A week of welfare reform

This week’s arguments about welfare reform are some of the most depressing, ill–informed and ill-judged I have ever heard.  

Last weekend, various left groups got out their placards after realising that people would be hard hit by the “bedroom tax”.  Not only was this ridiculously late – where were they when the welfare reform bill went through Parliament? – but it seems doomed to fail. “What do we want? A spare bedroom! When do we want it? Now!” doesn’t feel like a popular cause. And why just the bedroom tax? Where are the protestors about Council Tax benefit? About changes to the Social Found?

By the end of the week, the welfare system was being blamed for much more than turfing people out of their homes. It was responsible, it was said, for the manslaughter of six children.  It wasn’t a violent, manipulative man who killed his children, we are supposed to believe, but the £13.40 a week child benefit.  This would be laughable pub-speak if they weren’t the words of the Chancellor of the Exchequer and two mass circulation newspapers. We have reached a new and unspeakable low in the demonisation of claimants.

Facts and any other connection with reality have been abandoned in this war of words.

It’s conveniently forgotten that a very small proportion of families on out-of-work benefits – only about 3 per cent – have five or more children, according to Channel 4’s Factcheck blog, about 40,000 families in the UK.

It’s also conveniently forgotten that, vicious though the cuts to housing benefit are, they are by no means the only changes to benefits to hit hard. The issue isn’t just about the “bedroom tax”, or indeed any of the other individual changes to affect claimants, but the reshaping of the welfare state to something much smaller and meaner than anything we have seen since 1945.

It’s conveniently overlooked that by far the biggest part of the so-called welfare bill is state pensions and pension credit, at 52% of the total, not the skivers.  The so-called skivers – the unemployed and the incapacitated – account for less than a tenth (8.5%) of benefit expenditure. (Figures for 2011/12 for GB and are from DWP.)

And last, but not least, the underlying reasons for the rising working-age benefit bill are brushed aside. That benefit claims are rising because unemployment stands at 2.5 million, because rents are soaring and because wages are failing to keep up with inflation is written out of the narrative.   Yet these are the reasons – not people having 11 children or not getting up in the morning – that the social security system is in crisis.

The turn that the debate over so-called welfare has taken this week demeans us all.

Neither the placard-waving nor the blame-game add anything to our understanding.  Nor do they find any solutions to the underlying question of how a civilized society supports those who cannot support themselves.

Victoria Winckler is Director of the Bevan Foundation.