Benefit Cheat (or Benefit Thief): A person deemed by the authorities to have broken the law whilst in receipt of benefits. This may include people who have discovered that it is almost impossible to survive on the dole and decided to earn a little more by doing some occasional cash-in-hand work. It also includes many administrative errors that are often blamed on claimants until the truth is uncovered. In 2008-9, overpayment as a result of administrative error was found in 2.6% of all JSA claims, compared with 2.6% due to alleged fraud. This ‘zero tolerance’ approach is based on the presumption that everyone wants to work - whatever the work is – and those who don’t are considered ‘parasitic free-loaders.’ It is also used to justify the criminalisation of the unemployed and the use of increasingly punitive and repressive measures against them.

Customer: A benefit claimant or a person in need of social protection who is treated by Jobcentre Plus and its private ‘partners’ as shoppers, or beggars, seeking a product that the former sell. The change in terms, from ‘claimant’ to ‘customer’ or ‘client’, reflects a cultural shift towards an increasing commercialisation of public services, where market values have become guidelines for social policy.

Flexible (as in Flexible New Deal, etc.): The flexibility of government to outsource social and other public services; the flexibility of private contractors to deliver services in a way that minimises costs and maximises profits; and the flexibility of employers to hire and fire. This is achieved through fewer regulations and often leads to a deterioration in services and less accountability.

Gateway, Pathway and other ways to work: Programmes designed to get people off benefits and into work as quickly as possible, no matter what the job is and how unsuitable for the claimant. They are mostly about hassling and intimidating participants so that they get sick of it all and accept whatever jobs the market throws up and are offered to them. The programmes are also becoming increasingly coercive, forcing claimants to go on compulsory courses, rather than having the freedom to choose between different options according to what best suits them (see also Voluntary and Workfare).

Jobseeker: A benefit claimant who is assumed by the Jobcentre to be fit for and willing to work (everyone is assumed to be willing to do waged work in a capitalist economy). This sometimes includes people with disabilities, single parents and students who are finding it increasingly difficult to stay on incapacity benefit, income support and so on.

Provider: A private company contracted by the DWP to do what Jobcentre Plus is meant to be doing. They enjoy increasingly more power in designing and implementing programmes in a way that maximises their profits, as well as in making important decisions about people’s eligibility for benefits and future prospects. Private providers are nowadays referred to by government officials as ‘partners’.

Support or Help: Programmes and schemes aimed at getting people off benefits and ready for jobs they do not necessarily want to do. This ‘help’ is often coercive and imposed on those receiving it, e.g. “supporting people on incapacity benefit to find meaningful work.” The result is a restructuring of the welfare system that prioritises employability (making someone ‘fit’ for certain types of work) over welfare. For example, Work and Pensions Secretary Yvette Cooper justified a new a £550m scheme that will “guarantee work or training” for young people with the following word: “the longer young people are unemployed, the harder it can be for them... and that’s why we are investing this extra help.”

Training: Short-term interventions by Jobcentre Plus or its private contractors to increase a claimant’s chances of finding a job out of those available on the market (increasing claimants’ ‘employability’). This may include sending them on a course they may not want or need, or having to ‘volunteer’ at a ‘work placement’ to gain experience that is not necessarily related to their stated ‘job goals’, or simply imposing new, ‘more realistic’ job goals on them.

Voluntary: Programmes under which benefit claimants are forced, after a certain period of time, to attend a community or youth centre, charity shop and the like, ostensibly to gain ‘work experience’ in retail, admin and other ‘skills’ that do not always relate to the actual job they are looking for. Participants are not covered by national minimum wage regulations and are only paid their normal benefit rate (less than a third of minimum wage), or a little more in some cases, despite doing 4- 6 hour shifts, 4 days a week, for up to 26 weeks. Many charity shops and so-called community or voluntary organisations used by Jobcentre Plus as ‘work placements’ depend on this constant flood of technically free labour from which to source their ‘volunteers’.

Workfare or Welfare-to-Work: A pilot scheme and part of the recent welfare reforms, under which people who have been on benefits for a certain period of time should be forced to do mandatory, unpaid work in order to continue receiving their benefits. Participants are expected to work 40-hour weeks for six months without pay at work placements chosen by private contractors that do not necessarily have to be related to claimants’ job goals. Workfare has been in use in the US since the 1990s but has failed to achieve what it was supposedly created for: to get unemployed people into regular paid work. The only result that such schemes may have achieved is turning welfare into an earned privilege rather than a right.