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Welfare, Employment & Energy Demand
- 1. Welfare, Employment, and Energy Demand Dr Catherine Butler @drcbutler
- 2. Project Methods Document analysis Policy and stakeholder interviews Case study interviews • Analysis of policies, speeches, existing analyses and data • Develop narrative accounts of policy impact • Qualitative Interviews with policy, agencies, ngos, academics (e.g. DWP, DECC, Ofgem, Citizens advice bureau) • Cardiff, Bristol, York • Policy delivery roles (e.g. job centres, local authorities) • Biographical interviews with people affected by DWP Policy
- 4. Configuring energy demand • Work and employment • Housing and household demographics • Digitalization • Government Estates Policy Process
- 5. Work and DWP policy “Work is – and always will be – the best route out of poverty and with welfare reform, Universal Credit, tax cuts and the introduction of the National Living Wage, we are making sure that it always pays to work” (David Cameron, 2016) “Your work coach may refer you to these schemes… you may do work experience to add some career history to your CV”. (Back to Work Schemes, 2014) “Private sector employment over 26 million, unemployment rate at 5.1% and the claimant count at its lowest level in over 40 years”. (Priti Patel, 2016) Being employed helps promote recovery and rehabilitation and prevents the harmful physical, mental and social effects of long-term sickness absence. Fit for Work is designed to assist you as an employer in helping employees to get back to work as soon as is appropriate. (DWP, 2014)
- 6. Work and energy demand Worklessness – individual Getting into work - fit for work & employment coaches Practices – continuities and increases in energy demand e.g. work travel
- 7. Re-imagining work policy Workplace hubs in areas of high employment (Spurling and McMeekin, 2015) Practice change - materials, temporal ordering, meanings Re-imaginings
- 8. Housing and energy • DWP role in codifying particular ideas about living arrangements and energy use • Connections between DWP and DECC • Focus on fuel poverty – enabling access (rather than reducing dependencies) “From that point of view things like the Winter Fuel Payment and the Cold Weather Payment are hugely welcome and greatly appreciated. Older people will fight fairly furiously to keep them”. (Interviewee charity – policy) “In essence it’s a fuel poor commitment… So generally that involves investing in new gas infrastructure in areas of deprivation throughout the UK that are off gas. That includes the facilitation or installation of heating systems” (Interviewee – industry)
- 9. Housing and energy Housing – fuel poverty - financial support for energy needs Winter fuel and cold weather payments – gas boilers – grid connection Practices – continuities and in resource intensity and energy needs
- 10. Re-imagining housing policy Policies to reduce dependency on resources/needs for energy Practice change - materials, meanings Re-imaginings
- 11. Digitalisation and DWP process “you’ve got all these Job Centres and part of a strategy for reducing that is to consolidate Job Centres and move everything online” (interviewee policy DWP) Policies to transition benefits and pensions systems to online Practice change – role constituting the need for IT
- 12. Concluding reflections… • Requirements for energy constituted (in part) by policies and processes that cross multiple areas of government policy • Energy intensity and use addressed as an inter-governance issue • Reflexive engagement with the ways that different departments constitute need and could reshape configurations
Editor's Notes
- The research uses the policy area of welfare and employment as a case because it includes goals that have implications in terms of increasing energy demand (e.g. economic growth), reproducing particular temporal patterns of demand (e.g. through employment policies), and (possibilities for) reducing demand (e.g. across welfare policies, such as for housing). The project aims to offer insight into; 1) the role of non-energy policy in the constitution of energy use and needs; and 2) the tensions and opportunities that arise in using non-energy policy to transform energy demand.
- Interviews will explore experiences of developing and delivering policy – reflection on energy demand implications This will use outputs from WP1 to create questions and prompt materials designed to encourage reflection on how current policy and associated problem framings impact the dynamics of energy use and also its reduction. Based on these we will undertake analysis to identify and map key areas of conflict and opportunity in DWP policy with regards to reducing demand. This work package will create more detailed insights regarding the complexity and reality of policy in this area, including thinking through the varied ways in which national policy is applied and developed within different regional and socio-technical contexts – 1) What varying conceptions of policy goals and appropriate strategies are identifiable across policy, NGOs, and wider public and private institutions, as well as within different regions? 2) How are the implications of welfare and employment policy for energy demand viewed by different actors? 3) Which policy goals and associated strategies conflict with aims for reducing energy usage and what opportunities exist for synergy? Key outputs for this WP will be: further in-depth analysis of key policy areas in terms of their implications for demand and for conflicting outcomes; mapping of different actor perspectives and identification of alternative policy framings and approaches different to those embedded in official policy; initial highlighting of possible opportunities for future policy innovation. They will be themed according to key welfare and employment policy areas identified through WP 1&2 (e.g. welfare reform, employment, pensions and ageing) in order to focus discussion. The aim of this WP will be to reflexively engage with the main areas of conflict and the key opportunities for policy development to reduce energy demand. The outputs of WP 1&2 will form the basis for the materials and protocols that will be developed to provide a framework for discussion in this phase. Specific questions that the work package will address are: 1) How can policy-makers reconcile and negotiate conflicting policy objectives? 2) How can key welfare and employment goals be achieved in ways commensurate with reducing energy demand? 3) How might policy aims and approaches in this area be differently configured for change congruent with the objective of reducing energy demand?
