Starmer’s intention for work and benefits should be applauded – but it must come with good jobs

Big Issue is built on work, literally and any other way you want. It’s the grain from which the whole thing has grown. Every person who has stood on the street to sell Big Issue has been working. They are also trading entrepreneurs – they buy for half the cover price and sell for cover price, that’s the income. They manage their micro-businesses.

So much of a sense of value and self-worth comes from the agency and control work brings. Countless men and women who have moved out of dire situations with this job have repeated this message. I’ve proudly stood on many platforms and stages representing Big Issue with our vendor colleagues when this has been the core line. It’s quite something that 33 years after launching, the foundational tenet has remained unshakeable.

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Many of Big Issue’s developments subsequently are framed by the sense of offering opportunity, or helping organisations offer opportunity. We are not a charity. We are a work organisation. This hardwired mentality is why as a group we look for growth, for example, in Big Issue Recruit. This is about helping people who were locked out of the job market find routes back, and also to help that route lead to sustainable, valuable work. 

It’s why when we set about launching the Breakthrough programme within our editorial department, it was focused on providing both income and lifelong, useful skills. We worked hard to make sure we offered chances to young, talented people from marginalised backgrounds, those with every bit as much talent as their born-luckier peers, but without the ladder of opportunity.

Class remains the great barrier to inclusion still deadweighting so many lives. We paid those young people who came to us, we paid transport (I learned how much that alone was a barrier), we paid attention to what they told us would help, and provided experience and expertise they could carry with them.

All this serves to explain why Big Issue welcomes any genuine, concerted governmental plan to get people into work. Working, when you are in a job you enjoy, changes everything. I’m very lucky to have this one. I couldn’t imagine not wanting to work. 

• Get Britain Working: What are Labour’s plans for the DWP, benefits and employment support?
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So Keir Starmer’s intention, though still to be fleshed out, to reset mentalities around work and benefits is to be applauded. His push to make it about the people rather than box-ticking stats is positive. It must come with a real drive to create good, sustainable jobs that people are fitted for and can excel in. We can’t simply tart up the precariat with nice new titles and claim the job is done. 

The wider training opportunities needed, and indeed the space for creative industries to flourish, is another complex jigsaw to assemble, and given  the value of creative industries to the economy, one that must be tackled. I’ve yet to hear the best plan. For instance, many British bands and musicians who rose in the 1980s said the ability to draw the dole giving them time to rehearse was invaluable, a resource not available now.

But equally, I’ve always loved the fact that the two great American composers of the late 20th century, Steve Reich and Philip Glass, ran a small removals company well into the 1970s in order to earn so they could keep finding time to create until their art carried them. That it wasn’t called Minimal Effort remains an annoyance. 

Starmer and his government must remain vigilant about demonising those who need the safety net of benefits. He’s making the right noises, moving away from the skiver agenda of the previous government. There are faults within the system to fix, as there are with any system. But this must not come at the expense of the most vulnerable in society. We’ve been down that road.

As he builds his new model, the PM could do worse than speak to Big Issue, an organisation with decades-long experience, and success, at making work pay, an understanding of the underlying challenges facing those from difficult backgrounds, and how we make pride in that work a key, almost tangible asset. 

Our door’s open, Keir. 

Paul McNamee is editor of the Big Issue. Read more of his columns here. Follow him on X.

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