Benefits

Tuesday

Peter Hoskin

IDS defends his work scheme — but he may have to change it

Articles by politicians are often flat and passionless. Not so Iain Duncan Smith’s effort for the Daily Mail today. The welfare secretary sets about defending the government’s Work Experience scheme for unemployed young people, but it soon turns into a full-blooded attack on its detractors. ‘I doubt I’m the only person who thinks supermarket shelf-stackers add more value to our society than many of those “job snobs” who are busy pontificating about the Government’s employment policies,’ he bristles, ‘They should learn to value work and not sneer at it.’ And there’s much more besides, including a warning against ‘a twisted culture that thinks being a celebrity or appearing on The

Wednesday

James Forsyth

Labour vote to the Tories’ benefit

Labour has just marched into the trap that George Osborne set them and voted against the benefits cap — again. As one gleeful Tory says, ‘we’re going to make sure everyone in the country knows how they voted on this.’   I suspect that in every Labour-held marginal that the Tories need to win to get a majority in 2015 the benefit cap will feature prominently on Tory literature. Labour MPs will be faced with the unenviable task of explaining why an able-bodied household where no one works should receive more in benefits than the average wage.   The cap chimes with the public’s sense of fairness — as the

Peter Hoskin

Your six-point guide to the Green Budget

As promised earlier, here’s my more detailed supplementary take on today’s IFS Green Budget. I’ve distilled it down into six points, but obviously there’s much, much more in the actual document itself. I’d recommend that you read the chapters on public sector pensions and pay, the 50p rate, and child benefit, in particular, if you’re so minded — as they’re very good summaries of some complicated fiscal areas. Anyway, here are my points: 1) The scary graph. As it does every year, the IFS has produced what I call the ‘scary graph’. It shows what our debt/GDP ratio would look like for decades hence under various circumstances. Even extending Osborne’s

Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

Miliband finds his niche, and leaves Cameron looking boorish

Miliband is getting the measure of PMQs. Not with respect to Cameron. With respect to himself. He’s learned that his strongest register — sanctimony — will always ring hollow unless it’s attached to a powerful cause. And his gags don’t work. So he’s ditched his team of funny men and wise-crackers and turned to his political instincts instead. Miliband’s gut worked today. He began with a question which he knew Cameron couldn’t answer. Why hasn’t the government activated the laws requiring banks to name all employees earning over a million year? The PM answered by not answering. He performed a transparent switcheroo from the particular question to the general topic.

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Tories push benefit cap in PMQs, Miliband ignores it

As expected, the Tories did everything they could to make the benefit cap the subject of PMQs. One Tory MP managed to slip in a question on it just before Miliband got up, allowing Cameron to press the Labour leader on the issue even before he had started speaking. Tory MPs kept coming back to the benefit cap — there were five questions on it in all — allowing Cameron to repeatedly mock the Labour front bench for not saying what its position is. ‘Just nod — are you with us or against us?’ was one of the lines Cameron tried to goad them with. But in the main clashes

James Forsyth James Forsyth

The battle for ‘fairness’ continues

Today’s PMQs will be another skirmish in the battle for fairness. All three parties know that there is no more potent word in British politics at the moment than fairness and they all want to be its champion. But what will make PMQs interesting today is that Cameron and Miliband each have a powerful weapon in the fairness debate, but also a vulnerability. Miliband’s weapon is bankers’ bonuses – the government’s inaction over Stephen Hester’s bonus has given him plenty of material. But he’s acutely vulnerable over the benefits cap. Cameron will be desperate to move the debate onto this territory. All the polling shows that Labour’s desire to have

Monday

Jonathan Jones

Some numbers to encourage both halves of the coalition

Yesterday’s YouGov poll for the Sunday Times had a few interesting nuggets buried beneath the top line (Lab 40, Con 39, as it happens). Here are some of the most topical findings: 1) Clegg’s tax proposals are very popular. 83 per cent support the Lib Dems’ policy of increasing the personal allowance to £10,000. This might explain the 12-point jump in Nick Clegg’s net approval rating since last week. And there’s strong support for the ‘mansion tax’ that Vince Cable’s been pushing since 2009. 66 per cent back ‘a new tax upon people with houses worth more than £2 million’ — something Clegg called for again last week — and

