Dutch city of Utrecht to experiment with a universal, unconditional income

Louis Dore in The Independent

The Dutch city of Utrecht will start an experiment which hopes to determine whether society works effectively with universal, unconditional income introduced.

The city has paired up with the local university to establish whether the concept of 'basic income' can work in real life, and plans to begin the experiment at the end of the summer holidays.

Basic income is a universal, unconditional form of payment to individuals, which covers their living costs. The concept is to allow people to choose to work more flexible hours in a less regimented society, allowing more time for care, volunteering and study.

The Netherlands as a country is no stranger to less traditional work environments - it has the highest proportion of part time workers in the EU, 46.1 per cent. However, Utrecht's experiment with welfare is expected to be the first of its kind in the country.

Alderman for Work and Income Victor Everhardt told DeStad Utrecht: "One group will have compensation and consideration for an allowance, another group with a basic income without rules and of course a control group which adhere to the current rules."

"Our data shows that less than 1.5 percent abuse the welfare, but, before we get into all kinds of principled debate about whether we should or should not enter, we need to first examine if basic income even really works.

"What happens if someone gets a monthly amount without rules and controls? Will someone sitting passively at home or do people develop themselves and provide a meaningful contribution to our society?"

The city is also planning to talk to other municipalities about setting up similar experiments, including Nijmegen, Wageningen, Tilburg and Groningen, awaiting permission from The Hague in order to do so. 

‘Cleansing the stock’ and other ways governments talk about human beings

Those in power don’t speak of ‘people’ or ‘killing’ – it helps them do their job. And we are picking up their dehumanising euphemisms

• 
• • George Monbiot
  • The Guardian, Tuesday 21 October 2014 15.25 BST

An Israeli strike on a UN school in the northern Gaza Strip in which two children were killed and a dozen other people were injured. 'Mowing the lawn'? Photograph: Mohammed Abed/AFP/Getty Images

To blot people out of existence first you must blot them from your mind. Then you can persuade yourself that what you are doing is moral and necessary. Today this isn’t difficult. Those who act without compassion can draw upon a system of thought and language whose purpose is to shield them – and blind us – to the consequences.

The contention by Lord Freud, a minister in the UK’s Department of Work and Pensions, that disabled people are “not worth the full wage” isn’t the worst thing he’s alleged to have said. I say “alleged” because what my ears tell me is contested by Hansard, the official parliamentary record. During a debate in the House of Lords, he appeared to describe the changing number of disabled people likely to receive the employment and support allowance as a “bulge of, effectively, stock”. After a furious response by the people he was talking about, this was transcribed by Hansard as“stopped”, rendering the sentence meaningless. I’ve listened to the word several times on the parliamentary video. Like others, I struggle to hear it as anything but “stock”.

If we’re right, he is not the only person at his department who uses this term. Its website describes disabled people entering the government’s work programme for between three and six months as “3/6Mth stock”. Perhaps this makes sense when you remember that they are a source of profit for the companies running the programme. The department’s delivery plan recommends using “credit reference agency data to cleanse the stock of fraud and error”. To cleanse the stock: remember that.

Human beings – by which I mean those anthropoid creatures who do not necessarily receive social security – often live in families. But benefit claimants live in “benefit units”, defined by the government as “an adult plus their spouse (if applicable) plus any dependent children living in the household”. On the bright side, if you die while on a government work programme, you’ll be officially declared a “completer”. Which must be a relief.

A dehumanising system requires a dehumanising language. So familiar and pervasive has this language become that it has soaked almost unnoticed into our lives. Those who do have jobs are also described by the function they deliver to capital. These days they are widely known as “human resources”.

The living world is discussed in similar terms. Nature is “natural capital”. Ecological processes are ecosystem services, because their only purpose is to serve us. Hills, forests and rivers are described in government reports as “green infrastructure”. Wildlife and habitats are “asset classes” in an “ecosystems market”. Fish populations are invariably described as “stocks”, as if they exist only as movable assets from which wealth can be extracted – like disabled recipients of social security. The linguistic downgrading of human life and the natural world fuses in a word a Norwegian health trust used to characterise the patients on its waiting list: biomass.

