Alison McGovern: "Employment is 1,000 per cent a progressive cause"

As Alison McGovern prepares reforms to encourage more people on benefits back into work the employment minister is gearing up for a battle – including with some of her Labour colleagues.

Led by Work and Pensions Secretary Liz Kendall – whom McGovern supported in her 2015 bid for the Labour leadership – the changes are set to include further requirements on the long-term sick to look for work. These are likely to include a ‘duty to engage’ with employment services and cuts to benefits. Figures show 2.4m incapacity benefits claims are paid with no work conditions attached - that’s up 50 per cent in five years.

But such action seems certain to provoke a fight with the Labour base – and could well prompt legal challenges. McGovern wants to avoid at least one of these outcomes. She says she would like to learn from what she sees as one of the mistakes of the last government – the extent to which its decisions were subject to judicial review – setting this up as a key measure of success for her own Labour government.

“The recent judicial review on the Tories’ plans was a lesson in how you should approach this issue with care and attention,” McGovern says. To avoid such clashes over government policy in the courts, there is expected to be detailed consultation over the contentious changes.

You don’t need an economic model to tell you that 4.3 million kids in poverty in our country is a crisis

The employment minister, 44, likes to deal in dualities: there are two problems for the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) to be dealing with, and two solutions Labour is working on.

Problem number one is that “in whole parts of our economy, we haven’t created enough good jobs for far too long and people get stuck for that reason”. Problem number two is with universal credit, something which McGovern likes to say was announced “with great fanfare” to ease people’s journeys into work: “I would ask any neutral observer whether that has, in fact, happened.”

“Now we have to fix both,” the minister says. The first part of the solution is the plan to change job centres; the second is the upcoming green paper on health and disability reform.

The latter is designed to “offer help and support more widely”, McGovern says, and will help bring about a focus as they bring forward “our own proposals on changing work capability assessment”.

The MP for Birkenhead - a constituency previously represented by the late Frank Field, a long-standing champion of welfare reform - is ready to defend the principles behind the cause: “Employment is 1,000 per cent a progressive cause. Work is not just the best prevention against poverty, it’s also about everybody’s dignity. Your contribution in your job is also a core part of your dignity.”

The first female chair of Progress, the Labour organisation founded to support Tony Blair’s leadership, she entered parliament in 2010, only 29 years old, and was selected shortly after to serve as former prime minister Gordon Brown’s last parliamentary private secretary (PPS) after his exit from Number 10. The pair still speak.

“We talk about that [government work] and other issues, including the football,” confirms McGovern, a Liverpool supporter. “I’ve been lucky enough to have support from a range of people who’ve done significant jobs in government before.”

McGovern’s employment brief is not the only point of discussion with Brown, as he continues – outside of Parliament – to press for further efforts to tackle child poverty. When asked by The House what modelling she has seen on levels of child poverty, McGovern deflects. “You don’t need an economic model to tell you that 4.3 million kids in poverty in our country is a crisis.”

The Labour MP was a loud voice on the issue when in opposition. Under Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership, she took on a role in the party’s policy review on child poverty, before resigning. (John McDonnell said Progress had a “hard-right agenda”.) In a paper published last year, McGovern’s old boss Brown called for the current state of affairs to be recognised as a “child poverty pandemic”, and his former PPS agrees.

“I think that’s right. It’s what every MP sees in their own constituency,” she says. “I would say to anybody, is that acceptable in the United Kingdom?”

Yet there are concerns that the numbers of children in poverty could actually go up over the course of this Parliament – under a Labour government. McGovern will not confirm whether she would see that as a failure, saying: “We’ll stick to our manifesto commitment.” (Labour promised to “develop a strategy to reduce” child poverty but offered no further detail in the manifesto.)

McGovern meets The House at the Westminster Jobcentre, where she speaks enthusiastically to staff including a work coach who has been working in job centres for 27 years. The minister for employment at one point even refers to job centres as her “happy place”.

“This is the job I have always wanted to do,” McGovern says. “I am anxious to get things done because I had 14 years sitting on the opposition benches, watching the Tories ruin our country. The thing that we want to do quickly is bring forward new tools for work coaches.”

She adds: “Even I, with my anxiety to do things quickly, have to recognise that some of the problems that we’re dealing with have been created over a very long period of time. And so one of the things that we’re also doing is trying to make sure that where [local] economies have really not succeeded for a long time, that DWP is part of the solution to that.”

The employment minister is speaking in the context of 700,000 UK job vacancies alongside 3.3 million people on incapacity benefits. She cites statistics from Blackpool, where 29 per cent of the working age population are economically inactive.

