Meeting the cost of welfare reform

As far back as last September, Iain Martin wrote that Iain Duncan Smith’s plans to reform the welfare system were going to run into trouble over cost:

‘But there is no way these proposals, as drafted, will be implemented by a Conservative government, for one simple reason: they carry an estimated up-front increased cost of £3.6bn. A Treasury and Tory Chancellor desperate to find massive savings quickly will never nod that through even if advocates of these proposals promise vast “long-term” savings. Officials will simply say: how many times have we heard such talk before?’

It would be a real tragedy if the political will built up to take serious action on this issue was wasted out of a failure to make the sums add up.  For that reason, at the TPA we’re launching a major