Those who kill for a living employ similar terms. Israeli military commanders described the massacre of 2,100 Palestinians, most of whom were civilians (including 500 children), in Gaza this summer as “mowing the lawn”. It’s not original. Seeking to justify Barack Obama’s drone war in Pakistan (which has so far killed 2,300 people, only 4% of whom have since been named as members of al-Qaida), Obama’s counter-terrorism adviser Bruce Riedel explained that “you’ve got to mow the lawn all the time. The minute you stop mowing, the grass is going to grow back.” The director of the CIA, John Brennan, claimed that with “surgical precision” his drones “eliminate the cancerous tumour called an al-Qaida terrorist while limiting damage to the tissue around it”. Those who operate the drones describe their victims as bug splats.

During its attack on the Iraqi city of Falluja in November 2004, the US army used white phosphorus to kill or maim people taking shelter in houses or trenches. White phosphorus is fat-soluble. Even small crumbs of it bore through living tissue on contact. It destroys mucous membranes, blinding people and ripping up their lungs. Its use as a weapon is banned by the Chemical Weapons Convention, as the US army knows: one of its battle books observes that “it is against the law of land warfare to employ WP against personnel targets” (personnel targets, by the way, are human beings). But never mind all that. The army has developed a technique it calls Shake ‘n Bake: flush people out with phosphorus, then kill them with high explosives. Shake ‘n Bake is a product made by Kraft Foods for coating meat with breadcrumbs before cooking it.

Terms such as these are designed to replace mental images of death and mutilation with images of something else. Others, such as “collateral damage” (dead or wounded civilians), “kinetic activity” (shooting and bombing), “compounds” (homes) and “extraordinary rendition” (kidnapping and torture by states), are intended to prevent the formation of any mental pictures at all. If you can’t see what is being discussed, you will struggle to grasp the implications. The clearest example is “neutralising”, which neutralises the act of killing it describes.

I doubt many people could kill and wound if their language accurately represented what they were doing. It is notable that those who are most enthusiastic about waging war are the least able to describe what they are talking about without resorting to metaphor and euphemism. Few people have nightmares about squashing insects or mowing the lawn.

The media, instead of challenging public figures to say kill when they mean kill, and people when they mean people, repeats these evasions. Uncontested, their sanitised, trivialised, belittling terms seep into our own mouths, until we also talk about “operatives” or “human capital” or “illegal aliens” without stopping to consider how those words resonate and what they permit us not to see. I wouldn’t be surprised if there are dehumanising metaphors in this article that I have failed to spot.

If we wish to reclaim public life from the small number of people who have captured it, we must also reclaim the language in which it is expressed. To know what we are talking about: this, in more than one sense, is the task of those who want a better world.

JK Rowling attacks government as out of touch with poor people

Harry Potter author criticises 'skivers v strivers' rhetoric and calls on coalition to help people into work instead of imposing cuts

• Haroon Siddique
• theguardian.com, Wednesday 18 September 2013 12.53 BST

JK Rowling – a struggling single mother when she wrote the first Harry Potter book – called for investment to help single parents work their way out of poverty. Photograph: Lefteris Pitarakis/AP

JK Rowling has said the government is out of touch with poor people and should focus on helping them into work rather than stigmatising them and hitting them with more cuts.

Writing in her role as president of the single parent support group Gingerbread, the Harry Potter author criticised the coalition's welfare reforms and the characterisation of people as either strivers or skivers.

"The government mantra that work is the best route out of poverty is ringing increasingly hollow, with nearly one in three children whose single parent works part-time still growing up in poverty," she said. "Rather than focusing on ever more austerity measures, it's investment in single parent employment that will allow single parents to work their own way out of poverty and secure real savings from the welfare bill."

The attack by Rowling comes almost five years to the day that she donated £1m to Labour on the eve of its 2008 annual conference, criticising the Tory message that "a childless, dual-income, but married couple is more deserving of a financial pat on the head than those struggling, as I once was, to keep their families afloat in difficult times". It follows the announcement that the Tories will unveil plans for a tax break for married couples in this year's autumn statement.

The award-winning author was herself a single mother struggling to make ends meet when she wrote the first of her best-selling books in the 1990s. She said that her self-esteem was tested at the time and that single parents were still being stigmatised.

"I find the language of 'skivers versus strivers' particularly offensive when it comes to single parents, who are already working around the clock to care for their children," she wrote on the Gingerbread website. "Such rhetoric drains confidence and self-esteem from those who desperately want, as I did, to get back into the job market."

