To disguise the radical nature of reform, one need only make it boring. And here Chris
Grayling has succeeded spectacularly. Today he has announced further details on the ‘Work Programme’ and the ‘Benefit Migration’, which sound like the type of
well-intentioned but doomed reforms that ministers tried over the Labour years.
The welfare state has incubated the very ‘giant evils’ it was designed to eradicate. There are, scandalously, 2.6 million on incapacity benefit right now – a category which ensures they don’t count in unemployment figures. Brown didn’t care much, but Grayling is taking this head-on. In tests on 1,700 IB claimants in Burnley and Aberdeen, it was found that 30 percent were fit for work, 40 percent genuinely incapacitated and the rest capable of some work.
When Iain Duncan Smith was recalled to run welfare reform, his revolutionary ‘universal credit’ was adopted on the condition that it was applied over a ten-year period.
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