The welfare trap

Rhoda Klapp

It's like that because we made it like that. It stays like that because we will it to, consciously or not. Guilt is the weapon that keeps it going. Not even John Humphreys can do anything about it, and one wonders just how much he and his ilk have contributed to the guilt over the years with his Today programme 'something must be done' and 'more money is needed'.

David Ossitt

"The system, not the people, is to blame."

Wrong; the system and the people are to blame.

Ruairidh

You're preaching to the choir here I think. Most people on the right are of a pragmatic mind and understand the issue and appreciate the counter productive impact some measures can have. Left wingers (sweeping generalisation alert!) are more ideological, policies seem to be based more in what they think is right and ethical rather than what might actually work. So when presented with perverse outcomes year after year they struggle to let go because in their hearts the policy feels right.

Nickle

The money has run out. Even the borrowing pot has run out.

Then there are all the debts hidden off the books just like Maddoff.

When the electorate wise up to that, and that they are paying taxes for a gold plated system, but get the dregs of a service, its going to blow. It will come from the middle class, not the feckless.

Then the feckless will have the tap turned off, and it will get very ugly.

Boyders

I do agree, the way the media has backed the funding of a welfare life style on the grounds of compassion has had a lot to do with where we are now. Who could argue without looking like a heartless bastard etc...

John Humphrys has more responsibility than I suspect he would accept. Having said that maybe him speaking out now will have more of an impact on the reality of the situation.

R2-D2

Very true, Fraser. The main issue in your point 1. is not the low wage, but the high effective marginal tax rate, which can easily be more than 100%. That is a direct and inevitable consequence of targeted, means-tested benefits. Make benefits less targeted, and poor people could afford to work again.

pete-s

This is caused by the socialist 'throw money at the problem solution' thinking about the likely unintended consequences does not show on their radar.

Not thinking it through is at the base of a lot of the U.K's problems.

BrianSJ

Yes to R2-D2. The LibDem proposal to raise the income tax threshold has to be a big part of the answer.

Austin Barry

“It’s a very unglamorous topic: when we put it in the cover of The Spectator we took a huge sales hit.”

I’m not sure that it was the lack of glamour that sank the issue, rather that the whole subject, immutable and with its sub-text of scroungers, mad immigration policies and the creeping Dystopian quality of life in our cities, is hardly likely to have attracted hard-pressed, sleep-deprived commuters trudging past a newsstand on their way to an interminable groundhog day of work. It would just profoundly incense them.

The issue might have sold more had the cover consisted of a “The Coming War on Welfare Scroungers” strapline and an illustration of tooled-up, masked and blacked-suited SAS-types rappelling down the balconies of some frightful South London sink estate.

You have to give people hope.

Verity

Austin Barry - I like your scenario.

Occasional Ostrich

What sensible employer would want to be burdened with someone with an attitude like the woman in paragraph 5? I wouldn't. Whatever changes are made to the benefit rules they're going to do precious little until that regrettably prevalent attitude is changed.

Ed P

Although the welfare problem predates Labour's glorious reign, they made it ten times worse. I have renamed them The Welfare Party (and urge others to refer to them similarly), as they no longer represent working people and have no right to be associated with real working people at all.

toni

I didn't see the documentary, but out of interest I clicked onto Middlesbrough and then looked for jobs that an unskilled male (known here as scrounger) might take up - did you?

In construction I found 11 jobs for supervisors, planners, consultants etc.
Labourer’s and highways produced a crossing warden. Perhaps you can produce more Fraser?

Humphreys is in the same age bracket of those who will tell you that during the forties and fifties you walked out of a job in the morning and took up a new one in the afternoon – there were plenty of jobs to choose from right up until when?...Thatcher’s era? When all those steel/coal/manufacturing/factory type jobs started to disappear; the jobs that helped to mop up those with no qualifications.

@Nickle What the electorate are wising up to is this:

“FTSE director pay up 49% “
“Directors of biggest companies enjoy rise in average earnings to £2.7m.”

And in a town near me 1700 people applied for 300 jobs in a new supermarket, what a shower of feckless lazy bastards eh?

cpt

Is the answer not to pay a portion of benefits to small Businesses rather than the long term Unemployed, so that they can afford to employ more people? People on Income Support would be then better off by working rather than getting caught in the trap and the long term benefit would be the re-introduction of the 'will to work"

James

"Would you work from 8 to 7 for £5 an hour? I think that’d be disgusting"

Umm, yes, I would, actually. I'm trying to build my own business at the moment, but I wouldn't mind the extra income of paid employment to help me along - even at minimum wage.

