The sickness benefit trap

Now that I’m no longer editor of this magazine, I can admit that I spent the election night of 1997 cheering on Tony Blair. Reader, it gets worse. I didn’t particularly want a Labour government but I badly wanted the devolution they had promised. A parliament in Edinburgh would, I thought, consider why the East End of Glasgow – home to many of my extended family – had some of the worst deprivation in Europe. Drugs deaths, unemployment, crime, all ignored by Westminster, would surely be remedied by the new politicians in Holyrood.

How naive that was. Scotland’s drug-death toll has since risen fivefold and the welfare situation has worsened. Grimsby, Birkenhead, Blackpool and the Wirral have all followed the trail blazed by Glasgow.

My time as a political journalist has helped me understand why. Politicians, like everyone else, respond to incentives – and there is barely any incentive to resolve sickness benefit. If an attempt to fix benefits goes wrong (as it always does), you will be greeted with the worst headlines. You’ll be accused of taking money away from the poorest, most desperate people in society. The safest option is to sound angry and promise reform – just not yet.

Liz Kendall, the Work and Pensions Secretary, maintained this long tradition when she declared that welfare needs to be fixed, but we’ll have to wait until next year to hear what her plans are. She’s quite right in her analysis: the system she inherited is a debacle, it doesn’t work for anyone. The question is whether the system can be reformed or whether approving as many as 3,000 people a day for sickness benefits means it is simply out of control.