Benefits

I’ve sifted through yesterday’s welfare White Paper, and thought CoffeeHousers might appreciate a ten-point guide to its contents. This is by no means the entire picture – and some of it will be familiar from past Coffee House posts – but hopefully it should capture the broad sweep of IDS’s reforms: 1) The problem. Fundamentally, the issue is that there are a lot of people stuck on out-of-work benefits: around 5 million at the last count. This means different things for different groups. For the Treasury and taxpayers it contributes towards an unwieldy working-age welfare budget that has increased by 45 percent, in real terms, over the past decade –

This morning’s welfare event was one of the great “Who’da thunk it?” moments of this government so far. Here we had the Lib Dem leader providing backing vocals for a former Tory leader who has not only become a minister, but who is implementing an agenda that only a few months ago was little more than an idea in a think-tank report. Reviewing that Centre for Social Justice report for Coffee House at the time, I said it deserved to influence welfare policy for years to come. Now, it looks as though it will do just that. The immensity of Iain Duncan Smith’s achievement should not be underestimated. No doubt,

The coalition has few better defenders of its cause than Nick Clegg. And if you need proof, then I’d point you in the direction of his article for the FT when the IFS first called the Budget “regressive”; his article on welfare reform for the Times in September; or his summertime speech on social mobility, which, along with his 2009 conference speech, is perhaps the defining statement of his politics. I mention all this now, because there’s another effective Clegg article in the papers this morning – again on welfare reform, and again dripping with punchy arguments in the coalition’s defence. Rather than buckle to the charges made by the

The New Statesman’s George Eaton has already homed in on the key passage from James Purnell’s article in the Times (£) today, but it’s worth repeating here. According to the former welfare minister, he pitched something like Iain Duncan Smith’s Universal Credit to Gordon Brown, and the reception it received catalysed his departure from government: “Before I resigned from the Cabinet, I proposed a similar plan to Mr Brown. But he was scared that there would be losers, and his refusal to give me any answer made me think that there was no point in staying inside the Government to try to influence him.” This is of more than simple

After a summer of sporadic announcements, IDS’ welfare reforms will be published in a white paper next week. As in 1997, when Tony Blair urged Frank Field to think the unthinkable, there is consensus on the need for radical welfare change. IDS has earned respect as a moral and pragmatic reformer, and he attracts goodwill from across the House. The Liberal Democrats, Nick Clegg and Steve Webb particularly, were ‘vital’ in securing a spending concession from George Osborne, whilst Douglas Alexander has described IDS’ plans and ‘noble’ and pledges to support principle that welfare should be a safety net, not a vocation. He warms to the theme in today’s Guardian.

Most sensible taxpayers think Britain’s current housing benefit costs to be a terrific scam. In the last five years the bill has risen by 25 percent. We now pay £21billion each year, a good chunk of which flows private landlords turning a healthy profit from the state’s responsibility to the poor. We all know by now that a slew of reforms designed to cut the bill by at least £2bn will stop the indefensible abuses of taxpayers’ money like this and this. That’s why Danny Alexander, among others, claims that the coalition must be ‘brave’ on housing benefit. But cast aside the most extreme exploiters of the system and ask

Welfare is fast becoming this parliament’s Ypres Salient – strategically critical, it is constantly contested. £20bn on social housing, £100bn on out of work benefits and £billions on universal benefits: welfare reform is where spending cuts are most conspicuous. A rhetorical confrontation is building and various tactical dispositions are being made. The Staggers’ George Eaton has an analysis that assumes that Labour’s current wedge-strategy (which I critiqued here) is not working because it is avowedly sectional, privileging those who might be caricatured as ‘undeserving’. Eaton argues that Labour must ‘launch a defence of the hard pressed majority’; those who work but still stand to lose, particularly families. Indeed, Westminster’s number-crunchers

Dressed with his effortless prose, Matthew Parris has a point (£) that proves why he is the leading commentator of the last two decades. Housing benefit reform is his subject and he urges his readers reject the legends that have accrued around the issue – not Boris, not Polly Toynbee, not shrill councils, not rapacious landlords and definitely not the government. No one, he says, has the numbers but there are several certainties: ‘The outcomes may not prove nearly as brutal as this week’s predictions. What (as I asked above) can we know? We know that comparisons with Paris are ludicrous. All of our big cities are speckled with very

Depending on who you read, the planned £400 a week cap on housing benefit is either comparable to Nazi concentration camps, death squads in Brazil, or ethnic cleansing in the Balkans Critics have ranged from the Mayor of London to the ultra Left. So it is worth taking a moment to get some perspective. Firstly, the general caps on housing benefit don’t even impact on social tenants because they pay lower, subsidised rents, (though the £26,000 cap on the total amount of benefits per household might hit them). But for housing benefit claimants in the private sector outside London, less than 1% are affected by the cap. And even in

Weak again. For the second session in a row Miliband was feeble at PMQs. He opened in his quiet-assassin mode with a quickie question. ‘There are reports that the government is planning changes to housing benefit reforms. Are they?’ Clearly he meant to wrong-foot Cameron by tempting him into admission which could be instantly disproved. But Cameron simply denied the suggestion and Miliband had no embarrassing disclosure to fire back with. Pretty duff tactics there. He fared slightly better when he asked Cameron what advice he’d give to a family facing a 10 percent cut in housing benefit after the chief bread-winner had been unemployed for a year. Cameron replied