IFS: Osborne should come clean on his welfare cuts

George Osborne this morning said that people should judge him on his track record, as he refused to set out the detail of welfare cuts planned in the next parliament. The IFS’s Paul Johnson didn’t seem to think this was good enough when he gave his verdict on the Budget today. He said:

‘It is now almost two years since he announced his intention of cutting welfare spending by £12bn. Since then the main announcement has been the plan not to cut anything from the main pensioner benefits. We have been told about no more than £2bn of the planned cuts to working age benefits. And remember apparently the “plan” is to have those £12bn of cuts in place by 2017-18. It is time we knew more about what they might actually involve.’

There is also a risk for the Tories that they don’t do the welfare cuts in the right way when they come to them. Voters are largely very supportive of cutting benefits: it comes second only to overseas aid in the list of things people say the government should cut spending on most. At the weekend, 36 per cent of voters named welfare as one of the areas that should be cut the most (66 per cent named aid). Pollsters say the £26,000 benefit cap is one of the most popular policies they’ve ever asked people about. But the ‘bedroom tax’, a poorly-designed cut that has attracted very negative media coverage, does not poll as well. In this YouGov poll from 2014, 49 per cent said they opposed the measure, which cuts the benefits of people living in social homes with more bedrooms than they need and takes no accounts of their efforts or ability to move to smaller accommodation. That had risen from 38 per cent opposition in March 2013.

If the £12bn of cuts ends up including ones that are slapdash and ill-considered, then the Tories might find that the public doesn’t support them as wholeheartedly as Osborne assumes. The British public has a dogged sense of fairness: it doesn’t like people being given handouts they don’t deserve, but equally it doesn’t reward politicians for being vindictive towards the poor. Whatever it is that Osborne has up his sleeve on welfare, he’ll need to make sure that it’s carefully thought-through before he produces it.