Introduction

In January 1988, the National Executive Committee of the Labour Party endorsed The Charter against workfare (NEC, 1988). The Charter had been agreed by a number of trade unions and local authorities, laying out four principles for participation in government schemes to reduce unemployment. The most important was a commitment to make all initiatives voluntary:

Labour's rejection of workfare, an arrangement under which claimants must take work in exchange for social security benefits, was unequivocal.

Labour's approval of the voluntary principle was uncontroversial. The idea that benefit entitlement should be unconditional was at the core of Marshallian social rights of citizenship. This commitment to universal social rights was a benchmark of the Party's welfare programme between 1945 and 1992 (Marshall, 1964; Lister, 1997b; see Deacon, 1996, for a critical view). Labour ministers criticised the various schemes floated by the Conservatives during the late 1980s and early 1990s which attached conditions to receipt of benefit (King, 1995). For example, Robin Cook was blunt in defending the benefit rights of those who voluntarily left work: “Those people's families are entitled to the same diet, clothes and heating allowances as the families of other unemployed people” (The Sunday Times, 6 March 1988). He later criticised the “humiliating hoops” through which the Conservatives wanted claimants to jump by making benefit conditional (The Times, 23 November 1988). When the Tories edged towards workfare in 1992 and 1993, Tony Lloyd, a member of Labour's frontbench described such arrangements as “socially unacceptable” (The Times, 5 February 1993). These schemes were irrelevant to the needs of the unemployed and they were unfair: they would create a two-tier labour force. It was “demeaning”, claimed Frank Dobson, to demand that people “work for next to nothing” (Financial Times, 5 February 1993).

On 9 November 1995, Gordon Brown, Shadow Chancellor of the Exchequer, announced an ambitious plan, called Welfare to Work, to tackle the problem of youth unemployment (Brown, 1995). Four options would be designed for those aged between 18 and 25 who had been out of work for six months.