19 March 2025

The Government’s Pathways to Work Green Paper sets out a renewed focus on work, personal responsibility, and system reform. As experts in integrated mental health and employment support, Twining-Hestia welcomes several important proposals:

• The Right to Try Work, helping people test employment without risking their benefits
• Greater integration between employment and health services, and
• Reference to personalised models like Individual Placement and Support (IPS) — an approach we already deliver with impact.

These are welcome steps — signalling a shift towards earlier, more tailored support. But reform must also ask a deeper question:

 

What are systems for, if not to care?

In our work supporting people with mental health challenges, unemployment, housing insecurity and trauma, we see daily that change doesn’t come from frameworks alone. It comes from trust, presence, and meaningful human relationships.

As services expand and modernise, we must ensure that what grows is not just capacity, but connection. That we don’t simply scale provision — but protect the human relationships that make it work. Models like Individual Placement Support (IPS) succeed not just because they move people into jobs — but because they begin by listening.

The Green Paper also includes a welcome emphasis on young people, recognising that too many fall between the cracks of education, mental health and work. But here too, the quality of support matters as much as access. If that support becomes transactional or overly target-driven, we risk responding with labels instead of listening.

The Green Paper also sits within a broader fiscal strategy — aiming to reduce welfare spending by £6 billion by 2029, largely through reducing caseloads and moving more people off out-of-work benefits. Encouragingly, proposals like the ‘Right to Try Work’ reflect a shift in tone, offering space to explore work without fear of penalty. This spirit must be safeguarded. If the drive for savings leads to greater conditionality or premature withdrawal of support, we risk undermining the trust, dignity and safety that results in lasting change and which reform must seek to protect.

To truly deliver on its promise, sustainable reform must go beyond structure and delivery — and invest in deeper relational foundations.

That means protecting models like IPS from being diluted in scale-driven commissioning. It means designing with lived experience, not just for it. And it means investing in the people behind the systems on whom success depends; staff, practitioners and those they support.

Because in the end, transformation is not just about pathways to work — but pathways to belonging.

Let’s build systems that meet people where they are, with trust, with care, and with the courage to hold complexity.