I can’t fault Keir Starmer for his piece in the Mail on Sunday today promising that Labour will crack down on idlers and benefit cheats. But does anyone really believe that Labour is really going to get on top of the explosion in out of work benefits?
Whenever the Conservatives announced plans to trim the benefits bill, Labour accused them of heartlessness
‘Don’t get me wrong’, the Prime Minister writes. ‘We will crack down hard on anyone who tries to game the system… There will be a zero-tolerance approach to these criminals.’ Work and pensions secretary Liz Kendall is due to announce on Tuesday measures which will supposedly achieve this and cut the £137 billion a year welfare bill.
Trouble is that whenever the Conservatives announced plans to trim the benefits bill Labour accused them of heartlessness. When, in October 2021, Boris Johnson’s government withdrew the temporary £20 a week bonus which it had added to Universal Credit payments during Covid, Starmer himself accused the government of ‘turning on the poorest in our society’.
Look what happened, too, when Blair came to power in 1997. The previous year the Conservatives had introduced a pilot scheme, Project Work, which finally sought to tackle the problem of people claiming benefits while pay only lip service to the obligation to look for work. Under the scheme, 6,800 benefit-claimants were put on compulsory 13 week work placements. If they failed to turn up, they didn’t get paid. Result? Nine hundred of them got jobs – while over 3,000 of them stopped claiming altogether. It is not hard to wonder why: many no doubt had been working while they fraudulently claimed. Some may not even have been living in the country, or didn’t exist at all. That is what happens when you try to run a remote-controlled benefits system where claimants are not obliged to turn up in person – as was already happening in the 1990s.
Polly Toynbee was so impressed that she penned a column entitled ‘The Tories were right: workfare really works’ – asserting that the approaching Labour government would now cash in on the reform. Blair seemed to start well, by appointing Frank Field as welfare secretary and inviting him to ‘think the unthinkable’ on welfare. Whatever he thought, Blair seemed to come to the conclusion that he wasn’t brave enough actually to do it – and a year later Field was gone. There was no extension of the scheme John Major’s government had piloted.
The Tory governments of 2010-2024 failed miserably on welfare. Iain Duncan Smith’s welfare reforms, which were based around making work pay, seemed to achieve early success. But by 2018, when Universal Credit started to replace Unemployment Benefit for significant numbers of people, the numbers on out of work benefits began to creep up –even before the pandemic. Over the past six years the overall number of people has climbed from 3.65 million to 5.79 million.
In one sense Labour ought to be in a better position than the Tories on welfare reform. The party does not automatically get accused of being heartless towards the poor, and therefore afford to be a little braver. On the other hand, the government will face fierce resistance from within to anything which takes money away from the poor – or from people claiming to be poor. I am not holding my breath for meaningful reform, though I remain open to what is announced on Tuesday.
Comments