On Tuesday it was tax credits. And now the Public Accounts Committee delivers a boot to another of Gordon Brown’s pet projects – the New Deal. The findings should (but won’t?) put pay to those claims that the UK’s achieved “full employment”. Some six million people now live in homes where “no-one has a job and ‘benefits are a way of life’”. Put another way: one-in-six households are now benefit dependent.
And then there are the pots and pots of taxpayers’ cash that have been used to reach this unedifying position. Those households cost some £12.7 billion a year in public money. One New Deal scheme found jobs for only 61 people in a year, at a cost of £1,100 each.
The brand of welfare reform championed by David Freud gets more people into work and at a lower cost. At last the Government is shifting to this approach, but maybe – as Melanie Phillips notes – we shouldn’t expect much from them after a decade of disappointment over welfare.
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