was offered a job by the council to work full-time. It was her first job since she’d left school. Suddenly after years of seemingly being ignored she could use the skills she had perfected during years on benefits. 

The book, though, went the way of many projects you try to do with governments. I was trying to demonstrate the power of social security, to take it from a negative to a positive. To inspire those in a position to use social security as a stepping stone to better things. To turn a handout into a hand up. 

• Austerity was something we simply could not afford
• There’s no defence for raiding the social security pot

Now of course we have had decade after decade of social security simply warehousing people. And because there is very little churn out of poverty from the huge public spend on benefits, it becomes a hand-holding exercise. It doesn’t take you anywhere. 

We can’t all be potential multimillionaire authors of novels for young people. Or actors awaiting a great break. But there must be a way of helping perfect and improve people’s lives, those who’ve been parked up on social security with a grim future of just about hanging on. Social security is not usually going to get you living high on the hog. Often it is difficult to survive on it. 

A friend of mine described what the government needs to do as being a bit like fixing a plane when it’s still in flight. You have to continue the support but at the same time transform the service. At the same time, the government has to be the greatest inspiration to businesses and the economy so that they can produce the kind of skilled jobs that lift you away from need. From the low-wage economy that keeps people teetering on the edge of poverty in perpetuity. 

The government needs to be the biggest investor in new kinds of work. It must support this fight to turn a handout into a hand up. And to address the chronic situation where 23% of working-age people are receiving some form of benefit.  

There are many things the government has to do at the same time to ‘repair the plane while in flight’. It is a bitter task to take on. One thing it must not do is take the austerity road; for this has been proved to be the most expensive of roads. 

One reason we have so much social dislocation, expressed in the vast social security bill, is because the coalition government tried to get the poorest among us to pay for the bankers’ crisis of 2008. It whipped the rug from under people and harmed our health and social services immeasurably. If we take the same road – and there are indications that a Labour government is going to do what didn’t work for a Tory government – then we are screwed. The damage will be immeasurable. 

Back to the original question: how do we turn the handout into a hand up? Answer: through investment in turning social security into social opportunity. Not social need. 

No government that I can remember, or can look up in the history books, has a greater responsibility and in more difficult circumstances than the current one. Circumstances not of their making. Perhaps the nearest is the Churchill/Attlee government in the Second World War. External and domestic threats abound. 

And among all this the plane has to be mended while in mid-flight.

John Bird is the founder and editor-in-chief of the Big Issue. Read more of his words here.

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