Workfare improved
Andrew Rowe MP in a letter to The Times (Feb. 8th '93) writes of the unemployed on workfare executing projects 'to reduce vandalism and to make our streets and estates safer, pleasanter places to live in'. As readers of this journal will know, The Institute for Social Inventions has put forward the same argument, with the additional suggestion that parish councils be reestablished in the cities, with unemployed people able to report to the parish council for 'neighbourhood care' work or seeking approval for ideas of their own that would improve the area's quality of life - anything from acting as street guardians to painting a mural or organising a street festival. The parish councils would thus be able to allocate workfare jobs, whilst acting at times like mini-arts-councils for their area. It is only at this most local level that there will always be work worth doing, without taking jobs away from those already in employment.
'Workfare would be a compulsory parish tax on all residents, but a tax payable in labour or in money'
Ideally, this workfare would be a compulsory parish tax on all residents, but a tax payable in labour or in money, with most people contributing an hour or so's work a week and some otherwise unemployed doing it virtually full-time, with their state benefits supplemented locally by the parish tax money paid in by those with outside employment who prefer to pay than to do their one hour a week of required parish work.
Giving the parish council a vital task to fulfil would work wonders for an area's feeling of neighbourliness - and in our view - again, apologies to regular readers for the repetition - the health of the body politic depends on the health of its smallest cell. It is time to rebuild a human-scale society from the bottom up.
The Institute for Social Inventions, 20 Heber Road, London NW2 6AA (tel 081 208 2853; fax 081 452 6434).
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