Hardening attitudes towards welfare make reform an easier sell

Nick Kaplan

What a strange statement: ‘benefits are too low and cause hardship.’ How can being given something more than you would otherwise have ‘cause’ hardship. Surely it should say ‘fail to prevent hardship,’ and even then it is not just the lowly levels of benefits that prevent this but other factors like the lack of a job.

Moreover, is it not evidently true that there is ‘one law for the rich and one for the poor,’ that law stipulates that the rich should pay 40% top rate of tax and the poor should pay 20%, both of which, I may add, are too high.

Verity

"Towards A More Equal Society" equals enforced Communism under the heel of a jackboot.

JR

There are several factors at work here.

One is that people's responses are heavily influenced by their personal and their family's experiences. Therefore as the amount of people effected by unemployment decreases attitudes to those claiming welfare harden - for potentially right and wrong reasons.

Second, and related, when most people answer the 1st question posed they relate it to 'scroungers' not what they would actually get if they were unemployed.

There has been a huge decrease in the real value of unemployment benefit since the early 90s in particular. Even if you have worked for the last 20 years of your life all you will get is £60 JSA per week for 6 months and then you'll likely to be thrown off. It is empirically the least generous system in the western world except America.

There is no meaningful employment insurance scheme, just a very (by international standards) basic safety net. I think that is wrong and actually messes up work incentives - but it is a function of the anglo saxton (but not Canadian) disease of seeing means-tested benefits and public employment insurance as the same thing.

This in my view has been because of the perception bias identified above. People don't accurately perceive what they (the 'deserving') would get if they became unemployed.

You're now seeing lots of case studies on TV and in papers of people being shocked by how little they get.

What this will mean is that the trend in numbers above will reverse over the next few years as there is wider experience of mass unemployment and there will also be a generational impact as young people grow up in households with formerly employed adults.

What this would suggest to me is a more neuanced discussion of the means tested and contributory (insurance) sides of the benefit system.

Freud made no proposals in this area - ignoring the crucial fact that people who claim means tested benefits have much longer period of time on benefits. Therefore his proposals to extend 'confitionality' (what you have to do to continue to get your benfits) uniformally across the system was just plain illinformed and likely to waste money.

Tom Freeman

"I suspect the recession has caused attitudes to harden even further"

As the job losses mount, more and more people will at least have friends and relatives who are unemployed - and familiarity breed empathy. Do you think people will conclude that there's been a sudden outbreak of laziness rather than a collapse in demand?

And do you think the regular coverage of 'greedy' bankers' blunders (real or perceived), met by bailouts and bonuses, will make people think there isn't a different law for the rich?

Wily Trout

I suspect there would be a difference in attitudes towards welfare for those who had just lost a job and those who had never worked at all.

SJH

In the first two questions, the results suggest that Labour voters in 2006 are the same as Tory voters in 1987. Now there's a bitter pill for the Labour Old Guard. It would have been entertaining to quote at the unveiling of Lady Thatcher's portrait at Downing St.

cuffleyburgers

Some thoughtful comments, but there is an important point of principle involved.

The idea that money taken by force from taxpayers (because that's what it is) be used to try to seek some notional equality of outcome is wholly wrong headed.

It is against all the laws of natural justice, as well as being deeply negative to the development of the economy and, I would argue, to the development of mankind as an individual.

There will always be those who have more and others who have less. In a fair society, those who have more will be those who are smarter and work harder, and occasionally, luckier.

In an unfair society the talented and hardworking do not reap the rewards of their labours (do not forget the old saw, which is true in the majority of cases, that achievement is 10% inspiration, 90% perspiration).

Nobody on this thread I think will argue with the idea that a safety net is indispensable, and if possible, funded properly (ie not pay as you go).

Plenty would argue that current levels of taxation, largely in order to try to achieve this pernicious social engineering, are absolutely wrong. In the words of Talleyrand, not just wrong, but a mistake.

I wish the Tories would start making this point more vociferously.

The reason we are in the shit is because Brown has spent too much on unproductive stuff. He calls it investment. It isn't.

It reminds me of George Best's explanation of where the money had gone " well I spent about half of it on booze, fast cars and easy women, and just wasted the rest"

Brown doesn't even manage that well.

