Where is the stick? For weeks the government has been trailing its white paper on benefits reform by floating the idea that there would be tough sanctions on claimants who refused to take up work offers. It culminated on Sunday in a double hit – Keir Starmer in the Mail on Sunday and Liz Kendall in the Telegraph – each promising that idlers would no longer have the option of a life on benefits. ‘Don’t get me wrong,’ wrote Starmer, ‘we will crack down hard on anyone who tries to game the system, to tackle fraud so we can take cash straight from the banks of fraudsters.’ Kendall added ‘there should be no option of a life on benefits for young people’.
But now the white paper has been published, it seems the tough talk was just a ruse to butter up Mail and Telegraph readers. There is no sign of tough sanctions against welfare cheats, just a bunch of platitudes and reforms which sound totally meaningless. Job Centres will be ‘overhauled’ and turned into a National Jobs and Careers Service. What does that mean in practice? Besides a few extra staff in areas where worklessness is highest, Job Centres are going to improve their ‘digital offer’, with ‘more DWP services put online’. Isn’t that part of the problem, though? When you can make your benefit claims online rather than having to turn up at a benefits office in person you might as well be in Bulgaria – or you might not exist at all.
What will Labour’s reforms do to stop the likes of the Bulgarian gang who succeeded in stealing £54 million in benefit claims for imaginary claimants, for which five of them were jailed for between three and eight years in May? Absolutely nothing. Don’t be surprised, either, if the Bulgarians succeed in fighting deportation after their release on the grounds that it would infringe their right to a family life to be deported to Bulgaria – I can’t quite see any proposals to end that scam, either. I suspect we haven’t seen the last of them living on the largesse of the UK taxpayer.
Otherwise, Labour is promising ‘inactivity trailblazers’ – taking Whitehall guff to a new level. It seems to mean local authorities being stuffed with a few million quid to develop their own plans as to how to get people back into work. The government is promising partnerships with organisations such as the Premier League, Channel 4 and the Royal Shakespeare Company to take on young apprentices – all very worthy but hardly the nub of a plan which is going to make much of an impact on the shocking rise of people on out-of-work benefits: up from 3.65 million to 5.79 million in the past six years.
There’s a promise of a few extra staff for the NHS and mental health in areas where worklessness is at its highest, but nothing to address the fundamental problem: that it has become far too easy for people to opt out of work by claiming that they are too mentally unwell to put in a day’s grind. As with illegal migration, the government is all tough talk to the tabloids, but its resolve seems to evaporate when it comes round to firm proposals.
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