Suella Braverman’s welfare tirade exemplifies the current Tory pandering to baby boomer myths about social spending and moral decay. Interviewed by ITV News on Monday, the leadership candidate said:
I think we spend too much on welfare. There are too many people in this country who are of working age, who are of good health, and who are choosing to rely on benefits, on taxpayers’ money, on your money, my money, to get by. I don’t think there’s enough rigour. Universal Credit’s been a brilliant thing in stamping out the culture of dependency but there’s further we can go, there’s more we can do.
Since I’m about to be very critical, let’s begin in a spirit of charity. There are roughly 3.5 million people on out-of-work benefits during a labour shortage, or 5.3 million if incapacity-related benefit is included. Are there people ‘choosing to rely on benefits’ instead of working? Yes. One way we know this is because there is a problem of benefit fraud. Braverman doesn’t mention fraud and her word choice (‘culture of dependency’) suggests she is talking instead about a lack of willingness to work but let’s give her the benefit of the doubt. Fraud overpayments, which in 2019/20 stood at 1.4 per cent (£2.8 billion) of overall welfare expenditure, doubled to 2.9 per cent in the first year of the pandemic and held steady at three per cent (£6.5 billion) last year. So, benefit fraud is a contextually small but real problem.
Beyond that, Braverman’s thesis is hopelessly wrong. ‘We spend too much on welfare.’ The UK dedicates roughly one-fifth of its GDP to social spending. That places us 17th – roughly in the middle – of OECD countries. However, ‘social spending’ covers all social protection expenditure, not just working-age benefits, which is what people tend to think of when they talk about welfare.
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