Can Welfare Work for Wales?

The most radical shake-up in social security benefits for a generation is already making its mark in Wales, the Bevan Foundation’s latest project reveals.

The Bevan Foundation’s latest project looks at how the social security system can be a better ‘fit’ with the needs and circumstances of people in Wales. We are launching it three years on from the so-called most radical shake-up of benefits in a generation.  As well as bringing in a whole new vocabulary, such as sanctions and bedroom tax, the reforms have substantially reshaped the make-up of claimants.  This short article highlights one of the areas of lack of ‘fit’.

Almost all discussion about benefits is couched in terms of unemployment and worklessness.

From ‘Benefits Street’ to the latest Welsh Government programme, the mantra is helping people into work. Yet the number of people claiming Job Seekers Allowance is surprisingly small, at just over 42,000 in May 2015.  They are just 14% of working age benefit claimants, and astonishingly there are nearly as many people claiming Carers Allowance as Job Seekers.

The big, big numbers of claimants are those receiving Employment and Support Allowance – about four times as many people get ESA as get JSA. And while the number of JSA claimants has tumbled, the number of ESA claimants is levelling out after an initial drop in the 2000s – there’s been no change since mid 2012.

Add to these figures the number of carers – up 26% in the last three years – and it’s clear that Wales’ problem is not so much one of unemployment but one of long-term illness and disability.

This is much more than an interesting statistic.

The shifts that have taken place mean that the many and various efforts to reduce unemployment are, at best, unlikely to make much impact on either the number of claimants or the benefit bill. Even worse, they mean that the challenges faced by disabled people and their carers are not being addressed in a significant way by government and others.  There are of course some small-scale programmes to help disabled people find work, but the kind of concerted and positive efforts that you might expect to see when there are about 163,000 disabled people claiming benefits are conspicuous by their absence.

This is just one example of the lack of ‘fit’ between the wider benefits system and circumstances in Wales, for which the Bevan Foundation will be seeking solutions over the next few months.

Victoria Winckler is Director of the Bevan Foundation. The project’s baseline report is available here.