Empowering the Incapacitated Worker? The Employment and Support Allowance and Pathways to Work

The article offers a critical discussion of the welfare-to-work regime and developments since the Welfare Reform Act 2007 was enacted, with a particular focus on policies towards those who are incapacitated from work. It considers a new measure, the Employment and Support Allowance (ESA) which is replacing both Incapacity Benefit and other forms of support such as the ‘incapacitated from work’ and ‘disabled worker’ categories of Income Support. As the article considers, this is just one of the strands in the government's evolving ‘empowerment’ agenda unveiled in A New Deal for Welfare: Empowering People to Work (2006, Cm 6730). This has the declared aim of increasing the labour market participation rates of sizeable groups such as those in receipt of Incapacity Benefit and those who are disabled, as well as lone parents, carers, older workers, and unemployed people in the ethnic minority communities. A critical assessment is made of wider reform objectives such as achievement of an overall national 'employment rate' of 80% - an increase of nearly 7% on the latest figures for the UK issued by the OECD's Economic, Environmental and Social Statistics, and the Office for National Statistics Labour Force Survey figures. Much of the article's attention is focused on the kind of interventions described in 'Reducing Dependency, Increasing Opportunity: Options for the Future of Welfare to Work' (David Freud: Department of Work and Pensions, March 2007).