That the welfare bill needs bringing under control is pretty undeniable. According to projections by the Office for Budgetary Responsibility (OBR) an unchecked welfare bill could rise over the next five years from £64 billion to £100 billion. That is not to mention the effect on the economy of increasing numbers of people being shunted onto sickness benefits and never expected to work ever again. If the case is made properly, and the focus is kept on the public finances, the government should enjoy widespread support for a policy that trims the welfare state.
Yet there is still a risk that this could all go horribly wrong for the government. And that’s not just because it will cause deep rifts with the parliamentary Labour party, souring the mood for future battles between Downing Street and backbenchers.
From what has been floated this morning in advance of the Prime Minister’s announcement of £7 billion worth of cuts, it seems that the government has a long-term plan to eliminate the distinction between out-of-work benefits and out-of-work disability benefits. The fact that currently you can be paid more for being signed off ‘on the sick’ apparently provides a strong incentive for people to be declared as unfit for work.
It is also being reported that claimants of Personal Independence Payments (PIP) – which are not linked to being out of work and are not means-tested – will be more frequently assessed, and made much harder to claim for. Along with Wes Streeting’s assertion on Sunday that mental health conditions are being over-diagnosed, it seems that the big target will be people who qualify for PIP by virtue of anxiety and depression – many of whom seem to be self-diagnosing.
That is a good start when it comes to reforming welfare, but there is a big political problem. Inevitably, as with all attempts to reform welfare, stories will emerge of people who claim to have been horrible wrong-done. There are always errors in the system – people who have been denied benefits when they clearly are suffering from some genuine condition. But when you have just reformed welfare, such stories tend to cling together to form a narrative of a callous system. That is exactly what happened in the years after Work Capability Assessments were introduced – every error was made out to be part of a systematic attack on the poor and weak.
The other huge problem which the government shows few signs of having considered is illegal migrants. If people who have lived in Britain and paid taxes here all their lives start to be refused benefits while asylum seekers continue to be put up in four-star hotels, there will be uproar. But does the government have any plans to curtail benefits for asylum-seekers? The number being housed in hotels has increased by around a third since this government came to power, from 29,000 to 38,000.
It is going to be very hard for the government to tackle this part of the benefits bill, however, so long as human rights lawyers are dictating policy. UK taxpayers denied benefits when they get ill while Albanian gangsters continue to live at public expense, courtesy of their right to a family life? It is hard to imagine a more powerful source of recruitment for Reform UK.
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