Work in progress | 21 January 2012

It is often claimed that the Lords, unencumbered by the rivalries and ambitions of the Commons, have a greater affinity with ordinary people than MPs. Certainly, this is the spin which opponents of the Welfare Reform Bill would like to put on its rocky passage through the upper house, where the government narrowly avoided a fourth defeat this week. But there is an alternative interpretation: that their lordships are suffering from a form of noblesse oblige which prevents them from seeing that the welfare system has become a racket, incubating the poverty it was set up to eradicate.

This week’s near-defeat, on the subject of the Disability Living Allowance (DLA) — which is paid to 3.2 million disabled people to help them cope with everyday living costs — needs to be seen in the context of the soaring bill for that benefit. Over the last ten years it has doubled. Medical records show no corresponding surge in disability. The government’s critics say that there is little fraud — something that is impossible to check, given that the allowance is handed out year after year without any reassessment of a claimant’s condition. There are 130,000 people who have been claiming the benefit since it was introduced in 1992, without anyone ever checking that they still need it.

Asking claimants to take a fresh medical examination is hardly an outrage. DLA is a remnant of an outdated attitude which wrote off the disabled as totally unfit for work for the rest of their lives. The same assumption was made of those on incapacity benefit. This callous system meant that hundreds of thousands were, in effect, economically decommissioned by a government that defined compassion as writing a cheque. Britain has been creating the most expensive poverty in the world.