Office for National Statistics figures show that 59% of single parents in the UK are already in work. Gingerbread says the government could save £436m a year by getting just 5% more into employment.

Rowling wrote that to help single parents back into work, the government should focus on affordable childcare and training, make employers embrace flexible hours and take "a long, hard look at low pay".

Referring to a comment by the welfare minister and former investment banker Lord Freud last year that "people who are poorer should be prepared to take the biggest risks – they've got least to lose", Rowling wrote that it showed "a profound disconnect with people struggling to keep their heads above water".

She said more single parent families would lose than gain under the government's flagship universal credit payment, including many in work, because of gaps in childcare provision for many of the poorest families and a loss of support for single parents under 25.

The current benefits system takes into account whether you have a child in determining your personal allowance but under the reforms a single parent under 25 will receive the same rate of allowance as an under-25 without any children.

You can starve on benefits in this country

It's hard to say to a nation that hates benefit claimants: 'Your perception is wrong. The system is flawed,' says Jack Monroe in the first of a new series called Austerity Bites

• 
• • Jack Monroe
  • The Guardian, Wednesday 18 September 2013

A Trussell Trust food bank … missed or delayed benefit payments account for most referrals. Photograph: Sophia Evans for the Guardian

How can anyone possibly "starve on benefits"? "Something doesn't add up." Responses to my blog and comment pieces about life on the breadline are filled with these kinds of musings. After all, everyone has an anecdote about a mate or a neighbour who has all the latest gadgets and designer sportswear for their children, "and they've been on benefits since, like, for ever".

Yet you don't know to look at someone whether their trainers came from JD Sports or Oxfam, or if they wash their hair in Charles Worthington or Sainsbury's baby shampoo. You don't know whether the young man in the town centre with a takeaway in the middle of the day is a night-shift worker or a student or, heaven forbid, has the day off work. Not everyone works Monday to Friday, 9-5. Someone needs to staff the checkouts at night so the 9-5ers can pick up a bottle of Bolly after work. The 999 control room staff work day and night shifts across all of the emergency services. And someone needs to clean those supermarkets and those offices.

You don't know whether the young woman walking down the street with a black baby and a lanky blond nine-year-old on her arm is a foster carer or a "slut". I was that young woman taking the kids to the shops to give my parents, who were foster carers, five minutes' peace. I was always met with whispers and stares, because people judge and people assume. One woman told me that I "should have kept my legs shut". I told her that I was a virgin, and, funnily enough, she didn't have a comeback.

So, in an attempt to explain again and again that life is not as black and white, and the "free money" is not as easy to come by as certain newspapers would have you believe, I find myself a stuck record, plastering my personal circumstances across the media in an effort to make people understand.

When I first needed to claim housing benefit, the payments were delayed, leaving me in arrears. I had to involve my MP and the town clerk, but the rent arrears were already piling up. When payments are delayed, bills bounce, leaving you with hundreds of pounds in bank charges, on top of your rent arrears. When you go back to work, you need to pay for a month's fees in advance to secure your child's nursery place. The money allocated to benefits is for housing, food and bills. But when it is not paid in full, or not paid on time, when you have to wait 11 weeks for it due to "administrative backlog", the money also has to pay for late payment fees, bank charges and rent arrears.

This mess is not unique to me. According to the Trussell Trust, the most cited reason for referral to food banks is delayed and missed benefit payments. Meaning, yes, Mr Gove, you were half right that food bank use is down to financial mismanagement, but it is the financial mismanagement of the Department for Work and Pensions, and the financial mismanagement of local authorities that administer housing benefit. Not quite the fault of the "feckless poor".

While it is easy for people to pontificate on what I could have done differently (taken my former employer to a tribunal would be first on my list if I could relive the past two years) or berate my "absent" friends and family (to whom I was too embarrassed and humiliated to admit how bad things were) – it is much harder to put your head above the parapet and say to a nation that hates benefit claimants: "Your perception is wrong. The system is flawed. People are getting hurt. Something has to change."

The middle class loves the welfare state – but the poor hate it, Why?

