Benefits

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.

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 large-scale “social” housing of a type that is suited only to the income groups for which it was constructed.

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 London 9 out of 10 of private renters claiming housing benefit will be totally unaffected.

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 that unlimited benefits ‘are a serious disincentive to work.

Plenty of attention for Nick Clegg's listening, reading and smoking habits this morning, as well as his appearance on the Andrew Marr show. But it is another of Marr's guests who has made perhaps the most important intervention of the day: the shadow work and pensions secretary, Douglas Alexander. Here's how the Beeb website reports it: "Mr Alexander also said he backed 'in principle' the coalition's plan to replace all out-of-work benefits with a single 'universal credit' payment. He said such a move was 'sensible' but he would be 'scrutinising' the government 'very carefully' over its £2bn start-up costs." If true, then it leaves the the parties in a surprisingly similar position on welfare.

In today’s spending review, George Osborne was absolutely right to hold the line on eliminating the structural deficit within one parliamentary term. In the Emergency Budget released earlier this year the coalition won fiscal credibility (and breathing space from international financial markets) by setting that goal. Failing to follow through on this goal at the first sign of difficulty would have damaged the government’s credibility and reputation in the eyes of international markets.   The Chancellor was also absolutely right to highlight the need for public service reform and to look to the welfare budget to provide some large and early savings.

As we know, education and defence have now had their budgets settled – another two ticks alongside the checklist. But that still leaves the third member of the coalition's trio of sticky settlements unresolved: welfare. The "quad" of David Cameron, George Osborne, Nick Clegg and Danny Alexander will meet today to bash out the final details. Yet some of their key talking points and decisions have already made it into the papers (especially in this article (£) in the Sunday Times). Here's my round-up, along with brief comments: 1) Crackdown on welfare cheats. George Osborne sets the tone with his article in the News of the World (now also behind a paywall). "A welfare cheat," he writes, "is no different from someone who comes up and robs you in the street.

Peter Hain is wizened counsellor to young king Ed, or gives that impression at least. The two are close, which makes Hain’s recent comments on tax noteworthy. Hain describes universal benefit as ‘non-negotiable’, adding: "If you start driving a coach and horses through universality you're effectively saying to middle Britain, 'you've got no stake in the welfare state.' I think the Tories and Liberals are making a very big mistake on child benefit. There's an answer to people on higher incomes and that's they pay higher taxes. And that is the answer to squaring that circle.