Saturday

Peter Hoskin

Miliband hopes to put a cap on his welfare policy problems

A-ha! Labour have hit on a line on the benefits cap, and Liam Byrne is peddling it in the Daily Telegraph this morning. ‘Now, there are some people who are against this idea altogether,’ he writes, ‘Neither I, nor Ed Miliband are among them.’ The way he sees it, he goes on to explain, is that there should be a cap but it should be set locally, so that it could be higher than £26,000 in more expensive areas such as London, and potentially less in other areas. Bryne adds that there should be an ‘an independent body like the Low Pay Commission to determine the level at which it

Wednesday

Lloyd Evans

Miliband delivers for once, but Cameron’s left unharmed

Incredible events in the chamber today. An absolute sensation at PMQS. For the first time since last summer, Ed Miliband got through the session without triggering talk of a leadership crisis. There was gloomy news aplenty to dwell on. Debts soaring; growth flat-lining; dole queues snaking back through blighted high streets and bankrupt business parks. The Labour leader chose to wallop Cameron with a well-prepared attack on the NHS. Quoting the prime minister’s vow, ‘to take our nurses and doctors with us’, he asked why the government had stopped listening. The prime minister’s reply was frivolous and desperate. He giggled and smirked like a teenager at the despatch box and

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Both leaders left smiling after PMQs

Today was one of those PMQs when you sensed that both sides were fairly happy with how it had gone. Ed Miliband turned in one of his stronger performances, cleverly splitting his questions and so allowing himself to have a go at both the economy and the coalition’s troubled NHS reforms. Cameron, for his part, got through what was always going to be a difficult session for him after this morning’s negative growth numbers.   Strikingly, there were four planted Tory questions on the benefits cap. The Tories know that Labour’s vote against it compounds one of their biggest vulnerabilities, the sense they are the party for people on benefits

Tuesday

Oliver Lewis

In defence of the Welfare Bill

The government’s welfare reforms seem to be staggering on, despite the concern from the Lords that they’ll harm those who need help most: children and the disabled. But before the Bill goes back to the Commons, and everyone becomes more agitated, let me put the case for the Bill from the perspective of someone it might affect.  I have a vested interest in the impending changes to disability benefits, because both my brothers are autistic – one severely so. My family depends on the Disability Living Allowance; caring for my brothers is a full time occupation for both my parents, and without support they simply wouldn’t be able to cope.

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

The bias towards migrant workers

Why are you never served by a Londoner in a London branch of Pret A Manger? I asked this in the Telegraph recently, and yesterday’s Evening Standard had a great piece tracking down four who applied, and were rejected without an interview. Some suspect there is a bias in favour of immigrants: if your name doesn’t sound exotic, game over. I doubt that a company like Pret, whose most valued ingredient is the famous enthusiasm of its staff, can afford to discriminate in any way. But the wider point is a very serious one: that British employers have come to prefer immigrants, believing that they work harder. And that a

Monday

James Forsyth

A defeat that delights the Tories

Rarely can a government have been so pleased to have been defeated. The Tories are, privately, delighted that the Lords have voted to water down the benefit cap, removing child benefit from it. The longer this attempt to cap benefit for non-working households at £26,000 stays in the news, the better it is for the government. It demonstrates to the electorate that they are trying to do something about the injustices of the something for nothing culture. The matter will now returns to the Commons where the coalition is confident it can be reversed. I understand that Nick Clegg remains solid on the issue, despite the fact that Ashdown and

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Benefitting the Tories

The longer the row over the benefit cap goes on, the better it will be for the Tories. The cap chimes with the public’s sense of fairness. Polls show massive public support for capping benefits at £26,000 a year for non-working households (the cap won’t apply to the disabled or war widows), and if Labour oppose it, they’ll be handing the Tories a stick with which to beat them. Chris Grayling has already declared that tonight’s vote in the Lords is ‘a test of Ed Miliband’s leadership’. Those who argue that the cap isn’t fair because it will force people to move out of their house are missing the point.