By Brendan O'Neill in The Telegraph Politics Last updated: April 2nd, 2013

Comfortably off liberals are always bemused to discover that the working classes and poor do not share their love of the welfare state. Where impeccably middle-class students will bravely spend bitterly cold evenings defending NHS hospitals threatened with closure, and highly paid columnists will devote an entire afternoon to writing tear-drenched articles about the beggary the poor will be plunged into if they lose their benefits, the less well off themselves are decidedly sniffy about the welfare state. Some even seem to hate it. According to recent opinion polls, 64 per cent of Brits think the benefits system "doesn't work"; 78 per cent think that if an unemployed person turns down a job, his benefits should be trimmed; and 84 per cent believe there should be tougher work-capability tests for disabled people. Apparently such views are more entrenched among the poor than among the comfortable.

From these findings, we might deduce that many of the unmoneyed will have given an approving nod to the changes made to the welfare system by Iain Duncan Smith yesterday. And this drives pro-welfare writers and activists absolutely nuts. Why, they wail, are those on the breadline so down about glorious postwar welfarism? In yesterday's Guardian, a columnist did some very public handwringing over the weird fact that anti-welfare "noise" always gets louder "as you head into the most disadvantaged parts of society". This echoes a recent Guardian editorial which bemoaned the way ordinary Brits have become "more Scrooge-like" towards welfare claimants. Or behold the poor, bamboozled Joseph Rowntree researcher who was horrified to discover recently that the less well-off are not "pro-welfare".

Pity the poor, unthanked middle-class warrior for welfare rights! Why is it always his kind alone that must attend demos defending jobseekers' allowance while the fat, fickle jobseekers themselves stay at home, probably watching Jeremy Kyle? Why is it always left to the well-educated activist to adorn her Twitter page with banners saying "I heart the NHS" while the poorest beneficiaries of the NHS fill their Twitterfeeds with tripe about Kim Kardashian's baby bump? These unloved fighters for the right of poor folk to receive money and comfort from the state have come up with all sorts of theories to explain the poor's failure to get off their lardy derrières and defend welfarism. Their favourite is the idea that poor folk, being a bit dim and all, have been brainwashed by "scrounger"-hating tabloid newspapers. As a result of political-class diktat and media messaging, these dimwits have apparently "internalised a Thatcherite every-man-for-himself mentality".

In truth, the real dimwittery in this debate is among the confused and angry middle-class warriors for welfarism. They have simply failed, and failed miserably, to reckon with one of the iron laws of modern politics – which is that the more reliant you are on the welfare state, the more experience you have of it, the less you love it. And by extension, the further removed you are from the welfare state, the less experience you have of it, then the more you can fantasise about its virtues and grow to love it – or at least to love an imaginary version of it derived from watching Casualty and reading Polly Toynbee columns.

If the less well-off really are more hostile to welfarism than the bien-pensant classes, that's perfectly logical. It's because they know the soul-deadening and community-dividing impact that blanket welfarism can have (Editor's comment - Not Sure if this is true). It's because they know that being sustained by the state is a miserable existence compared with being busy, independent, self-reliant. It's because they know that NHS hospitals, especially in the poorer parts of Britain, are far from the greatest human creations since the pyramids, but rather are soulless institutions in which families are relentlessly hectored about their lifestyle choices and eating habits, and the old are treated like animals. It's because they know that the offering of "incapacity" benefits to the long-term unemployed encourages these people to see themselves as sick rather than as having been let down by society. It's because they know that workless communities propped up by ceaseless welfare-state intervention tend to become ghost towns, bereft of individual initiative and lacking in social solidarity. After all, if an individual's or family's every financial and therapeutic need is being met by faraway faceless bureaucrats, what earthly need is there for them to strike up relationships within their own communities, to get together with others in the pursuit of daily happiness or a better future? Welfarism, by coaxing the poor man into the all-encompassing bosom of the state, alienates him from his neighbour. Who could love such a system, save those cushioned sections of society that are lucky enough never to have been mangled by it?

So, all you well-to-do campaigners for the protection or expansion of the welfare state, there is no need to be bemused by the poor's indifference to your battle. For what you love about welfarism – that it insulates the so-called "vulnerable" from the chaotic, often unfair world of the market and struggle and work – is precisely what the poor hate about it (Editor's comment - Am not sure of this conclusion about the poor).

