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Sunday 27 May 2012

How to spring the benefits trap

Fraser Nelson reports on how a revamp of the benefits system could finally end the scourge of Britain’s mass and hidden unemployment

Mr Duncan Smith has proposed a figure — that the income of the low-paid rises by at least 55 per cent of the extra money they earn. This figure can be higher or lower, but it ought to be an explicit aim of government policy. The so-called poverty threshold should be dismissed as meaningless, and a range of broader definitions — reaching right to the poorest in British society — should be incorporated.

This is, in a way, going back to Beveridge. In his original 1942 report, commissioned by Churchill, he warns that ‘idleness is not the same as want, but a separate evil which men do not escape by having an income. Idleness, even on an income, corrupts. The feeling of not being wanted demoralises.’ It is this, as much as the cost of welfare, which Mr Cameron needs to tackle if he is serious about the broken society. There is a public hunger for change. In dynamic benefit modelling, there is now agenda for change. All the Conservatives need do now is seize it.

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