Introduction

Facing an out-of-work population increasingly reliant on social assistance provision, successive British governments over the last 20 years have implemented a range of supply-side labour market policies to tackle unemployment. These demonstrate a trend towards increased use of compulsory activity and, latterly, compulsory work activity, which has come to be an accepted feature of policies directed to unemployed people. The social democratic New Labour government has developed this trend in two key respects. First, through introducing a universal policy of mandatory activity for young unemployed people in receipt of unemployment assistance, and second, through extending the reach of activating social policies to a range of ‘workless’ groups not previously within the scope of mainstream labour market programmes.

Unemployment and ‘worklessness’

The size and structure of the UK labour market has changed radically in the last 30 years. An upward trend in employment rates was accompanied for much of the period by rising unemployment. Employment continued to rise throughout the 1990s and by 1998 had reached an historic high with an employment to working-age population ratio of 71.2% (OECD, 1999). Meanwhile, labour force participation among 15- to 64-year-olds remained more or less constant at around 76%, and unemployment fell from its recessionary high of 9.7% in 1994, to 6.2% in 1999.

These changes reflected a process of de-industrialisation, with a decline in manufacturing employment, concentrated especially in the traditional industrial regions, and a growth in the service sector. Between 1984 and 1989, 80% of employment growth was in non-manual occupations (White and Forth, 1998) and this trend has continued. Moreover, while the employment rates of the best qualified remained constant in the two decades to 1997, they fell by 12% for those with intermediate vocational qualifications and by 18% for those without qualifications.

The extent of the growth in so-called flexible employment is disputed (Meadows, 1999; Walker et al, 1999), but it is clear that people returning to work from unemployment tend to enter the more unstable sections of the labour market. While many people who become unemployed rapidly return to work, the jobs available to them – particularly to those who have been without work for some time – are disproportionately unskilled, short term and poorly paid (White and Forth, 1998).