Politics
Job vacancies drop as Reform vows to punish unemployed people
On Monday 17 August, Reform UK announced a suite of new policies designed to target and punish sick, disabled, and unemployed people. The party’s plan to target unemployed people is based on the idea that there’s a significant number of voters who are just ‘layabouts’. In reality, most of the people who don’t work can’t work, and the rest are facing a particularly tough market – as the latest job vacancies show:
all while every single major party says it’s going to cut benefits for people that “refuse to work” https://t.co/TsAZeBlXwb
— mike ☭
On the attack (and ignoring the job vacancies chaos)
Reform’s Making Welfare Work policy would completely abolish Personal Independence Payments (PIP). As we reported, this is an odd move for Reform to make, given that many Reform voters are PIP claimants. It’s one thing to pretend the system is full of ‘scroungers’ and to promise a crackdown; it’s quite another to directly target every PIP claimant in the country.
I canvassed a disabled voter in Crook recently who told me she was voting Reform because the first time she applied for PIP it was rejected. "I had to fight damn hard for my PIP" she told me, "but foreigners get it for nothing".
I hope people like her become better informed. https://t.co/l5emWDM0QD
— Sam Rushworth MP (@SamJRushworth) August 16, 2026
Predictably, Reform’s policy is likely to result in a massive increase in child poverty. PIP payments help sick and disabled people juggle part-time work with their ongoing health issues. Removing PIP might push some people into full-time work, but it will also force many into full-time unemployment.
The new policy will mandate that anyone who’s on Universal Credit for 12 months will have to complete 20 hours of community work a year. As the Standard reported:
Robert Jenrick, the party’s Treasury spokesperson, said the long-term unemployed would have to work 20 hours a week scrubbing high streets, carrying out minor repairs and “beautifying neglected places”.
The scheme would be run by local councils and those who do not accept work placements will have their funding cut.
This really betrays two things:
- It’s entirely possible to just create job vacancies – including jobs which benefit the local area.
- For whatever reason, some voters will only get behind such a move if there’s an element of punishment to it.
And all this is especially bad when you factor in the current unavailability of jobs.
There are now 2.5 unemployed people for every job opening in the UK. https://t.co/dAkoigaAgb pic.twitter.com/tKpis4jAmE
— Bull Theory (@BullTheoryio) August 18, 2026
Job hunt
As the BBC reported, the number of job vacancies:
has fallen to its lowest level in more than five years as smaller businesses cut back on recruitment, official figures indicate.
Vacancy numbers fell over the May-to-July period to 707,000, according to the Office for National Statistics (ONS), which said small firms were citing labour and operating costs as reasons for scaling back hiring.
Energy costs have risen since the Iran war began, and companies have also said that increases in National Insurance and the minimum wage have made it more expensive to employ staff.
While it’s essential that the minimum wage rises to meet the cost of living, it can cause issues in a Cost-of-Living Crisis. The problem is that even with wages going up a bit, most people are still feeling the pinch. When that happens, people spend less; when people spend less, businesses attract fewer customers; when businesses attract fewer customers, they employ fewer people.
It’s a vicious circle, in other words. And it’s not one we’re going to get out of by punishing people who are out of work.
Reform says it will save £50bn a year by abolishing PIP. That’s £50bn which was being sent to PIP claimants who were in turn spending it on food, clothes, and essentials. Now ask yourself this: will pulling £50bn out of the economy be good for businesses who are already struggling, or will it be an absolute disaster?
Job seekers vs job vacancies
The BBC article carries the following interview with a job seeker:
Aaron Diangienda told BBC Newsbeat he has been looking for a role for more than a year.
“I’ve been trying my best, just making sure that I am finding the correct stuff to suit me and keeping on going with [the job hunt]”, he says.
Under Reform, Diangienda would have been put on the scheme to carry out labour for benefits – i.e. he’d be working for less than the minimum wage. Would that really help him find work?
Another job seeker said this:
For Jasmine Walker, it’s been a case of applying for jobs “literally anywhere and everywhere”.
The 24-year-old says she has been looking for marketing jobs since she graduated from university in July, and estimates she has applied for more than 300 roles so far.
“It’s a bit frustrating because you’re researching and practising how to make your CV and applications pristine, and yet you still can’t get anywhere with that,” says Walker.
Imagine if applying for 100+ jobs wasn’t enough, and suddenly you had to work 20 hours a week just to maintain your benefits – benefits which already failed to ensure any quality of life.
You can be mad about how things are, but you can’t pretend Reform’s plan will fix anything.
Farage wants 300k unemployed scrubbing the streets for free or starve. Call it community service. It’s the workhouse rebranded. Class war from the top. Always.
20 hours unpaid labour a week or lose your benefits. That’s Reform’s big idea. Taxpayers get paid. Claimants get… — Spirit Of Attlee (@SpiritOfAttlee) August 17, 2026
Costly
Another thing to note is that Reform’s plan is going to create whole new layers of bureaucracy and enforcement for local councils. Who’s going to pay for all this? Because the policy isn’t going to generate cash as far as we’ve been told. And this is supposed to be part of a plan to save money.
It’s almost like Reform hasn’t thought this one through.
Featured image via PA
By Willem Moore
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