10 lies we're told about welfare

Has someone made Jim Royle a policy adviser? Millions are being made poorer while we're fobbed off with porkies

• 
• • Ricky Tomlinson
  • guardian.co.uk, Tuesday 2 April 2013 14.47 BST

Protesters against the proposed 'bedroom tax' gather outside Downing Street in London. Photograph: Matthew Lloyd/Getty Images

Welfare reform, my arse. Has Jim Royle parked his chair, feet up, telly on, in the corridors between the Treasury and the Department for Work and Pensions? Employing him as adviser can be the only explanation for the utter rubbish that boils forth from this government on welfare.

Who else could have dreamed up the bedroom tax, a policy so stupid it forces people to leave their homes and drag themselves around the country in search of nonexistent one-bedroom flats?

That one has to be the result of too many hours in front of Jeremy Kyle (no offence) with the heating on full and a can of super-strength lager. It seems as if that is how this government views ordinary people: feckless and useless – poor, because they brought it on themselves, deliberately.

Maybe the cabinet is confused. Twenty-three millionaires in the one room can get like that. But do you know what, enough. Let's call this government's welfare policy what it is – wrong, nasty and dishonest.

Off the top of my head, I can list 10 porkies they are spinning to justify the latest stage of their attack on our 70-year-old welfare state.

1. Benefits are too generous

Really? Could you live on £53 a week as Iain Duncan Smith is claiming he could if he had to? Then imagine handing back 14% of this because the government deems you have a "spare room". Could you find the money to pay towards council tax and still afford to eat at the end of the week?

2. Benefits are going up

They're not. A 1% "uprating" cap is really a cut. Inflation is at least 2.7% . Essentials like food, fuel and transport are all up by at least that, in many cases far more. Benefits are quickly falling behind the cost of living.

3. Jobs are out there, if people look

Where? Unemployment rose last month and is at 2.5 million, with one million youngsters out of work. When Costa Coffee advertised eight jobs, 1,701 applied.

4. The bedroom tax won't hit army families or foster carers

Yes it will. Perhaps most cruel of all, the tax will not apply to foster families who look after one kid. If you foster siblings, then tough. But these kids are often the hardest to place. Thanks to George Osborne and IDS, their chances just got worse. And even if your son or daughter is in barracks in Afghanistan, then don't expect peace of mind as the government still has to come clean on plans for their bedroom.

5. Social tenants can downsize

Really, where? Councils sold their properties – and Osborne wants them to sell what's left. Housing associations built for families. In Hull, there are 5,500 people told to chase 70 one-bedroom properties.

6. Housing benefit is the problem

In fact it's rental costs. Private rents shot up by an average of £300 last year. No wonder 5 million people need housing benefits, but they don't keep a penny. It all goes to landlords. 

7. Claimants are pulling a fast one

No. Less than 1% of the welfare budget is lost to fraud. But tax avoidance and evasion is estimated to run to £120bn.

8. It's those teenage single mums

An easy target. Yet only 2% of single mums are teenagers. And most single mums, at least 59%, work.

9. We're doing this for the next generation

No you're not. The government's admitted at least 200,000 more children will be pushed deeper into poverty because of the welfare changes.

10. Welfare reforms are just about benefit cuts

Wrong. The attack on our welfare state is hitting a whole range of services – privatising the NHS, winding up legal aid for people in debt and closing SureStart centres and libraries. All this will make life poorer for every community.

Some call these myths. I call them lies. We are being told lies about who caused this crisis and lied to about the best way out of it. But I know one thing to be true: this government's polices will make millions of people poorer and more afraid. To do that when you do not have to, when there are other options, is obscene. That's why I'm backing union Unite'sOurWelfareWorks campaign in its efforts to help highlight the truth about our welfare state.

Welfare fraud is a drop in the ocean compared to tax avoidance

As Joanne Gibbons' case shows, benefit underpayments save us more than 'cheats' cost us. We need to target the real villains

• 
• • James Ball
  • guardian.co.uk, Sunday 3 February 2013 12.06 GMT

Had Gibbons claimed the benefits to which she was entitled she could have collected double her 'fraudulent' claims. Photograph: Peter Macdiarmid/Getty Images

 

Joanne Gibbons was sentenced to community service for claiming income support while holding down two paid jobs. Through accumulated payments of £66-a-week, the court heard, she collected £3,140 to which she wasn't entitled.

