Last update - 00:00 25/02/2007
The new welfare minister / Ten tips for Herzog
By Ruth Sinai
Over the past decade, except for a six-month period, the Ministry of Social Affairs has been in the hands of three religious parties. Isaac Herzog of the Labor Party has an advantage when he takes up his new post as minister. He is not obligated to any one section of voters among the weakest groups in the country - the Orthodox, the Arabs, residents of peripheral towns, and new immigrants. But he can work to improve the lot of all of them.
1. His most important task is to position the ministry as a body that initiates and leads social policy, and not to read about it in the newspaper after it has been set by the Finance Ministry and the Prime Minister's Office.
2. Herzog controls the National Insurance Institute, which in recent years has lost much of its independence and power to the treasury. He must demand that it stand at the forefront of the battle against poverty and make fundamental changes to the social safety net, including increasing some allowances.
3. Herzog is responsible for welfare services to more than a million children, seniors, people with disabilities, battered women and the poor. He must set clear policy in favor of the neo-liberal trend that distinguishes between groups deserving assistance such as people with disabilities and those who are not deserving such as single mothers. He must also make clear whether he is in favor of classic welfare policy that gives the right of social justice to every needy individual.
4. Herzog is getting a system most of whose laws have not been changed for decades. He must first legislate a basket of personal welfare services that every local authority will be obligated to provide.
5. Herzog must strengthen welfare departments in local authorities. Many of them are collapsing under their burden and are only able to put out fires.
6. He must also scrutinize the way they are funded. At present they get 75 percent of their money from the Social Affairs Ministry and make up the rest themselves. Stronger communities add more than 25 percent and provide better services. The weaker ones sometimes cannot provide their share and therefore cannot use the money allocated.
7. Most social services in Israel have been privatized. This is the time to stop and think about the future of the services that are still in the hands of the government and the local authorities. It is also time to think about failures to oversee privatized services and about the possibility of "nationalizing" some of the services that have been privatized.
8. In recent months the Prime Minister's Office has been furthering a process aimed at dividing responsibilities between it and charities, particularly as a lesson learned from the chaos during the Lebanon war last summer. Herzog should take the reins if possible.
9. Social workers will be among the first groups to knock on Herzog's door. In recent years attempts have been made to determine how many cases they should be handling, all of which have failed. The result is a case load that makes it impossible for them to identify populations at risk and prevent deterioration, leaving them only for damage control.
10. And if Herzog has any spare time, he should develop community services so children at risk will not be sent to residential schools, and deal with with urgent human resource problems and struggles within the Social Affairs Ministry.