Plus another important point.

Not just levels of benefits paid, but what it costs to deliver them.

Can we see please, of the spending allocated to this section, how much actually reaches the beneficiaries, and how much is spent on inefficient delivery?

My guess is less than half actually benefits the individual.

Ie, streamline benefits delivery and increase amounts paid out, and still make a saving.

Stalin MacSporran

I've just been made redundant and despite the fact that my monthly income tax and NI deduction used to be about £3,000, I find that what I'm now entitled to in total is one third of that. About £1000 in JSA, and then after that I can just go hang.

I have a private redundancy insurance policy which for a £45 monthly premium pays out £1000 a month for two years. Thank God it does, but why is it that I pay this colossal amount in tax and then find it's all squandered on funding benefits for other people - who unlike me can claim them for life exactly because they've never contributed anything?

FF

I see from these figures that opinions amongst Conservative and Labour supporters have largely converged. The Conservatives will win the next election because electors believe them more competent, or it's time for a fresh team, not because of any policy differences.

Stephen

A few months ago I was sitting (as a JP) in the Youth Court. A perfectly able-bodied 17-year-old defendant was asked what he was doing with himself. "Oh," he said, "I'm waiting to go on benefit." Clearly for him (and, I feel sure, for others) it was a 'life-style choice'. Something must be done to stop benefits - paid for, as others have said, by people without much money - being such a choice. I wonder how well the system ensures that people on Job Seeker's Allowance really are looking for work.

Verity

I have suggested on Chicagoboyz.net that people on welfare should be disenfranchised for the duration in "The franchise and the career unemployed". Further up the page I wrote "Reclaiming the franchise ...part deux" and suggested that people who work for quangos dedicated to the hammering into government of permanent lefty programmes - the denizens of the quangoes - lose the franchise for the duration of the time they work there.

Donna

"One is that people's responses are heavily influenced by their personal and their family's experiences. Therefore as the amount of people effected by unemployment decreases attitudes to those claiming welfare harden - for potentially right and wrong reasons."

OR, as people working all the hours God sends look around their neighbourhoods and realise that the people next door are better off than they are - and living on benefits, they start to suspect they're being taken for a ride. And attitudes harden.

My mother works for a community arts centre, and all day long throughout the week it's hired by people practicing circus skills and suchlike. Why aren't they at work? Because they're all on benefits... and have more left in their pockets at the end of the month than she does.

HJ

I agree with everything that JR (above) says.

In fact, unemployment benefit (JSA) is shockingly ungenerous to those that have contributed all their working life.

On the other hand, we hear of families that have never worked getting free housing and £30,000 p.a. in various benefits. I suspect it is these benefits that people attitudes have hardened about - not true unemployment benefit.

David Bouvier

The biggest concern I think as others have expressed, that the system does not sufficiently discriminate between those who have fallen on hard times (help them) those who are profoundly disabled or ill (help them) and those who find it comfortable (**** them).

Of course designing a system that is generous but hard to game is difficult. Getting the entrenched benefit bureaucracy to implement it would be next to impossible. But the reason for dissatisfaction is clear.

FF

I agree, it's aggravating to see people who are perfectly capable of working for a living grasping any handout going. However, the proportion of the huge welfare bill going to these kinds of people is relatively small.

The bulk of benefits are paid to pensioners, the disabled and the older, not so healthy, working age people:

www.dwp.gov.uk/publications/dwp/2006/dr06/annexb

To seriously get the welfare bill down, you need to select from: poorer pensioners, longer working lives, and/or forcing older and somewhat ill or disabled people back to work.

Which is why it's so difficult to do. The Conservatives, who instinctively hate benefit payments, can't afford to upset the main recipients: older people, who are an important constituency for them.

JR

And to complete the circle in regard of FF and David's comments - no country in the world has found a medical that sorts the deserving disabled from the undeserving 'scroungers'.

For those that fetishise the United States it is worth recalling that the proportion of the population on income replacement disability benefits (the equvilent to our incapacity benefit) is higher in the USA than it is in the United Kingdom. That proportion has also been rising in the US where as it has been falling in the UK.

The previous republican administration was actually quite interested in the UK's policies in this area.