What's more, there are others who would be happy to work for the same or less!

tom jones

It was a brilliant documentary. Obviously I don't want the American soup kitchens over here for the unemployed, but people should have to earn their benefits. At a time when the public sector is (rightly) being cut back, surely it makes sense to say to those on benefits - "you'll help fill the void or you won't get your benefits." It might sound harsh, but I reckon that if people are told to either clean the streets Monday-Friday to earn their benefits then that'll soon spur them on to get a proper job and earn a real wage. They'll think "why work all these hours for £50 a week when I can do the same amount of hours for £200?"

Baron

You may think it’s boasting, Baron’s bigheadedness, it’s neither, the poorly educated Slav wasn’t alone doing it, when he arrived here in the 60s (married, a six month old baby), for the first two years or so he had three jobs (a day one, another one four evenings each week, another on weekends, both on Saturday, Sunday), it wasn’t possible to live on what the single day job paid, it did him no harm, he’s still around boring you.

The entitlement culture will be hard to break, it will be the one that will bury us all, Nickle’s right, it can only end up in bloody ugliness, and it will.

CrystalShadow

I found that documentary predictably biased. You can make anything sound reasonable if you frame it the right way.
For instance, at the beginning they make mention of how many job vacancies there are... And thus reach the conclusion that anyone saying there aren't jobs around is wrong...
But... While true in one sense, it is highly misleading when faced with anything from 800,000 to 4 million people who don't work. (Depending on how you work out the figures).

Are there jobs in this country? Of course there are.

But how many?

How many new vacancies become available in, say... A week. Of these, how many are filled? How many people go off benefits as a result? How many new claims in that same period?

Unless the number of actual vacancies is at least roughly at the same level as the number of unemployed, saying "There are jobs" is just an easy way of shifting the blame and making people look bad.

It's all well and good to tell people to 'try harder', but all the effort in the world won't help if there are, say, 4 people fighting over every job.

Now, yes, the benefits system has serious problems. But even with the more obvious problems, the way this is presented can influence the conclusions.

This documentary was continuously pulling subtle tricks like this to forward a very specific agenda. Yet whether this is in any way a good idea, or simply represents a very specific political ideology without regard to the consequences...

As for the overall motivations behind this, I'm not particularly convinced those espousing the innate benefit of insisting everyone capable of it should work is really in touch with the realities of the modern world, or where it seems to be headed in the future.
However, that is a vastly different subject, and it is only indirectly related to this one.

daniel maris

Nickle -

The money has run out? Really?? Not for the chief execs of UK business who enjoyed a 49% increase in their remuneration last year...

When you read that sort of figure the pure cant of "we are all in this together" is revealed.

Work should be a right in a civilised society - and also a reasonable expectation. We need to disconnect welfare from leisure. There is nothing wrong with welfare, there is everything wrong in every way from paying people to be idle.

We need to put in place some obvious parameters:

1. You work for your welfare payments.

2. You can't just keep having children and expect the state to pay for them. Put a limit of two kids on that.

AliC

7 Children, not worked for 20 years. How in Gods name can this woman justify this? My partner and I have worked continually for 20 years. We can't even afford to run a car, or replace the carpets... The sense of entitlement of these people beggars belief! If she has no income why has she pumped out 7 kids? Get a job you lazy grasping woman.

Robert Christopher

David Ossitt on October 28th, 2011 @ 3:44pm
"The system, not the people, is to blame."

Wrong; the system and the people are to blame.

In fact: we ARE the system!

JohnBUK

I believe one of the issues could be the lack of "local" accountability. By that I mean someone on benefits does not see those people providing the funds, they're all faceless and probably miles away and "rich". Years ago the cost of "charitable benefits fell on the local community and thus there was a connection between the two parties. Less liklehood of "cheating" as both parties could ascertain the truth fairly quickly.
I would suggest we try and get nearer that state of affairs together with tax changes to bring about more responsibility.

Cynic

Methinks the reason the woman had a large family is because she was paid more for every sprog she popped. Isn't it time there were no more handouts after two?

