Dr. Tom Boland:

Knowledge, information and training skills, or building up people's human capital, as the phrase goes. The difficulty with the system is that many of these systems are connected to conditionality. All kinds of things can be offered and we hope they will be helpful to people, but if they are told they must take up various training or educational resources or risk losing their welfare payment, that will skew people's economic decision-making and they will not be free to choose as they would in the moment. Alternatively, if there were a guarantee whereby as long as people stayed in line with the system, kept within their eligibility requirements and did not do anything fraudulent or anything that broke the conditions of eligibility, there would be a genuine entitlement. At the moment, it is a benefit dependent on behavioural compliance, which involves, for example, turning up at meetings. I cannot believe we do this to people for not turning up to meetings. We would not even treat children in school like this and suspend them for not turning up for school. The same is true of someone refusing to take a job. People having economic freedom to say a job is not for them is something we should preserve. We will find it will be of benefit in the long term because if we are patient and let people choose, they will end up in a better position.