Sunday

James Forsyth

Labour’s confusion is the Tories’ advantage

Today’s polls make grim reading for Labour. Even three months ago senior Labour or Tory people wouldn’t have thought that the Tories would be five points ahead at this point in the cycle. Part of Labour’s problem is that its positions require too much explanation. As one Number 10 source jokes, ‘Ed Miliband can do a Rubik’s cube in less time than it takes him to explain his position on the cuts.’ A prime example of these overly complicated policy positions is Labour’s approach to the benefit cap. The leadership says that it is in favour of a cap in principle but against this one in practice. But, I suspect

Friday

Melanie McDonagh

What today’s immigration numbers tell us

During the leaders debates before the last general election, David Cameron declared that he wanted to make immigration a non-issue and he would go about it by reducing immigration numbers from hundreds of thousands a year to tens of thousands a year. He hasn’t succeeded in the second objective — more than half a million people arrived here in 2010, only 30 per cent of whom were from the EU — and he most certainly hasn’t succeeded in the first. At least if the reaction to today’s revelations about immigrants on benefits is anything to go by. Chris Grayling, minister for employment, and Damian Green, immigration minister, wrote an article

Saturday

James Forsyth

Simon Hughes speaks out against the benefit cap

In the Cameroon effort to redefine the politics of fairness, the benefit cap of £26,000 a year is key. When George Osborne announced it in his 2010 conference speech, he explained it – rightly – as a matter of fairness that ‘no family on out-of-work benefits will get more than the average family gets by going out to work’.   The Tories were also aware of just how potent a wedge issue it would be. If Labour opposed the cap, they would be in favour of some households in which no one is working receiving more from the state than the average salary people achieve by working. This is, to

Friday

Fraser Nelson

IDS must stay the course on welfare reform

Welfare wars are erupting again, with Iain Duncan Smith’s bill amended in the Lords and more showdowns ahead. Number 10 has been completely robust, threatening to use rarely-invoked powers to overrule the Lords. In my Telegraph column today, I say why it’s so important that David Cameron does not go wobbly – as his predecessors did.   Tony Blair understood the need for radical welfare reform, especially when his idol Bill Clinton introduced it in America. Listening to his speeches in the mid-90s is heartbreaking: he had precisely the right idea, but lacked the determination to implement it. Frank Field was asked to ‘think the unthinkable’, but when disabled protesters

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Cameron hints at child benefit taper

David Cameron’s comments to The House magazine on child benefit are causing quite a stir this morning. The Telegraph splashes on the PM’s line that ‘Some people say that’s the unfairness of it, that you lose the child benefit if you have a higher rate taxpayer in the family,’ he said. ‘Two people below the level keep the benefit. So, there’s a threshold, a cliff-edge issue.’ ‘We always said we would look at the way it’s implemented and that remains the case, but I don’t want to impinge on the Chancellor’s Budget.’ I suspect that what Cameron means by this is that they are looking at a taper. When one

Tuesday

Peter Hoskin

Byrne offers ‘something for something’ — but what does it mean?

What’s this? Seems like Liam Byrne has emerged from his policy review with an idea. He calls it, in an article for the Guardian today, ‘something for something’: ‘…“something for something” means reward for those who are desperately trying to do the right thing, saving for the future and trying to build a stable, secure home. Right now, these families are offered too little reward and incentive — in social housing and long-term savings — for the kind of behaviour that is the bedrock of a decent society.’ In truth, it’s not a new or surprising idea at all. Labour’s brain-in-exile, James Purnell, urged this sort of thinking on his