JohnPage

Fraser has omitted the opinion poll findings about the public's attitudes - politicians seeking change aren't in a vacuum (see the BBC website). The interview with immigrant family in Islington was also telling.

The programme's account US benefits was fuzzy and partly contradicted itself (did claimants have to do work or look for work?).

I'd only give it 6/10. Certainly not "excellent".

JaneS

Perhaps Mr Humphries could be encouraged to do a follow up looking at the GPs who certify millions of people unfit to work ; and the Court system which encourages a relaxed construction of the Welfare legislation. These decisions are made by professionals on the public pay roll earning salaries they would not command in the commercial market.What do they care if millions are on the scrap heap.

Edward McLaughlin

Nickle

"It will come from the middle class, not the feckless."

No fecklessness within the middle class then? Conversely, are we to understand that there is no worthwhile contribution made by the working class?

anxiouswarrior

no surely the most single important topics are the real criminals in the square mile,the banks,the corrupt political system, the rip off utilty companies and the evil right wing press

caerdydd-ian

one of the reasons that John Humphries was able to work his way out of Splott, is that he was able to go the the legendry (in South Wales) "Cardiff High School for Boys",located a reasonably short walk from his home.

JohnPage

Another failing in the programme: the US is seen as harsh. So why not look at well off EU countries where welfare provision might be expected to be more comparable to the UK?

Most wage-replacement benefits in Spain—which top out at about 1,400 ($2,000) monthly for workers with two children—run out or significantly decline by 24 months, compared with three to five years in some countries, including Belgium and Denmark.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970204505304577003864242042958.html

Looking at limited benefits in countries like Denmark or Belgium which aren't the Great Satan would have been interesting television. But the programme wasn't that enquiring.

toni

John Page. There was a report on the news last night about Spain. About families whose time on benefits had run out, they had lost their homes because they couldn't pay their mortgage, and were relying on charity food parcels to feed their children. Do you really think they'd allow themselves to sink to such depths of deprivation if there was work available?

Peter From Maidstone

Unemployment in Maidstone is presently 2,447.

Migrants receiving NI numbers, and therefore taking up jobs in Maidstone was 1,960 in just the last year.

Some of the unemployed have been unemployed longer than a year.

Other resident migrants received NI numbers before current year.

Thefore it would seem reasonable to conclude that all of the unemployment in Maidstone is actually due to migration.

ALL OF THE UNEMPLOYMENT IN MAIDSTONE IS DUE TO MIGRANTS

The worst factor is that youth unemployment in Maidstone has rise by 350 in the last month, while migrant NI cards issued is higher in Maidstone than elsewhere in Kent and has risen 36% in the last year, mostly Bulgarians and Poles.

Immigration is THE major issue we face. How can we do anything about unemployment if the jobs created are taken by those who are not British, and especially those jobs our children should be taking up.

Peter From Maidstone

Just 5 posts moderated today and it is 13:30. Makes it less and less interesting to even visit the CH.

chevron

"a single mother of seven children who hadnâ™t worked for 20 years."
Ok, so don't have 7 children. But, now that she has those children, it is probably best for everyone that she does not work, but (hopefully) supervises them so they do not end up being asbo recipients. And Christ, 7 children? That is worse than any employment.

@ toni "I clicked onto Middlesbrough and then looked for jobs that an unskilled male (known here as scrounger) might take up"

A good and obvious point to make: there are simply very few jobs out there in much of the country. I have recently spent two years unemployed, being unable to relocate to a less remote area. Despite several years of postgraduate studies at a top university, I was unable to secure any work at all: everything from council paper pushers, to areas I was directly qualified in, to unskilled farm labour (I was actually told more than once that I needed to speak a Balkans language to mix in with the rest of the workforce). It is not for want of trying that (some, and I would suggest most) unemployed are stuck without work long-term.

And what have I done? I'm now back at a university, getting another degree and training for a specific niche market, in which I really hope I get a little bit more luck. I'm fortunate to be able to afford this route, even if I resent spending another year effectively wasting my existing competencies; one cannot blame those who do not have the means to attain such a 'Plan B'.

chevron

I have a nasty feeling I wrote Balkan. Naturally, I meant Baltic :)

toni

PfM..."if the jobs created are taken by those who are not British, and especially those jobs our children should be taking up"

The jobs are not "taken by" immigrants, it's the employers decision to offer the jobs to immigrants instead of Brits.
They are the culprits, have a go at them.

