Wales should be an exporter of progressive ideas

Last week the London branch of the Bevan Foundation hosted a discussion at Westminster on The Changing Face of Welfare in Wales. Dr Peter Kenway, Director of the New Policy Institute and Dr Victoria Winckler, Director of the Bevan Foundation spoke to a gathering of MPs, peers and Bevan Foundation members and supporters with their analysis of the impact of the UK government’s welfare reforms on Wales.

The reforms are designed, in Peter’s words to compel people to be economically active again, sooner and for longer. The reforms to date have been piecemeal and often based on untried systems, threatening potential disaster for those most dependent on benefits.

His contention was that the goal of governments over the last decade was to reduce worklessness, not to reduce poverty. The high levels of in-work poverty in Wales are evidence of the limitations of this approach.  Most couples with children need at least to be working one and a half jobs (60 hours a week) to make work pay and affordable childcare and other support to enable them to access the jobs that are available, is simply inadequate.  

Could the government be heading for a return to local poor support not seen for centuries? Peter called attention to the devolution of council tax benefit to local authorities – largely unnoticed but potentially significant. The changes to this benefit, received by more people than any other, makes modest savings in expenditure but potentially paves the way for a local rather than universal benefit system. It is apparent from a number of the changes that this is reform driven by the Treasury, not the Department of Work and Pensions.

For Victoria Winckler, the high levels of benefit recipients in Wales mean that the effects of the government’s reforms could be massive with 25% of the working age  population in receipt of some form of benefit and almost 50% in some communities, coupled with a depressed jobs market.

One of the marked effects of the welfare reforms is the effective transfer of responsibility from Westminster to Cardiff Bay for the impact of the cuts – perhaps not by devolving benefits but through the hidden costs to public services of such deep cuts in welfare support. The burden of the extra demand will fall on the Welsh Government, through pressure on housing, care services, emergency support and other services.

Victoria highlighted the challenges facing advice services in coping with the changes – both in guiding claimants through highly complex changes to benefit and support but crucially also in ensuring an urgent take-up of benefits so that recipients do not fall foul of future tightening of eligibility criteria. 

There is also very high risk of injustice where neighbours in identical circumstances could be receiving different levels of benefit support due to the complexity of implementation and the variable take up.

Peter concluded his remarks with an aspiration which we should all share:  that Wales, as the only part of the UK governed by a progressive government and with a majority of progressive MPs, should lead the way in developing policies for a truly empowering welfare system – helping people into work with decent pay and prospects, as the route out of dependency on benefits.  

Jeremy Miles