Predictably, the Daily Mail is outraged. But here's the strange twist: had Gibbons claimed the benefits to which she was actually entitled, she could have collected £130 a week through family tax credits and child benefit. In total, Gibbons' fraudulent claims cost the taxpayer around £3,100 less than claiming what she was actually entitled to.

It's the reaction to Gibbons' claims which are particularly noteworthy. Matthew Sinclair, chief executive of the Taxpayers' Alliance – an organisation rarely troubled by wealthy people's tax avoidance – tells the Mail:

"It beggars belief that somebody going to the lengths of making fraudulent claims would have actually received more in benefits had they been honest.

"It just goes to show that the current system is broken and doesn't provide the right incentives for claimants to go back to work."

This quote suggests Sinclair is perhaps even less numerate than the "benefits cheat" he's deriding. Gibbons was entitled to £130 a week in legitimate benefits, while working on two low-income jobs. This total was higher than the £66 a week out-of-work benefit she was improperly claiming (though some of the £130 a week could be claimed in or out of work).

In what sense is a system which tops up low wages a disincentive to work? Sinclair appears lost in lazy rhetoric – an all-too-common failing when it comes to chastising the millions of families, most of whom with at least one adult in work, who rely on the benefit system.

The British public believe benefit fraud is a big problem. A recent poll by the TUC showed people believe 27% of the welfare budget is fraudulently claimed.

The reality is very different. Last year, 0.7% of total benefit expenditure was overpaid due to fraud, according to the DWP's official estimates. This totalled £1.2bn over the year. Nor is fraud getting worse – even against a background of benefit cuts and long-term unemployment fraud made up a smaller share of the welfare bill last year than it did in 2010/11 or 2009/10.

Indeed, welfare fraud is smaller than accidental overpayments due to error, which totalled £2.2bn (£1.4bn of which due to official error). It's also smaller than the amount of money underpaid to those entitled to it: £1.3bn.

In other words, if we wiped out benefit fraud tomorrow – but also eliminated the errors that deprive people of money to which they are entitled – the welfare bill would grow, not shrink.

In the context of the UK's £700bn public spending, and £150bn+ welfare bill (of which pensions and in-work benefits make up the substantial majority), benefit fraud is a relatively small revenue loss. But how does it compare to another textbook villain: tax avoidance?

Put simply, it is comparatively tiny. HMRC consistently estimates the UK's tax gap – the gap between what HMRC thinks it should receive versus what it actually gets – at more than £30bn per year. Others estimate this is far, far higher.

Of this, even conservative estimates suggest around a sixth – £5bn a year – is lost through tax avoidance, tricks to reduce tax bills which fall within the letter (if not spirit) of the law, but often fall outside what's regarded as acceptable by the public. A further sixth, at least, is estimated to be due to wholesale tax evasion: simply illegally not paying the tax that's owed.

These conservative estimates alone outweigh benefit fraud by a factor of eight, but this time not done in tens (or at most hundreds) of pounds per week by people struggling to get by; but rather by people who could afford to pay more, but prefer not to.

Benefit underpayments save us more money than benefit fraud costs us. By the most conservative estimates, tax avoidance and tax evasion outweighs benefit fraud eightfold. But the constant target of argument – "scroungers", "benefit cheats", and more, isn't the well-heeled middle classes who knock a little off their tax return, or the high-rollers with elaborate offshore schemes.

Instead, it's those at the bottom of society – for the government, perhaps, it makes it easier to sell the public swingeing cuts to the safety net that millions of families, both in and out of work, rely on to get by. For the Mail, it's easier to sell papers by buying into the easy preconceptions of their readers than bothering to challenge them.

Unfortunately, all too often, that's a view the Labour party – and others on the left – seem all too happy to go along with. If we must have national villains, surely we can do better than these?

Unemployed bussed in to steward river pageant

Coachloads of jobless people brought in to work unpaid on river pageant as part of Work Programme

Call for inquiry into use of unpaid jobseekers as jubilee stewards

• Shiv Malik
• guardian.co.uk, Monday 4 June 2012 22.29 BST

Some of those hired as stewards had to spend the night before the pageant sleeping under London Bridge.

A group of long-term unemployed jobseekers were bussed into London to work as unpaid stewards during the diamond jubilee celebrations and told to sleep under London Bridge before working on the river pageant.