Peter From Maidstone

toni (another first-namer pops up), it is against the law for an employer to give a job to a British person as a British person. Successive Governments have made it so. The same Governments, including this one, who are allowing all the towns of England, including Maidstone, to be so overwhelmed by migrants that there are no jobs for their children.

Mr. Davies

I'm sick of this prejudice against M.E. (CFS). Anyone who has it or knows someone that does will think differently.

toni

PfM. My comment should have read:
The jobs are not "taken by" migrants, it's the employers decision to offer the jobs to migrants instead of Brits.
They are the culprits, have a go at them.

Muhammad Haque

Fraser Nelson's praise of the BBC is a gem! Even if the rest of his utterances for a nasty society are left out, that event warrants a place in the record books. For it is almost unheard of for an aggressive propagandist for the agenda for the return to a nasty society in Britain to be anything but deeply contemptuous of the BBC. I have been a longer standing critics of the BBC than Fraser Nelson has been anywhere near a newsstand.
But the fact that I know what actually goes on in Tower Hamlets and neither Fraser Nelson nor his "new BBC hero" John Humphreys does is a telling vindication of my diagnosis of Society as based on almost 40 years of empirical engagement.
And that diagnosis is that the mainstream media is not controlled by those who are on the side of the truth.
Nor are the mainstream politicians.
And that both are openly brazenly working to generate new poverty to replace the denials and injustices that have been overcome. Like all their anti-society âœheroes❠the attackers of the targets of poverty creation and new disenfranchisement will not be anywhere around to pick up the pieces when society gets worse and the costs of the breakdown soar to levels that are still not being admitted.

Ruby Duck

Peter from Maidstone : " How can we do anything about unemployment if the jobs created are taken by those who are not British, and especially those jobs our children should be taking up."

PfM is 100% right. Outsourcing destroyed my life in the late 90s. It didn't stop me working, but it stopped be working in the job that I was skilled in and loved.

Is there no legal case that can be made ? Should we no be able to sue the government, under the human rights act, if its actions limit the ability of the native population to find work ?

MikeD

Here's an alternative more accurate view of reality by another commentator;
How the BBC and others fail to understand housing benefit

by Mary Tracy
October 31, 2011 at 10:55 am

Last Thursday night I had the unenviable experience of watching ‘The Future of the Welfare State‘, with John Humphrys.

If you haven’t seen it, do yourself a favour: don’t. Watch Tory propaganda instead; the two are barely indistinguishable.

I want to use a small point made during the programme to make my own point on a topic I know too well: housing benefit, and the Tory plan to push poor people out of London.

Humphrys and his production crew managed to find one of those Daily Mail benefit cases that tick all the boxes. An Ecuadorian family, all of them with brown skin, living in a big-ish flat in Islington, apparently unable to utter a single word of English.

The father and sole earner of the family was a cleaner. His wages wouldn’t have been enough to pay the rent for such a ‘palace’, so, as a person on low income, he is entitled to housing benefit to help him bridge the gap between what his employers feel like paying him and what he actually needs to live.

Humphrys asked the man something along the lines of ‘whether he feels the state should subsidise his flat’.

But here is where Humphrys gets it wrong. The state isn’t subsidising Mr Housing Benefit Recipient: the state is actually subsidising Mr Cleaning Company Who Employs Mr Housing Benefit Recipient because he cannot cough up the wages that his employee would need to live on.

This is an unashamed transfer of public funds into private landlord’s and private companies pockets.

It is up to employers to pay enough for employees to live, that is what wages are all about. If employers don’t feel generous enough, then employees need to go somewhere else. Low wages, no employees. At least that’s what would happen in a functioning ‘free market’.

Instead, the state steps in and gives Mr Housing Benefit Recipient enough money to pay his rent.

Notice that neither him nor his family get to ‘enjoy’ this wealth, for having a roof above their heads is non negotiable; it is a pre requisite for any worker to go and do their jobs.

If private companies were to pay living wages, it would make their profits sink. See? Housing benefit neatly translates into private profit.

This is the reason why the Welfare State doesn’t “work”. Benefits are supposed to be there to provide workers with a safety net; they were never meant to compensate for low wages simply because employers cannot be bothered to pay more.

But don’t expect Humphrys to tell you that. I suspect he’s too educated.