Unemployed people who cannot speak English will have to show they are learning the language or face losing benefits, the government has announced.
About 40,000 jobless people say their poor English is a barrier to finding employment – and £4.5m is spent on translators in job centres.
Ministers say this money would be better spent on teaching them English.
Welfare minister Jim Murphy said the measures, to come into effect in April, would benefit Britain and individuals.
Mr Murphy told a Work Foundation seminar that it is “unacceptable” that ethnic minorities in Britain earn on average a third less than their white counterparts.
Redress the balance
On current rates, ethnic minority employment rates will not reach the national average until workers currently joining the labour market reach retirement age.
“This is a social injustice in our society which is not only bad for individuals, families and their communities, but is a barrier against social cohesion and is bad for Britain,” Mr Murphy said. “On top of that, as ethnic minorities grow to constitute a much greater proportion in the working age population in the decade to come, it is absolutely critical that everyone is able to access the labour market and can prosper within it.”
Some 15% of members of ethnic minorities cite language difficulties as a barrier to work, the welfare minister said.
“That’s potentially 40,000 people being denied the opportunity to work because they do not have the language skills to get a job.”
He wants more focus put on English language tuition.
He said: “We must utilise the resources we have to redress the balance: to put the emphasis not just on translating language to claim a benefit, but to teaching language to get a job.”
New guidelines
From April, new guidelines will require job centres in England to focus on encouraging the take-up of English courses.
And a new programme, backed by £14m of state money, is offering 15,000 places on courses in basic skills and employability training – including language skills – with the Learning and Skills Council.
But an educational think tank which recently produced a critical report into how the government provides English classes to immigrants, attacked the proposals as risky.
The National Institute of Adult Continuing Education (Niace) said the English tuition system was struggling to meet demand from migrants who wanted to learn the language.
Alastair Thomson of Niace agreed that investing in tuition was better than translation – but said there were too few classes and teachers. He criticised separate government proposals to charge for some English classes from September.
“It would be premature if changes were to be introduced before there are enough properly-qualified teachers to meet the demand and bizarre if we start teaching people while they are unemployed but then do not have affordable courses for them to progress onto once they find work.
“We urge the government to ensure that all the implications of these reforms have been considered before moving too quickly.”
Benefit dependency
Liberal Democrat work and pensions spokesman David Laws said it was “ironic” that the government was seeking to introduce the changes while it was “cutting back” classes “for those without English as a first language”. “What is happening here seems to be the perfect example of unjoined-up government,” he added.
Meanwhile, a study by the think-tank Civitas suggests a third of households in the UK rely on benefits for their main income, according to the Daily Telegraph.
“What has been happening in the last few years is unemployment has fallen but the number of people receiving incapacity benefits has been going up a little bit,” the report’s author David Green told the BBC. “But there’s also been a huge increase in people receiving what’s now called working tax credit. So you’ve got a mixture of pure benefit dependency and what you might call in-work benefit dependency.”
i think its a grerat idea, also i think it should be at work…………. i work in a very dangerous indrustry {rope access} we have had so many issue with foreginers , who cant speak English, but have had to do health and safety features, which we had also do , and there was reading and writing envovled. so how the fuck did they pass? then they would just walk into a danger area , with no entry signs all over it, you would shout at them and they would just look blankly at you, as maybe a brick or peice of metal was crashing down towards them,
