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The welfare secretary, Liz Kendall, wearing an apron, is gingerly rolling a ball of sourdough. When it comes to getting people off incapacity benefits and back into work, breadmaking, it seems, has a part to play.
Kendall is at Workbridge, a community centre in Northampton. There’s a cafe, a garden centre, and workshops and kitchens offering people with mental illness, autism, learning disabilities and brain injuries the chance to develop their life and job skills.
People referred to Workbridge are often taking their first, tentative steps towards a job or returning to work. The activities – art, wood-turning, ceramics, breadmaking – are essentially therapeutic, about building confidence, routine and trust.
On her visit last month, Kendall was keen to highlight the less-discussed aspects of Labour’s ambitious employment plan, Get Britain Working, but the visit came against a backdrop of political noise around the government’s cuts to incapacity benefits.
The benefit system was “broken”, said Kendall. She said she wanted to replace the idea of the jobcentre as a place of distrust and punishment with one that provided real help to people on incapacity benefits, many of whom say they want to work.
The existing system did not provide proper support for disabled jobseekers but created incentives for them not to work, she said, adding that places such as Workbridge would be part of the new approach. “I’m here to change the system,” she said. “It’s got to be a genuine reform, not just about cuts.”
Josh, a 19-year-old with dyspraxia, has been doing courses at Workbridge in leatherwork and breadmaking. With extra support from Mencap, he was due to start working, with a workplace buddy, at Amazon.
He was at first uncertain, and then irrepressibly charming. Had Workbridge helped him? “It’s given me more confidence to talk to people,” he said. A friend asked him what he’d “really” like to do. Josh smiled: “I like acting.”
Mark, 54, was an experienced IT professional when the anxiety that had plagued him for most of his life turned into a breakdown. In a fug of depression he lost his job, his relationship and his savings, and became a virtual recluse.
The local jobcentre referred him to Woodbridge. “I would never have chosen to do a sourdough-making course in a million years. But it got me out of the house. After two or three weeks I went from terrified to: ‘right, what’s next?’”
Breadmaking was no magic bullet, he said. He was not ready to return to a full-time job. But it was a start. He contrasted it to his first, disastrous meeting at the jobcentre.
“I was sweating, panicking. It was like they just wanted me off universal credit asap,” he said. “If I had been forced into a job [at that point] I would have been off ill after three weeks. I would have had none of the tools that I needed. Compulsion doesn’t work.”
Richard Draper, a disability employment adviser at the Northampton jobcentre, said jobcentres had lost their way in recent years, becoming too focused on processing benefits and issuing financial penalties to people who fell foul of rigid benefit rules.
He wanted to see a more personalised and flexible approach. More face-to-face, sustained engagement, helping claimants who had not worked for years to “find their feet” in the world of work. “Absolutely everything in this business of getting people back into work is about relationships,” he said.
Sanjith Kamath, deputy chief executive of the charity St Andrew’s Healthcare, which runs Workbridge, said it produced positive outcomes, but that it would be wrong to overstate these: “Not everyone is going to be able to work 40 hours a week. Our role is to maximise the hope they can do the best they can.”
Funding is precarious for charities such as Workbridge, which are reeling from the financial impact of Labour’s national insurance cuts. “We need consistent funding. Everybody acknowledges [what we do] is a good thing. But they have to pay for it,” said Kamath.
Kendall said helping people who wanted to work, and who could work but were abandoned by a uninterested benefits system, was a “Labour cause”. She said: “There are many people, who with the right help and support, could work. But we have to help them get the skills and confidence.”