Up to 30 jobseekers and another 50 people on apprentice wages were taken to London by coach from Bristol, Bath and Plymouth as part of the government's Work Programme.

Two jobseekers, who did not want to be identified in case they lost their benefits, said they had to camp under London Bridge the night before the pageant. They told the Guardian they had to change into security gear in public, had no access to toilets for 24 hours, and were taken to a swampy campsite outside London after working a 14-hour shift in the pouring rain on the banks of the Thames on Sunday.

One young worker said she was on duty between London Bridge and Tower Bridge during the £12m river spectacle of a 1,000-boat flotilla and members of the Royal family sail by . She said that the security firm Close Protection UK, which won a stewarding contract for the jubilee events, gave her a plastic see-through poncho and a high-visibility jacket for protection against the rain.

Close Protection UK confirmed that it was using up to 30 unpaid staff and 50 apprentices, who were paid £2.80 an hour, for the three-day event in London. A spokesman said the unpaid work was a trial for paid roles at the Olympics, which it had also won a contract to staff. Unpaid staff were expected to work two days out of the three-day holiday.

The firm said it had spent considerable resources on training and equipment that stewards could keep and that the experience was voluntary and did not affect jobseekers keeping their benefits.

The woman said that people were picked up at Bristol at 11pm on Saturday and arrived in London at 3am on Sunday. "We all got off the coach and we were stranded on the side of the road for 20 minutes until they came back and told us all to follow them," she said. "We followed them under London Bridge and that's where they told us to camp out for the night … It was raining and freezing."

A 30-year-old steward told the Guardian that the conditions under the bridge were "cold and wet and we were told to get our head down [to sleep]". He said that it was impossible to pitch a tent because of the concrete floor.

The woman said they were woken at 5.30am and supplied with boots, combat trousers and polo shirts. She said: "They had told the ladies we were getting ready in a minibus around the corner and I went to the minibus and they had failed to open it so it was locked. I waited around to find someone to unlock it, and all of the other girls were coming down trying to get ready and no one was bothering to come down to unlock [it], so some of us, including me, were getting undressed in public in the freezing cold and rain." The men are understood to have changed under the bridge.

The female steward said that after the royal pageant, the group travelled by tube to a campsite in Theydon Bois, Essex, where some had to pitch their tents in the dark.

She said: "London was supposed to be a nice experience, but they left us in the rain. They couldn't give a crap … No one is supposed to be treated like that, [working] for free. I don't want to be treated where I have to sleep under a bridge and wait for food." The male steward said: "It was the worst experience I've ever had. I've had many a job, and many a bad job, but this one was the worst."

Both stewards said they were originally told they would be paid. But when they got to the coach on Saturday night, they said, they were told that the work would be unpaid and that if they did not accept it they would not be considered for well-paid work at the Olympics.

Molly Prince, managing director of Close Protection UK, said in a statement: "We take the welfare of our staff and apprentices very seriously indeed.

"The staff travelling to the jubilee are completing their training and being assessed on the job for NVQ Level 2 in spectator safety after having completed all the knowledge requirements in the classroom and some previous work experience. It is essential that they are assessed in a live work environment in order to complete their chosen qualifications.

"The nature of festival and event work is such that we often travel sleeping on coaches through the night with an early morning pre-event start – it is the nature of the business … It's hard work and not for the faint-hearted.

"We had staff travel from several locations and some arrived earlier than others at the meeting point, which I believe was London Bridge, which was why some had to hang around. This is an unfortunate set of circumstances but not lack of care on the part of CPUK."

The company said it had spent up to £220 on sponsoring security training licences for each participant and that boots and combat trousers cost more than £100.

The charity Tomorrow's People, which set up the placements at Close Protection under the work programme, said it would review the situation, but stressed that unpaid work was valuable and made people more employable. Tomorrow's People is one of eight youth charities that were supported in the Guardian and Observer's Christmas appeal last year.

Abi Levitt, director of development services at the charity, said: "We have been unable to verify the accuracy of the situation with either the people on work experience or the business concerned.

"We will undertake a review of the situation as matter of urgency. Tomorrow's People believes strongly in the value of work experience in helping people to build the skills, confidence and CV they need to get and keep a job and we have an exemplary record going back nearly 30 years for our work with the long-term unemployed."