- The Department of Work and Pensions (DWP) as the main policy body with responsibilities in this area. Stephen Crabb MP (Pembrokeshire) Iain Duncan Smith The department’s policy priorities span pensions and the ageing society, welfare policy and reform, poverty and social justice (most recently life chances strategy – launched by Cameron in Jan 2016 – due to come out this summer), and employment. As one of the largest government departments with connections across multiple other policy areas and the ‘highest spending’ of any Whitehall department, DWP represents an important and complex policy context. Recent changes in Government to Conservative/Liberal Coalition and majority Conservative have seen the department become the focus of extensive and major reforms. [cursory search of google images for DWP will give you a clear indications of this contentious nature] – IDS resigned saying that disability benefits proposed and quickly shelved in last budget were the reason – This makes welfare and employment a fast changing and politically contentious area of policy that provides scope for examining impacts of policy change as they unfold.
- Existing trends related to energy demand and work (commuting, high job densities, relationship between domestic-work energy use)
- DWP policies on work (benefits and worklessness; economic recovery and unemployment) – priti patel – minister of state for employment – DWP has a role in this area and currently policies are configured in terms of individuals deficits – of willingness to work, ability or skills
- So we can think about how work contributes quite fundamentally to the temporal and spatial patterning of everyday life and we can consider that ways that current patternings have important implications for energy demand Time travel surveys show increasing levels of travel related to work (Carlson-Kanyama and Linden, 1999) Other studies have shown how high job densities (the spatial concentration of work in particular places cities, city centres and business parks) contribute toward increasing the distances that are travelled for work (Boussauw et al. 2010) Allies with road development and other processes that favour car travel to mean that high levels of commuting are energy intensive work place energy use – impacts of being out at work versus domestic energy use in the home – so we have debates about the relative energy merits of different configurations of work say toward home working (Spurling and Mcmeekin, 2015) So we can pull together a range of different forms of evidence to argue that… As currently configured, ‘work’ contributes to particular patternings of demand in terms of peaks with regard to both domestic energy use and mobilities and are generative of new and increased mobilities as people move around nationally or even internationally for work. Changing the nature of work to be less energy intensive… not addressed through these policies or problemisations within this policy area which has major implications for work… The particular framing of problems of poverty in terms of work and as a problem of the individual or of increasing employment does (at least) not trouble these wider patterns and their associated social structures and thus can be argued to contribute to continuities in existing social structures associated with work and current patterns of demand toward high dependencies on energy use. But problems of poverty and welfare could equally be framed to include other structural and systemic issues, including access to work and workplaces, and issues associated with mobilities and travelling or moving to areas where workplaces are situated. Applying a lens of low carbon transition, they might be configured to challenge existing arrangements that contribute toward needs for mobilities, such as the separation between workplaces and homes and the social organisation of work more generally.
- By opening ways of understanding social problems it becomes possible to see and reimagine different possibilities for policy that more fundamentally challenge current structures pertaining to working patterns and forms of organisation that re-create high dependency on energy (e.g. in terms of mobilities). In their analysis of how practice theory might differently position arguments for policy change Spurling and McMeekin (2015) make an argument for the creation of ‘new spaces’ that could cater for new forms of interlocking between practices (of work, leisure, eating, commuting). They cite the examples of Liverpool Central Library and Kings Cross Hub as spaces which could facilitate abilities to work ‘from home’ in the same venue. In essence, one space becomes the working environment for multiple different employers and different forms of activity, and could diminish requirements for heightened mobilities while also addressing issues of energy intensity associated with high levels of home working. Though neither Kings Cross Hub or Liverpool Central Library are currently configured with sustainability ends in mind, or even the reconfiguration of work, they provide indications of what might be possible if we sought to change interlocking practices of working, commuting, eating, and socialising to be radically different and ultimately less energy intensive (Spurling and McMeekin, 2015). Allied with concerns about worklessness, we can imagine that such reconfigurations could be created to address issues of poverty and a whole range of social issues, such as social participation. At present, such reimaginings of work are evident in pockets of action typically associated with companies such as Google and high tech industries (The Economist, 2013), but they could be applied (not to all) but certainly to multiple forms of work and explicitly configured with sustainability, poverty, and wider issues of social participation at their core. Such a policy approach would direct efforts toward processes that challenge existing structures relating to energy consumption – and build in attentiveness to multiple different policy aims and wider social goals
- Housing, buildings and household demographics – cold weather payment and winter fuel payment – topping up the economic cost of energy rather than addressing the need for using that energy
- For example, living longer distances from places of work (Boussauw et al., 2010); inefficient and cold homes that require high resource use to heat; single occupancy numbers in bigger dwellings; and trends toward increasing levels of private renting (Dorling, 2014) allied with limited policy to address the efficiency of such homes.
- Already efforts to reimagine policy in this area but challenges related – move towards getting ECO to focus on fuel poor more and install more efficiency measures / retrofitting homes to reduce need for heat – rather than boilers or light bulbs and not targeted (but can’t change winter fuel payment or cold weather payment to free up money to support this) – and only fuel poor households not carbon emissions focused – policy void?
- Digitalisation – trends toward increasing level of energy use for digital and information tech – possibility of balancing potential for decreases in other energy uses (e.g. travel, buildings) but is this being genuinely addressed or analysed – Dwp – fully digitalise the benefits and pensions systems – no more paper forms being entered by teams of people but filling in online instead – closure of job centres DWP policies on moving to digital systems allied with closure of government buildings (reduction in estate)