“There are people in Blackpool who want a job and who are very well motivated, but I would say not enough is happening at the moment – although with the new government, we intend to change that – to make sure that the circumstances people are in are good enough.”

The barrier, McGovern says, between those out of work due to illness and those actively looking for work has “essentially got higher and harder”, where people out of work and not well “don’t get any help” if they want a job.

“That is not fair, that is not right,” she adds. “They’re sort of forgotten about, as if you’re not part of ‘the unemployed’, your life chances don’t matter. It’s got to change, and that’s why we want job centres to be able to be there for everybody who needs them.”

The work capability assessment, which now takes place over the phone, is set to be overhauled. McGovern describes it as “a very difficult and challenging process” where at the end people are “essentially forgotten about”.

One proposal floated by those eager for change has been to shift from phone appointments back to in-person meetings. It would not require legislation. She will not be drawn on any potential advantages of making the switch, however.

“The big reform that’s coming is about this issue of what I call the bifurcation… where basically it used to be easier to move between the groups, and it’s got harder,” McGovern adds.

The minister was “surprised” to learn that 92 per cent of people deemed to have limited capacity for work-related activity are still in that group six months later. She only has the statistic, she says, because of efforts to publish the ‘into-work rate’ for the first time: “I thought it was really important that we have transparency on that question of people moving off benefits and into work.”

Other results are just as concerning: of the universal credit claimants who are searching for work, less than eight per cent find their way into a job each month – and the rate has been declining for the past couple of years.

“This is why it’s really important that we reform job centres,” she says. “Whilst we have all of this experience and knowledge, I ask myself, do we use it well? The reform we need is to basically put expertise to best possible use to get more people moving into work.”

Back in 2009, when Brown was prime minister, he used the phrase “British jobs for British workers”, causing controversy. Today one in five jobs are taken by immigrants, compared to one in 10 towards the end of the last Labour government. Is “British jobs for British workers” a notion McGovern believes in?

She points to the increased number of health and social care visas issued under the last government’s immigration system, saying she wants British jobseekers to take up vacancies currently filled by immigrants. “I look at that situation and think there are loads of opportunities in the NHS that I want people who come into job centres to have the opportunity of, and I want people who would really see it as part of their ambition to work in the NHS to have that opportunity,” McGovern says.

McGovern’s employment enthusiasm is not new. Back in 2018, she wrote of former Labour prime minister Harold Wilson: “‘Unemployment,’ said Harold Wilson, ‘more than anything else, made me politically conscious.’ I am thinking about having his words tattooed on my forearm, so often do I think of them.”

So, has she got the tattoo? “No, I haven’t got any tattoos, but I definitely still agree with both Harold Wilson and my old self, in that when you experience what it’s like for a community to deal with economic failure, it doesn’t ever leave you.”

Employment is 1,000 per cent a progressive cause

Both Wilson and McGovern spent time growing up in Bromborough, Wirral; Wilson because his father at the time was desperate for a job – and it is from examples like that, she says, that she knows “the state of the labour market impacts people’s lives forever”.

On the theme of political history, McGovern looks back to the foundation of the welfare state and William Beveridge’s 1942 report for clarity on the two responsibilities the social security system requires of government.

“Firstly, to make sure that there’s a comprehensive health and reablement system, because don’t forget he’s writing this in the war,” she says. “He thought that government had a responsibility to provide a health system that would help get people back on their feet.”

“The second thing that he thought necessary for good social security was for government to bring about the circumstances of full and fulfilling employment. I would say for far too many people, that’s not the kind of labour market they experience.”

The employment minister can only offer “hope” that the state pension will remain for the next generation. “I very much fervently hope that the state pension is there for the next generation,” she tells The House. “That’s what a good social security system should do. It should help us cope with the ups and downs of life and be there for us when we need.”

McGovern highlights her time as a child during the 1980s deindustrialisation in the north of England and the Midlands, which “has had a very long-standing impact in the jobs mix that is available in that area” and yet the DWP “which is responsible for the people bit of economic growth, didn’t do anything locally”.

This is something that McGovern does not want to allow to happen again. She is willing to pursue further devolution if needed.

“What we’ve done is redesign our strategy… We’re working with local leaders to say, ‘You’ve got the most skin in the game here, either we will devolve this bit of employment support, or work with us and we all do it together’,” she says. “We’ve already devolved some things, Connect to Work, for example, and we’ll go further on that, I’m sure.”

“I want DWP to be part of every place’s plan for growth,” McGovern adds. She is unfailingly on-message with Labour’s drive for economic growth – even if she feels the need to remind her colleagues of its progressive roots.

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